Sure. Thank you for your question.
When you look at the scale of investment that we need to help these economies emerge and be able to feed their citizens and keep them healthy and give them jobs and give them electricity so they can read at night, the scale is many orders of magnitude beyond what direct aid could ever do.
Direct aid, as Fraser says, plays a valuable role in places where people are starving and in some disease eradication, but as far as helping countries rise and achieve sustainable development, the private sector is where the capital flows are. In context, the $95 trillion for global bond markets is many times more than any aid budget, and the bond issues are growing every year.
Our financial system is plugged up in many ways and in need of plumbing. It tends to finance what it's financed before with some exceptions like mortgage-backed securities in the U.S. So it looks at track records for this type of new investment, for this country, and it has a bias toward financing what it's financed before and with whom it's financed before.
If we want to achieve sustainable development in relevant timeframes, we're going to have to scale up private sector finance, redirect the trillions of dollars that are already flowing, and start tilting them toward more sustainable development investments. That's where we can make the biggest contribution, and that's what's so exciting about being Canadian. We have penetration in more countries. We have more countries with penetration in us, and we have more stable financing than almost any country in the world. So if we can marry all those things.... EDC is a great institution to work through, it is superbly well positioned to lead this new vanguard of sustainable development, but it will need a nudge to ramp it up.