Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Minister.
As you're well aware, your department is one of the hardest hit by the government cuts, and I think it's staggering, $320 million. It's pretty disturbing when you see that most G-20 countries are maintaining or increasing their aid with less robust economies than ours.
The other disturbing trend is that a lot of assistance does not fit with the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, which is mostly supposed to focus on reducing poverty. The other thing we found out—and you mentioned Africa with the droughts and the instability—is that Africa is still the biggest continent in need of help, and that's where your biggest cuts are.
Minister, you're from Toronto. Toronto and the country are great contributors to aid individuals, but most of them do it in their local communities through NGOs they believe in. That's where the vast amount of the contributions are. So when you're kind of cutting these NGOs off, you're cutting off that money stream from these individuals. My question is, do you have a sense of how much money is going to be lost as a result of the amount of money you're cutting from NGOs right now? How much does that translate to in the individual donations that would go to those NGOs to foster the programs they would want to do?