Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Gentlemen, thank you for being here. It's delightful to have the opportunity, Mr. Badet, to speak with you again. Mr. Siebert, I have followed the work that Project Ploughshares has done and I'm hoping to give you the opportunity to speak.
The first thing I want to do is dispel this myth that the opposition wants to perpetuate about how Canada is not active in Africa. That is the farthest from the truth. The fact is we have doubled our aid to Africa. Most importantly, we have untied our aid to Africa, first by untying our food aid, and now by the end of 2013, we will have untied all of our aid. We are giving Africans the opportunity to get the best bang for the buck, as it were, with the development dollars that we are investing there.
I want to talk about the presence in Africa, just purely on the presence of Canadian parliamentarians in Africa. We've seen Minister Fast there in the last two weeks. Minister Fantino has been twice in the last four months. The Prime Minister was in the DRC for the Francophonie summit. The Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association has had three parliamentary trips. Last year we were in Ethiopia and Senegal, Kenya and South Sudan, and most recently in Kenya and Malawi. So the presence of parliamentarians has been enormous.