Thank you for your question. I am sorry I am not a woman but I hope, nevertheless, to be able to answer your question.
Integrations are very difficult.
For those of you who have read Harry Potter, it's a bit like a visit from the Dementors, because it sucks all the energy out of the air and it makes things very difficult.
From your perspective as members, and this is not partisan, you want an effective working foreign affairs department. What you have to do is hold their feet to the fire to get on with it. In my experience, and I take this back not just to the trade reintegration and disintegration and reintegration back in the 2000s, if you go back to the commerce department, and of course CIDA and Immigration, which came in in the eighties, and then there was a pulling out of CIDA, and subsequently the foreign service side was put back into Immigration.... My experience is that these things are usually badly handled, they take a tremendous amount of time, and the best brains, as I said, are busy moving boxes around. That's not what you want. That's not going to serve you. That's not going to serve your constituents, to just move boxes around.
What you have to do is have a very clear schedule of how this is going to be done—the who, what, where, why, and particularly the what. What are we trying to do, and how is it going to achieve what we as members of Parliament representing Canadians are going to...? How are we going to achieve a foreign policy?