Certainly. Let me just tell you that I wrote that article sitting at a kitchen table in a condo in Florida after the Ottawa Citizen had twigged me about it: “There's a debate going on here; you might not have heard. Could you say something about this?”
I looked at two examples from my personal experience as to why I had been disappointed, in my jobs, with what CIDA brought to the table to help get those jobs done.
The first one had to do with the end of the Cold War, the destruction of the Soviet empire, and the sudden emergence of two dozen small, vulnerable countries, all of which were quite capable of being captured by either old communist or new fascist movements.
I was down at the embassy in Washington at the time—I don't know whether Colin was there as well, in 1989-90—and it was clear to many of us that we needed to do something to bolster the democratic and economic processes in these tiny little countries, many of which had no experience in self-management.
The appeals that went out to CIDA were uniformly rejected on the grounds that CIDA had its list of priorities. It was in the poverty reduction business, and while these might be good causes, they weren't CIDA causes.
Foreign Affairs hence had to go and scrounge for money elsewhere, with appeals to Finance and other people. Finally Prime Minister Brian Mulroney prevailed. He actually gave a speech announcing a program for eastern Europe that nobody much knew about in Ottawa.
It was how you got around the policy process to get something started, and that process worked quite well. It was called Renaissance Eastern Europe, and it ran for eight or nine years before CIDA took it over.
Now, did Foreign Affairs suddenly have the in-house expertise to do that? No. Where did they go and get it? From CIDA.
In fact, many people, when CIDA was moving over to take control of it, then took Foreign Affairs people over to CIDA. They crossed the bridge to go and work on Renaissance Eastern Europe.
It was an example of how policy differences and institutional gaps between the two institutions prevented what would be the normal solution. You had to do a workaround.
The same thing happened in Afghanistan.