We're a very ad hoc country. We muddle through all the time. When you look at the approaches the people like the Americans, the British, the French, and others take, they're masters at looking at the big picture and the long picture. Quite often, in the face of people dismissing it as a whole lot of rather silly think tank product that's never going to impact anything or anybody, we're right at the other end of the spectrum. We don't look more than a few days or a year or two down the road.
One of the reasons that I have argued that we need an international fair strategy...we also need a national security strategy. Look at all the institutions we have in Canada that are supposedly working on the safety and security of Canadians. Do they have a common program that they're working on? We need to do a much better job of exploring big trends in places like Africa and Latin America, and others, and then selecting the ones that matter to Canadians. There is a Canadian interest here. The Canadian taxpayers are shelling out this money, so they're entitled to know that there's something in it for Canada, that it's not entirely altruism. It should be altruism; it's part of the Canadian makeup that we do this sort of thing. But we need to focus a great deal more, not only on that picture, but also on how we can be effective.
My time at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre suggested that there's a great deal more we can be doing in training, building the capacity, as Colin mentioned, for other countries to get up to speed on things. I fear that in Afghanistan we're going to walk away in a year or two or three and leave a small CIDA program behind, and all the time, effort, money, and deaths that we've sustained, and the injuries that are afflicting a thousand Canadians as a result of that conflict, are just going to go for naught.
We need to be building the capacity of particular countries, and I think that's probably a better Canadian vocation than anything. When you ask the Americans or the British or the French to do those kinds of things, they bring big power or colonial baggage with them. Nobody thinks the Canadians or the Australians have an ulterior motive for helping. It's not talking about a niche. We're talking about a global program, but we need to focus that global program on the big issues that really matter, and then put our shoulder into a few of them that will really deliver results for us.