I agree with Janet's remarks. We do welcome this. We think this is a very important step forward, both the amendments to the bill—with the provisos mentioned by Michael—and this announcement by the Prime Minister.
As I said in my presentation, transparency and accountability are kind of Bobbsey twins: they go together. You have to have the two of them present.
As Janet was suggesting, however, the devil will be in the details in terms of what exactly we mean by mandatory reporting requirements. With regard to what we could do as a government, on the demand side there are issues. And by “demand side”, I mean on the side of governments in Africa, for example. We talked about this with Lois at our conference.
Oftentimes they don't have the capacity themselves. They can have very good laws on the books, and even have the political will to enforce those laws, but they don't have the capacity. Finance ministers make decisions based on limited resources. They have to establish priorities. You can have very good legislation, but you can have a ministry of mines and energy, for example, which is supposed to regulate that legislation, that doesn't have the vehicles, doesn't have the computers, and doesn't have the trained people, and the finance minister decides that he would want to spend his scarce resources on something else.
In that kind of situation, it would be helpful if the Canadian government and the development department, the former CIDA, in supporting Canadian private investment—mining companies, for example, working in certain countries in Africa—were to work with the host government and look at the capacity of that government to enforce whatever regulations they have in the books, and to help them build up that capacity.