Thank you very much.
Thank you for being here today.
First, I would make the comment that it's my understanding that the percentage of the GDP contributed to foreign aid is calculated differently in different countries. Of course, when we contribute to aid in various countries, there are other issues that have to be attended to that possibly could be construed as being part of the aid contribution.
One of the very important ones was, of course, security of aid workers and NGOs in various countries. We have been contributing aid on projects such as, for example, China on its judiciary, and we also have democracy development in various countries too. They are all forms of aid contributions.
So if we look at the overall basket of aid that Canada provides, I would suggest that the 0.7% is a very simplistic way to be looking at aid contributions.
Second, I would like to have clarity on the comments that were just made on the Global Fund as to what its mandate is. Understandably, there would have to be investigations into fraud allegations, and of course those would be the ones that you know about. There are also the ones that we don't know about that you have to be vigilant for, that you have to try to pull out.
I would like to know specifically if the Global Fund is strictly mandated to be looking at HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria--disease--and family issues, and not in the human rights aspect, because the human rights aspect as an aid designation has a very broad scope and involves a lot of complexities depending on the country. I'd like a little bit of clarity that it is focused on its mandate as detailed here in these sheets.