Evidence of meeting #30 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 41st Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was training.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Marc Garneau Liberal Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC
Thank you.
My second question is for Ms. Pulfer. Canada invested a lot in Afghanistan in lost lives and also invested quite a bit in terms of helping to develop certain aspects of the country. I'm curious as to whether your organization was in Afghanistan, whether you met journalists there, and whether you passed on some of the values that you subscribe to. Were you present in Afghanistan?
Executive Director, Journalists for Human Rights
No, we were never in Afghanistan. We are now working very productively with a woman in northern Ontario who has done grassroots regional media development initiatives in Afghanistan. She is doing training with aboriginal communities, so we're practising what we preach at home.
As the Afghanistan situation was unfolding, our feeling was that we are most productively put to use in a post-conflict environment, and for much of the time that Canada was engaged in Afghanistan, it was a hot conflict environment. We felt that we should put our resources into environments where the war is effectively over and we are rebuilding a sector that has been wiped out, whilst monitoring situations in other parts of the world to see where we could be most effective.
We are currently contemplating an engagement in South Sudan. We've been doing ongoing needs assessment work in South Sudan for three years now, and we feel that there is an opportunity there to work with independent media. But in the Afghanistan situation, there were a number of different factors, including language concerns and the extraordinary cost of security that would have been involved in the kind of model that we do, so we decided against it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much.
To our guests, thank you very much for being here today and for being flexible on our schedule with votes. You are dismissed.
Very quickly, I need to pass a budget for lunch, for hosting our guest:
That the Clerk of the Committee make the necessary arrangements and that the necessary funds be allocated from the Committee's hospitality budget for a luncheon with the UNHCR High Commissioner, António Guterres, on Thursday, May 29, 2014.
(Motion agreed to)
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you once again. With that, the meeting is adjourned.