Good morning and thank you for being here today.
We know that you can't teach democracy. It's more of a practice. It takes so many sacrifices and years of development to get a society to adopt it. We also know that only about four and a half per cent of the world population lives in full democracies and the other 95% is really struggling to get there. We seem to be experiencing a comeback of old regimes in some of the empires that have been very significant at imposing their way through.
Besides that, we have the plans and the money and the know-how to go and promote our democracies. In major parts of the world, in every corner almost, we are having a comeback. I'm not going to call it an enemy, but we have another opinion coming forward more aggressively than ever. We have the money and the power, and we have two battles to fight, not just one.
That brings me back to the SDGs, the United Nations SDGs. For goal number 16, Canada coincides with about four or five elements—numbers 16.3, 16.5, 16.7 and 16.8. The question is, within those measures and within those areas that we're trying to improve and with millions of dollars that we're taking away from our own society to try to promote democracies and to help other communities out there or other countries, how is your department able to measure the effectiveness of what we do? In reality, we have to come back to Canadians and tell Canadians that we are spending this kind of money and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. So far, we really don't have any answers or enough answers to say how effective this is, or how much of a breakthrough we've made in Indonesia or Kenya or the DRC or the Americas region or anywhere.
On the measures, it's very important for us to know in this committee how your department is able to show or to tell us how much progress we are making.