Foreign Affairs Committee on May 17th, 2016

[The Chair (Hon. Robert Nault (Kenora, Lib.)), Liberal, Bob Nault]

I call the meeting to order.

I apologize to our witnesses for the late start. There were lots of votes today

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are studying the Canadian government's countries of focus for bilateral development assistance.

Colleagues, today we have World Vision Canada, CARE Canada, and UNICEF Canada.

For the record, give your name and title, and then we'll start with the presentations.

We'll start with Carleen.

[Carleen McGuinty, Deputy Director, International Policy and Programs, UNICEF Canada]

Good afternoon. My name is Carleen McGuinty. I'm with UNICEF Canada. I'm deputy director of international policy and programs.

[Santiago Alba-Corral, Senior Director, International Development, CARE Canada]

Good afternoon. My name is Santiago Alba. I am with CARE Canada. I'm the senior director of international development.

[Shaughn McArthur, Advocacy and Government Relations Advisor, International Programs, CARE Canada]

Good afternoon. I am Shaughn McArthur, with CARE Canada, advocacy and government relations adviser.

[Jamie McIntosh, Vice-President, Programs and Policy, World Vision Canada]

Good afternoon. I am Jamie McIntosh, vice-president of programs and policy, World Vision Canada.

[Rachel Logel Carmichael, Team Leader, Programs and Policy, World Vision Canada]

Good afternoon. I am Rachel Logel Carmichael. I'm a team leader for the international programs team.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

I understand that World Vision Canada will start first.

[Jamie McIntosh]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I would like to thank the committee for inviting us to appear before you today.

World Vision is a child-focused, Christian relief, development and advocacy organization, working in nearly 100 countries around the world.

We work in the world's toughest places, actively supporting and empowering communities to take control of their own futures by overcoming poverty, injustice, and fragility.

We're pleased to share our thoughts on the committee's study on countries of focus for Canada's bilateral development assistance. We understand that the committee is looking to address a number of issues during the course of this study. For our time this afternoon, we'd like to focus on how Canada's international assistance framework can effectively address the circumstances facing the least developed countries.

Let me start with an evident acknowledgement: the world is rapidly changing. Conflict, violence, inequalities, climate change, and the mass displacement of people have changed the way we look at poverty and development and challenge us to find new ways of working.

The UN refugee agency states that globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world's 24th largest. It's realities like this that strengthen our resolve to collectively envision and work with urgency toward a new reality, one in which poverty, hunger, and preventable deaths are eradicated, a world in which no one is left behind.

What will it take to get there? We must adapt our approaches and make them fit for purpose. World Vision itself is in the process of evolving its own efforts and its own approaches. We are increasingly working in fragile contexts—building resilience and sustainability, empowering citizens to hold their governments accountable, and investing in innovative partnerships. We know that there is immense opportunity before us.

In order to take advantage of these opportunities, we believe Canada can review its international assistance and design a framework that is focused on the poorest and most vulnerable in the world's toughest places, one that responds to evolving context by defining adaptable approaches. These principles have implications regarding both where and how we must focus our efforts, which I would like to unpack for you this afternoon.

Canada is a country known for upholding human rights and empowering the most disadvantaged around the world. While we've seen tremendous progress with the millennium development goals, the impact has been uneven among countries, and even within them. We need, then, to ask, who has been left behind, where they are, and how we reach them.

Let's start first with who has been left behind. They are the unregistered—children who are not officially acknowledged at birth; the missed—mothers and newborns who die in childbirth; the isolated—indigenous children and ethnic minorities living in remote rural areas and urban slums. They are the untraced—child labourers and trafficked children; the neglected—orphaned and homeless ones; the unclaimed—refugees, the stateless, and the internally displaced. Most fundamentally, they are women and girls. It is critical that we identify these individuals and keep them front and centre as we walk through these specific considerations.

Now that we've identified who these individuals are, let's focus on where we might find them.

The majority of these individuals are in places where the burden of instability, poverty, hunger and mortality are the highest, yet where the biggest gains are to be made: in fragile contexts and where pockets of fragility exist. These are the places where there is conflict and violence, widespread violations of human rights, limited access to justice and rule of law, where there is economic instability and a lower capacity to adapt to shocks and stress, and where the government may be unwilling or unable to meet the needs of all or some of its residents.

In the next decade, some of the world's most acutely vulnerable people will be living in fragile and conflict-afflicted cities and states. While we may think of traditional places like Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Somalia, they also include places like Mali, Honduras, and Nepal. For example, while Honduras and El Salvador are not traditionally known as fragile, violence in urban settings has had an adverse affect on society and its development, including things such as youth employment.

In World Vision's community development program, we're addressing the root causes of violence through investing in rehabilitation, diversion, and skills training initiatives with youth in or affected by gang violence.

Our experience in such a fragile context has shown us that significant progress is possible, so our focus should be where the risks are higher but the potential gains greater.

This brings us to recommendations about how Canada's international assistance should be designed to best reach the regions of the poorest and most vulnerable in these contexts.

In order to effectively undertake the exercise of country prioritization, we recommend that Canada not only look at countries as a whole but also recognize that pockets of vulnerability exist within countries and across regions. This should be done in coordination, of course, with the international donor community.

Let's illustrate with the examples of Jordan and Lebanon.

Jordan has been prioritized for development and humanitarian support largely as a result of its alignment to donor values, legitimacy of government, and relative stability as compared with others in the region. Canada's bilateral support to Jordan has been highly influential in ensuring effective policy development to support the growing number of refugees, including supporting refugees' ability to enter the labour market and the education sector's ability to accommodate Syrian children.

Lebanon, on the other hand, is potentially on the brink of significant escalation of conflict that will destabilize the entire region even further. In part because of poor governance and limited bilateral investment, Lebanon has been unable to effectively manage the significant influx of refugees.

While priority countries have allowed for predictability of support and reduced aid fragmentation, there needs to be a mechanism in place that allows for the nimble shifting of resources regionally, as the burden of other countries can often overwhelm priority countries.

Additionally, we recommend that once the country prioritization has been determined, an adaptive approach to bilateral development assistance be put in place. This is to ensure that country strategies and programs are responsive to who the most vulnerable populations are, wherever they may be, recognizing the kaleidoscopic, evolving context that we've described here today.

One of the challenges with the current approach to funding of the government's bilateral development programs is that it does not enable partners to use funding to adapt to changes in rapidly evolving contexts. For example, the way World Vision's own community development program model addresses this challenge is to immediately allocate 20% of private development funding to prevention and response. Repurposing such funds allows us to address emerging situations, as was the case with an unfolding food crisis in the Sahel in 2012, or currently in southern Africa with the impact of El Niño.

What would be most effective at an institutional level is an approach that sees improved cross-departmental collaboration and analysis, working together with national governments, regional bodies, and Canadian civil society to effectively respond to and prioritize these changing situations, ombined with multi-year strategic efforts, such as block grants that allow for community-led response to fluid contexts.

Such measures allow us to protect development gains, bridge the relief development divide, and transition emergency responses to recovery as soon as appropriate and possible.

In closing, we see a clear opportunity for the government to direct its focus, based on these principles, towards ensuring that we reach the unregistered, the missed, the isolated, the untraced, the neglected, the unclaimed, especially women and girls—those who are the poorest and most vulnerable in the world's toughest places.

Thank you for inviting us to be here today and for including our field-informed perspective in this important study. We look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Mr. McIntosh.

Now we'll go to Mr. McArthur and Mr. Alba-Corral.

[Santiago Alba-Corral]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

CARE Canada is pleased to appear before this committee for its study on countries of focus and thematic priorities for Canada's bilateral development assistance. It's timely for a number of reasons.

Seven years have passed since the Government of Canada selected its first 20 countries in 2009, and the list has undergone a number of changes.

In 2014 it was expanded to include 25 countries.

In 2015 the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction articulated a new plan to help communities recover from disasters.

Months later, a new global framework for international development was adopted in the form of Agenda 2030 and the sustainable development goals. Last December, the Paris agreement promised to help developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change.

Amid these changes, the geography of poverty has continued to shift. Inequality within nations has risen, erratic weather patterns have grown more frequent and severe, and crises have grown more numerous and protracted.

Today, as Canada sets out to review the framework of its international development policy on funding, the time is right to re-evaluate the “countries of focus” approach. Prompted by some of the trends just listed, CARE itself recently undertook a review of our own strategy for eliminating poverty and social injustice around the world. Much like the Government of Canada, we were motivated to focus our resources, capacities, and experience for maximum impact.

For CARE, the process began with an understanding that poverty is caused by unequal power relations. Today, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and the majority of them are women and girls. Addressing gender inequality is therefore critical for making significant impacts on poverty.

We also see one of the greatest inequalities of our times reflected in the causes and consequences of climate change. The world's poorest and most vulnerable are the least responsible for causing climate change, yet they continue to bear the brunt of its impact.

Building on this analysis, CARE provides three ways of addressing the underlying causes of poverty and social injustice: strengthening gender equality and women's voices; promoting inclusive government; and increasing resilience to climate change, conflict, and disasters.

We committed to four specific outcomes by 2020: that 20 million people affected by the humanitarian crisis will receive life-saving humanitarian assistance; that 100 million women and girls will exercise their rights to sexual, reproductive, and maternal health and a life free from violence; that 50 million poor and vulnerable people will increase their food and nutrition security and their resilience to climate change; and that 30 million women will have greater access to and control over economic resources.

These outcome areas share many similarities with the thematic priorities that have guided the Government of Canada's international development efforts in the last years. We are pleased that the themes being prioritized by the present government largely build upon Canada's strengths in these areas.

Determining where to concentrate one's efforts to achieve the greatest impact is another exercise that CARE has recently experienced.

In 2015 we undertook to generate an index for development and humanitarian needs. This required us to develop a set of criteria to determine where needs were greatest with respect to each of our thematic priorities: the percentage and the overall number of people living under the poverty line, the prevalence of maternal mortality and of women's economic inclusion, and so on. Our analysis also took key global indexes and reports into account, such as the Gini inequality index, the global climate change adaptation index, the gender development index, and the index for risk management.

Finally, we considered future needs and risks, including the vulnerability of a country or a region to climate change, the projected conflicts risk, the projected number of people below the poverty line by 2030, etc.

The end result was a tabulation of countries with the greatest needs, categorized under each of the thematic priorities defined in our own program strategy. For instance, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Madagascar topped the list under overall poverty and inequality, while Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen topped the list of countries in need of assistance in areas such as women's economic empowerment.

Many countries, of course, were found in need in several areas. However, critically, our analysis showed that not all development needs are created equal in all countries. Some communities are best assisted through a combination of civil society and institutional capacity-building. Others stand to benefit most from measures to strengthen women's access to safe or dignified jobs. Yet others are better suited to receive support targeting women's access to nutritious food.

The Government of Canada today faces a unique opportunity to undertake a similar analysis to ensure its international assistance is tailored to address the right issues in the right communities for the greatest possible impact. CARE Canada is pleased to present five recommendations to help guide this process:

First, the government should undertake an evaluation of Canada's country-of-focus approach. This should include an assessment of what has worked or not worked since the approach was first adopted in 2009. Has the focus on selected countries truly enhanced the impact and efficiency of Canada's development assistance? Has it improved development outcomes for women and girls in those communities?

Second, the government should ensure that its focus on helping the poorest and most vulnerable people defines how, where, and what type of assistance is delivered. Need, in other words, should not be defined by a country's status as a least developed country. According to the World Bank, 73% of the world's poor live in middle-income countries. People, not countries, should be the targets of Canadian assistance. In CARE's experience, inequality is the lens through which these people are best identified and assisted.

Third, if a country-of-focus approach is retained, the government should be held to account for those commitments. This means developing long-term, 10-year to 15-year strategies for each country in consultation with implementing partners. This should be linked to broader regional strategies and attached to transparent and predictable funding envelopes. They should also be underpinned by robust monitoring and evaluation systems and subject to regular reviews. They should be flexible enough to accommodate changing conditions but rigid enough to follow through on complex change. They should include mechanisms to support emergency preparedness in countries prone to natural disasters or conflict and to redirect resources when disaster strikes.

Fourth, Canada's new international assistance framework should include a mechanism for regular impact monitoring. The broad range of indicators attached to the sustainable development goals provide a ready means to help Canada measure their impact while ensuring alignment with global objectives.

Finally, international development assistance must always be motivated by the interests of the people it aims to serve. The amalgamation of Canada's foreign affairs, international trade, and international development departments creates the conditions for more coherent and efficient engagement in the world. Trade and diplomacy can do much to leverage Canadian advantage and support international development objectives. However, international development itself is undermined if it is seen to support trade and diplomatic outcomes.

With that, I thank you for your attention. I look forward to answering your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Mr. Alba-Corral.

Now we'll go to Carleen McGuinty.

[Carleen McGuinty]

Honourable members of the committee, thank you so much for having me here today.

As I mentioned before, I'm Carleen McGuinty, the deputy director of international policy and programs at UNICEF Canada.

Thank you for inviting UNICEF Canada to speak this afternoon. I will be speaking to you about our perspective on bilateral aid from the government of Canada and about our recommendations regarding your study. I will be focusing on the development of the government's new strategy.

I will be pleased to answer your questions in French, but I will be giving my presentation in English.

Very briefly, UNICEF is the United Nations' children's agency. We're active in 190 countries around the world. UNICEF Canada was established 60 years ago. We work tirelessly in the areas of health, education, protection, emergencies, clean water, nutrition, and the list goes on. We've benefited from a very good and strong partnership with the Government of Canada, and I'm delighted to be here today to share our perspective with you.

I've just returned from Chad. I returned on Friday afternoon. I spent a week there. I want to give you a little bit of a perspective on what I saw. It will inform some of our discussion.

Chad is a fragile state. It is not a country of focus for Canada. It is a member of La Francophonie. It is almost at the very bottom of the human development index. It's at number 184 out of 187. It is completely surrounded by fragile states. It's surrounded by Libya, Sudan, Central African Republic, and Nigeria, to name a few.

It is in a very precarious situation. It also has one of the highest mortality rates for children under five in the world, the third-highest. It has low immunization rates. Child marriage is an issue. The list goes on and on. This is one of the toughest places in the world to be a child or a woman.

I went there to see a vaccination campaign against tetanus. This is a program that the Government of Canada is funding UNICEF Canada to do. We're there with partners. Despite there being very little infrastructure, we've been able to immunize thousands of women against tetanus, which is a killer of their children. It actually kills newborns within a few days of birth if the umbilical cords were cut with unclean instruments.

We are able to vaccinate all these women. The reason we were able to do that is, first, because of the support of the national government. The government has committed to purchasing all vaccine for all immunizations. Second, we were working with a number of partners, including Gavi, the World Health Organization, and local partners on the ground.

What was apparent was that they are also using local innovation. They are using solar-powered energy to make sure these vaccines are cold, so although they don't have a lot of resources, they are using what they have, and that's the sun.

I met some women who were being vaccinated in a very remote area of the country, thousands of kilometres away from the capital. What was apparent was that, yes, they were happy to be vaccinated, happy for the protection, but they kept telling me, “We have no water here”, “We have no schools here”, “Our children have to leave school so they can help me fetch the water”, and “The water we have isn't clean.”

This is just to give you a sense that there are still a lot of very fundamental aspects that have not yet been addressed. We need to continue working in some of these most underserved places and continue to reach the children who are living in these hardest-to-reach places. I think Canada is well positioned to do that.

I want to start by saying that this is an exciting time for Canada to be reviewing its international development assistance. We're in 2016. It's the new era of international development. We have the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. We are now looking at a global agenda for the world. We have progress. We know where we want to go. We have 17 goals and we can work together to achieve them.

I think Canada needs to use the sustainable development goals and this agenda to drive our work and to measure progress. There are 169 targets. We don't have to measure ourselves against all of them, but we can select those where we'll have the most impact and use them to drive Canada's international development assistance and to show progress.

I have to say that Canada really has to be commended for the work that the government did ahead of signing the 2030 agenda for sustainable development to ensure that children were part of these goals. Canada played a leadership role there, and I think we should be very proud of that.

I want to make sure children and youth are at the heart of Canada's international development assistance. They have to be at the heart of delivering the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, and they are the litmus test for the health and future well-being of all our societies.

Currently, securing the future of children and youth is part of Canada's development strategy. That focus needs to continue. Children still suffer disproportionately from poverty.

There is a very strong economic argument to invest in children; there are very strong economic and social returns. Children and young people are not passive recipients of aid; when we invest in their rights, they grow into the people who will change our world for the better.

Also, what UNICEF has realized through our own research is that if we reach the most disadvantaged children first, if we invest in the most disadvantaged children first, this has two key advantages: it allows us to be faster at making progress, and it is more cost-effective than focusing on the easiest-to-reach children.

Canada can't do it all, so how can we make Canada's aid work harder and smarter?

The way we can do that is by focusing on the most underfunded areas of the sustainable development goals. Those are the areas of health and nutrition for children, child protection, quality education, and early childhood development. This isn't just the right thing to do; this is what economists are saying is the right things to do. This is where you get the biggest bang for your buck.

There is the Copenhagen Consensus, which is over 100 peer-reviewed analyses from the world's top economists and sector experts. They have identified 19 of the 169 targets of the SDGs as being the most effective investments, and 13 of those 19 are targets that are focused on children. I would encourage Canada to focus its efforts on these 13 targets.

Furthermore, as I said, Canada can't do it all. Where can we do it?

The number one priority is to focus on the most vulnerable people. Those are children and youth who are living in hard-to-reach areas, and they need our help. They include children who are living in humanitarian emergencies and in fragile settings. We know that cycles of poverty are intergenerational, and they are perpetuated because of the repeated and cumulative effects of crises. If we want to stop these, we need to invest in resilient development. Resilient development means providing children and communities with what they need to better prepare for shocks in the future, to better manage crises, and to recover from these more rapidly. Canada is already investing in some of these areas, and it should continue down that path.

The second priority is to make sure that we are supporting the gains that have been achieved. Between 2015 and 2030, a number of countries are going to move from a low-income to a middle-income status. That doesn't necessarily mean that the government has the capacity to make that transition. We need to continue investing in these countries, making sure we can help them sustain the gains they have made.

We need to leave room for innovation. Canada's aid needs to remain flexible and nimble so that we can invest in those game-changing initiatives for children—for example, clean energy. We know that if kids can have access to safe lighting at home and clean cookstoves, this will change their family's life. They will be healthier, they will be able to do their homework safely, and girls won't be forced to go out to collect firewood and be exposed to exploitation.

Lastly, Canada needs to play to its strengths. We have a comparative advantage in certain areas, including maternal, newborn, and child health; sexual and reproductive health; and climate change.

In the area of maternal, newborn, and child health, we know that Canada is a leader. We need Canada to continue to invest in sustaining these gains. There are still eleven children under the age of five who die every minute. We need Canada to remain focused there.

We also need to make sure that children are healthy and protected from violence. We can't exclude the issue of violence. This is a new area in the sustainable development goals, and Canada has been a leader. If Canada pulls out of this area, we risk losing the gains that were made. In fact, this committee conducted a study in June on the issue of protection of children against violence. I would encourage the committee to look at the recommendations that came out of that study.

Canada has invested heavily in addressing climate change. It is an exciting opportunity and it has a lot of benefits for children. We know that children are the ones who suffer disproportionately from climate change. Investments in clean energy will go a long way, and we are very encouraged by Canada's investments in this area.

That is where I leave it with you. I am happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much to UNICEF, CARE Canada, and World Vision.

Colleagues, we will try to make up a little bit of time, but as you know, I am not very good at that. We will probably end up being here a little longer than we normally are. That is probably a good thing, because we have a very good group of people before us.

I will start right off the bat with Mr. Allison.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

To our witnesses, thank you once again for being back before us today.

Ms. McGuinty, I liked the comments you made in terms of targeting our competitive advantage where we've done well, and how we've done that. I noticed you did talk about maternal and child health.

When we look at this study in terms of where we focus, do we expand the list or shorten it? I agree that we should be looking at where we've done well or where Canada can offer its competitive advantage. Do you have any thoughts in terms of whether we should be looking at a more thematic scheme? Should we be looking at areas versus countries?

Obviously, we talk about countries that.... I raised this question with the officials when they were here. You think of Vietnam; it is now a middle-income country, but that doesn't mean they need less help. Could I have your thoughts in terms of whether this is an opportunity for us to expand the list, in realizing that we don't have unlimited resources?

You talked about Gavi and the Global Fund, which are obviously great organizations that do other things in some of these very poor countries as well. I'd like your thoughts on how we focus. What would be your suggestion to us?

[Carleen McGuinty]

Thank you for the question, Mr. Allison.

First, at UNICEF we're not advocating for a country-focused approach. We would support a thematic focus.

I think, as I mentioned, areas where Canada already has a competitive advantage would go a long way in making Canada's aid work smarter for our beneficiaries and also for Canadians.

In terms of the thematic focus areas, I would encourage you all to look at the Copenhagen Consensus, which identifies 19 targets that present the biggest impact for a small investment. I think that can really help guide your work.

Also, as we've heard from everyone here on the panel, I think the lesson learned from the millennium development goals is that we left a number of people behind. Therefore, the vision and lens to use is in reaching those who are the hardest to reach, the poorest of the poor. They can be found everywhere. They're not just in low-income or middle-income countries.

You can use different approaches to that. Perhaps Canada's aid will be required more heavily in a low-income country where you can rely on other partners or in building local capacity in other areas. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. UNICEF certainly uses different approaches. For example, in looking at the capacity of a government, is the government low capacity or high capacity? You work with them accordingly.

You have a formidable challenge ahead of you all. Those are some of my thoughts.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to ask one other question, and then I want to pass it over to Mr. Kent.

Mr. McIntosh, I think you also talked a bit about looking at more regional areas. Do you want to flesh that out a bit? Are you suggesting that maybe it's not countries of focus, per se, but as Ms. McGuinty said, maybe it's a regional focus and we need to look at those issues? I know you were talking about migration and some of these other issues you guys have been working on. Would you just expand on that briefly?

[Jamie McIntosh]

Yes.

I think the issue is really to look at the volatile nature of these situations. It really is the case that whether one chooses to do a country prioritization or a thematic or sectoral one, we need to have the highly adaptive ability to say, “Let's be more nimble.” In that, what we were advising is that there could be some regional reallocation as the context changes.

You could look at Ebola. In the Ebola response, if we were prioritizing one country but Ebola broke out in a different country and we didn't rapidly respond, then the cost, the social consequences, and the cost in terms of lives saved or lives lost would certainly compound.

Likewise, we might focus somewhere in Central America and then see what we saw, with Honduras having the highest homicide rate per capita in the region. Now that's being outstripped by the situation in El Salvador.

Having the ability to regionally reallocate is really what we're talking about. Even if we choose some sector, there might be an unknown risk that leaps upon us. We should have the ability to be adaptive midstream.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you very much.

I was impressed by the suggestion of five recommendations with regard to the re-evaluation of countries of focus. My question bears on number two, focusing on need and not least-developed-country ranking, and number four, impact monitoring.

I was taken by the update on your visit to Chad.

Also, I've asked previous witnesses. It's six years after the Haiti earthquake, and billions of dollars were contributed by many countries, with Canada as a lead among the stabilization countries. There is very little to show, in part because of the government's inability to govern.

I'm wondering if this comes to a point of reallocation. What should Canadians be thinking about the development funds we have been spending in Haiti and not spending in Chad? How do we rationalize potential reallocation?

[Santiago Alba-Corral]

I think when we talk about evaluation, it's not only to say what we have done but also to see what we have learned from what we have done. I think this is going to be the critical point, because I don't think we can say.... Even before the earthquake, Haiti was already not in a good situation. The reality today is that infant mortality is much lower than it was before the earthquake. There are a lot of things that we have done, and I think the way we can explain this to Canadians is to also understand we are not always going to have the same results in every place we intervene. There will be many aspects that will change the way we measure that level of success.

On the other hand, if we want to be the innovation agency that Canada has been since the beginning of development, innovations sometimes are going to mean that we learn from mistakes. I think we see that from the private sector. Innovation comes from places where you invest, and you can get a major result.

In conclusion, it's both messages, not just in how development works. I think that's a message we have to send to Canadians. Development has worked and keeps working. We are learning to do it better. I think Haiti will be a good example. We must also understand that we cannot spread our very thin resources to every single country. We also need to be able to collaborate with other governments and other donors in how we respond to some needs.

One of the main issues in Haiti was that there was not always strong coordination in how aid was delivered, and maybe that's a lesson. What is the role that Canada wants to play in bringing actors together and reinforcing some of the spaces where those decisions were taken with other donors?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Sidhu. We'll get back to this question.

[Jati Sidhu, Liberal, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, panellists. You're doing the best job you can around the world where the help is needed. I thank you for that.

With my background, I need to know how to get the best mileage our of our dollars, so the question is, what are Canada's comparative advantages in relation to international development assistance? In which countries and what sectors is Canada most likely to be able to achieve the best results from its development spending?

[Carleen McGuinty]

In terms of Canada's comparative advantage, we have a lot of strengths.

Canada is a Commonwealth country. Canada is a country of the francophonie. Canada is a Pacific nation. We're a member of the UN. There are a number of alliances and relationships we have to draw upon. That's one thing.

Second, I believe Canada has a comparative advantage in the areas of child health, maternal health, newborn health, and now sexual and reproductive health. I think that's something to note.

Third is the area of climate change. I think with the significant investments that Canada has made, we are leading in this area, particularly with the commitment to supporting low-income countries with mitigation and adaptation, and investment to support clean energy.

The fourth area I want to highlight is the protection of children from violence. Canada's officials have spent a lot of time providing technical assistance, creating a draft strategy, and investing in building a child protection system. In the same way that we have a health system, Canada's been investing in creating a protection system to make sure there are focal points for children if they are affected by violence, abuse, or neglect. If Canada pulls out of this area, we risk losing that. Canada is a leader in this area, and I'd love to see Canada continue to invest in that.

[Jati Sidhu, Liberal, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

One more question. I'm sure this goes to Mr. McIntosh.

When it comes down to administration costs, there are times Canadians have questions. How do you compare yourselves with other comparable entities when it comes down to administration costs? Where do you sit? If you don't have the numbers, you don't have to answer, but I'm curious.

[Jamie McIntosh]

In terms of World Vision Canada's administrative costs, we endeavour to be at about an 80:20 ratio. That's 80% of our resources going toward the program activities and 20% being utilized to ensure we can reach Canadians with the message of need that's out there and advocate about our activities and the effective intervention strategies that we have.

I would say that when we're independently audited, we get significantly high ratings in terms of independent folks who would rank us as well on those sorts of things. As a child-focused organization, we want to ensure we're delivering good value for dollar to these children and we want to optimize the dollars for programs that will impact child well-being, both in terms of actual on-the-ground community development activities and in terms of advocacy efforts that will help leverage national actors to do their duty-bearer responsibilities to ensure child well-being outcomes.

Essentially, we've been tracking over the last five years at about an 80:20 ratio.

[Jati Sidhu, Liberal, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

If I have time left, I will share my time.