Again, I think these are all great points. It depends on the problem we're trying to solve.
Generally speaking, it's a “yes and”, not an “or”, so some things are efficiency based, some things are resource based, some things are policy based. It matters to understand which is the problem we care about. On issues of human rights, maybe there's a need to support legal reform or justice services, but it's a very different problem, again, from the expressed commitment around something like maternal, newborn, and child health, which is about health service delivery.
It's part of why I also resist the term “international development”, because it bundles everything as if it's a single bucket of a problem, which it's just not. It's like saying we'll pick which organ you like best in your body as the one that's most important. Well, I like my heart, my lungs, and hopefully my brain works sometimes. I want to be able to breathe. How does all this fit together in each society? It's a different mix. I want my cardiologist—if, heaven forbid, I have to go see one—to know how my heart works, so I need this specific expertise. Whether that's from a bilateral or multilateral support base, what I care about most is that I can access the expertise. Whereas, if I have a problem with my lungs, I'm going to go a pulmonary specialist because they have a different expertise.
I think that, for Canada, for these different priorities we care about, we at least have to align that there are some things where we will commit to be a bilateral leader, which means we need heavy expertise, not just on financing but all the technical problem-solving that goes into solving these things over time. I think we need to build up our civil service technical expertise on this, through a research department, through policy voices. We also might say that there are these other areas where we're not going to invest so much in that in-house and direct bilateral, but we might want to work with them—for example, something like the global agriculture and food security program, which is an instrument on the brink right now—to scale up the multilateral approach, because the world doesn't need more bilaterals in that area right now; it needs more multilateral coherence. That's an area where there's actually significant expertise.
I think we just have to think through the mix of, again, priorities, problems, and expertise. We do have to be aware that one of the challenges of Canada's having got to a point of such small budgets, compared to its peer countries on this, is that we have to make tougher choices than most. One problem over time is to say how you release from that constraint, knowing that we're having to make extra hard choices in this area because our budgets have become so small.
