A couple came up in different segments. There's the uncoupling of the unilateral...or the giving to the UN. What ends up happening is that you give all this money into a very large system. They then take a significant percentage of it as an administration fee and go out to try to program it. They will come to smaller agencies and say to them, “We want you to implement, but we're not going to give you an administrative fee. In fact, you need to give us some form of a match.” Basically, the UN becomes your middleman, if you will, or your power broker in between. That becomes a problem. If you just cut them out of the system, you could have saved that 13% management fee, put it to the side and saved the money. When we talk about $1.4 billion, which is what you program, it's a significant amount of money. So I would look at that one.
The other thing is this: Look at Haiti versus Pakistan. Haiti was a horrible incident that involved three million. In Pakistan it was 20 million—seven times the number of folks involved. The money given to Pakistan didn't correlate to the number of beneficiaries or victims who were affected by an incident. Often the questions were raised of....
You can come back to the whole matching program, which the Auditor General touches on as well. As Canadians, we thought of using a matching fund to encourage Canadians to give. If we left the program alone, many agencies would get their match. We would get our funds. We would report to the government what we raised. The government could simply take all that and say, hey, Canadians gave $10 million to all these agencies, so we're now going to match it and give to the agencies we want to. You'd still achieve the exact same objective, which was engaging Canadians to give, without hurting agencies.
Now we're in the middle of a pandemic. We have agencies that are struggling to raise funds. All of a sudden the government tilts the playing field. I know that one is not mentioned in the Auditor General's report. I'd be surprised if it weren't in the next Auditor General's report, because that's certainly something the government should not be doing. Then it came down to efficiency and value for money.
Respectfully, if we're able to push more aid into a crisis zone at a lower cost.... Imagine if we ran this dual program as a nation, where we said to our partners who have boots on the ground, delivering the aid, that we are not only going to fund them, but we're going to provide them with the right aid solutions. We know that all those refugees who are fleeing fighting, or the IDPs who are fleeing fighting in Syria, really need access to clean water. The Rohingya who are in Bangladesh, who have fled all that horrible fighting in Myanmar, need clean drinking water. Now we're going to give you all of this aid at a much lower cost. We'll still give you the money to go and distribute it, but then we get to control costs and actually get to do way more with the money we have right now.