That's a great question. Thank you for that.
We're really good at diagnostics, right? When I say “we”, it's everybody who works on Haiti. We spend so much time figuring out what's wrong. I think we know what's wrong and how we got here. I think we know that if Haiti's going to have long-term success, it needs to restructure, to reform the economy. It needs people to pay their taxes and their customs fees. It needs a judicial system to enforce that. The judicial system has pretty much collapsed.
In order to do that, it needs to fight what is Haiti's biggest, number one problem since the dictatorship, and that is impunity. Everything stems from impunity—corruption and impunity. We've tried, over the course of the last 30 years, every time there has been an assistance mission, to fight impunity from the inside—with some success. The country has been going up and down. It's in a pretty big low right now, but there were some things that really worked.
What we didn't do is fight it from the outside in, and that's where the sanctions piece comes in. Sanctioning sounds short term because it's new, but it's not. To me it's fundamental. It's long term. What you do is stop the flow of all this illicit capital out of the country. You change the behaviour of the economic elite. You change the way the country works at a macroeconomic level. Then we can start doing the other stuff and actually have a lasting impact. That's why it's very important.
We can actually do it because we're Canada and because we're the U.S. The links between the North American economy and Haiti's economy are obvious. That, to me, is the long-term part.
I think your question also deserves a longer answer—frankly, a whole seminar—on how we plan better as an international community once stability comes back, how we approach our assistance better, how we coordinate ourselves better. I would hope we'd bring in new donors. I have to say the first time I worked on Haiti was right after the earthquake in 2010. There were several countries that were very active at the time that have left, that are no longer active. Some have just closed down and are gone, and that's a shame. We have to show these donors, these countries, that it's worth coming back.