I am not, Mr. Chair. I am debating the substance of the motion.
I think the substance of this motion is very divisive, and I think it's part of a broader pattern on the part of this government to defend itself by introducing divisive measures in the House and in committees in order to distract from its failings.
I don't think that this motion is a constructive motion in the context of the diplomatic capacity study. I would note that a different form of the motion was introduced previously at this committee, and the committee descended into chaos.
We are, once again, taking the committee off track, because this motion clearly doesn't have a consensus around this table. I would note that it is unfortunate, because I think that in regard to Canada's foreign aid, it is possible to develop a consensus across party lines and among Canadians more broadly.
The approach I would highlight, which I think the committee should have taken when it comes to these sorts of issues, is the approach that the previous government took with its G8 Muskoka initiative on maternal and children's health, an initiative that was widely seen as being successful, precisely because both NGOs and the government set aside their partisan considerations and worked across divides to find a consensus on issues of commonality.
I was just recently reviewing an article that was written by Elly Vandenberg in Policy Options in 2017. Elly Vandenberg is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She has 25 years of experience at World Vision Canada and she wrote something that I think is particularly apt in this context of the motion in front of us today. She highlighted 10 practical lessons learned from the success of the Muskoka initiative. One of the 10 lessons learned was to collaborate across different divides and to focus on areas of common support.
That's not what this motion does; it does quite the opposite. It's a divisive motion that we have dealt with in another form at this committee, and I think that it doesn't build on the lessons learned from the successful Muskoka initiative, which was something that really galvanized not just NGOs across Canada and not just the international development community here in Canada but also the community outside of Canada. It played a big role in helping us move towards the millennium development goals that we had been struggling to meet, as we were at the two-thirds point around 2010.
We know that in the aftermath of the pandemic, the world's poorest have suffered disproportionately. The World Bank, I believe, last year highlighted that tens of millions of people slid back below the extreme poverty line as a result of the pandemic, so there is a need for a doubling down on the effort to meet the sustainable development goals and the previous millennium development goals that were set.