But I had to make it anyway.
The position to which I'm going as president and chief executive officer is an NGO, a non-governmental organization, non-profit organization, situated in Washington, D.C. It does work internationally. Its budget is between $40 million and $50 million U.S. a year. The funding is on a project-specific basis. So if a government wants an organization to go and help a particular country develop an aspect of or a total electoral system.... For example, IFES was involved in organizing the Iraqi elections; they were part of the United Nations group that was there. There is work that's done in Latin America in different countries. If you want an education program, and an electorate, for example, during an electoral process in Haiti.... Or IFES will also do observation for a particular event because of its credibility. So that's what I'll be doing.
IFES is situated in about 15 offices around the world now, on a project-specific basis. It's not there forever. When the money runs out, the people come back, and that's it. So people are working on a contract basis. About half the staff are in Washington. I'll be travelling, I would suspect, in some parts of the world to achieve this. So that's the type of business that it is.
Most of the funding comes from the American equivalent to CIDA; it's called USAID. There is some that comes from European countries, and there is some that comes from funding agencies in the States, principally, that like to see this kind of work being done around the world.
I'm already starting to have ideas on further thoughts about how to pursue these things, and how to make it grow, and so on and so forth. Obviously, the attraction for me is that I'll be working in an area that has become very rewarding for me in a personal sense, because of the work we did around the world, especially what we did in Iraq and what we did in Haiti. There were a lot of untold stories about Iraq, but they were extremely gratifying--very dangerous, obviously, but extremely gratifying, and the work in Haiti as well.
So all of that is to say that I'll be focusing on that, as opposed to the details of the Canada Elections Act, to come back to the detailed comment that you made.