My impression, and I want to stress “impression”, is that it's the latter, and we can play games with ourselves. It certainly was my experience from the centre in Montreal, looking at most of what we were then doing in China, too. We have these wonderful conferences, people go over, and it can be, on our part, a gross act of self-deception. It can be.
Similarly, all the kinds of projects, it seems to me, Irwin, you mentioned, in Cuba, could have just a nice focus on economic and social rights and we ignore the political and civil rights dimensions of them and think we're doing something useful. The only way I think of answering your question is, are these projects pushing the envelope more towards political and civil rights as actually an empirical study?
I don't know well enough in there, but if we could get in...and that's the other big problem. As you will know, having been on the board at the centre, when the centre did projects in Latin America, even with bad regimes we could get in as a human rights organization and see what was happening on the ground. There was enough space for that. Well, we don't have that space in Cuba. We don't. We can't send human rights activists in there to verify if some of these projects we're doing are really pushing the envelope or not.
So my answer is that I tend to be a bit skeptical about them, that they can provide us with an excuse, saying we're looking at economic and social rights, carrying on our trade at the same time, but avoiding pushing the envelope on political and civil rights.
If they do the latter, then they're worthwhile, but as I say, I find it kind of hard to answer the question as a generalization: would I favour doing these things or not? I would favour doing them, but only on the condition that they're a foundation for pushing for other rights. As I say, the only way we find that out is to keep an eye on CIDA and get the best kinds of reports from them, and so on.