With regard to your question about CIDA programming, the CIDA programming in China is largely, as I said, on human rights, democratic development, good governance--that's one concept--and the environment.
We do have some small programs like the Canada Fund, which is a small program designed to engage in specific projects in largely border regions of China. This is a very small proportion of our overall development programming in China. Of course, you can get this more clearly from the representatives of CIDA than from me. I just know what I know.
In terms of whether other countries are doing things better in China, as a Canadian who went to talk to people, I am very discouraged that it seems that the Canadian programming in China has fallen behind the times. We have not been as innovative and as vigorous in pursuing our interests in China as other nations have been, specifically Australia, the United States, and Scandinavian nations.
I see this as not just a function of the human rights programming. I believe it reflects in all aspects of our programming--immigration, trade, political relations, development. We just don't seem to be responding to the dramatic changes that have been taking place in China in recent years.
I'd be happy to talk about this, but I think it's the wrong committee. I do have strong views on every aspect of our programming, and I don't think Canada needs to innovate; I think we have to look at what other countries are doing, learn from their experiences, and perhaps do something suited to Canadian interests in China--make more efficient use of our national resources to better get us in there and do a better job in terms of how we engage China.
With regard to the human rights dialogue, all the nations have the same issues, but some nations have innovated a bit.
Denmark, I believe, focuses largely on Tibet questions, so they've focused their dialogue to an issue that they sustain year by year.
Australia puts much more resources into it. It's at a higher level, an assistant minister level. They connect it much more closely to technical assistance and follow-on. As my report points out, I find that the dialogue takes place over a day and then disappears for the other days of the year; other countries have more sustaining activities connected to it, and other countries have been more innovative in terms of their development programming in terms of engaging civil society in China and standing on the side of agents of change to promote citizenship and democratic values in that country.
Canada does have a civil society program, a program of CIDA that is specifically oriented toward the China NGO sector, but I believe that if we did a comparative study of Canadian programming in China and that of comparable nations, we'd find many areas in which Canada could in fact consider renewing and innovating and getting more in tune with new possibilities in China to better realize our interests in that country.
I'm sorry. That was a long answer to a short question.