Evidence of meeting #7 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was human.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Caroline St-Hilaire Bloc Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good day and thank you for being with us this morning.
The Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China sent a letter to the Prime Minister on October 6. Did the department make recommendations to the Prime Minister about an answer? No one is aware of this letter?
Conservative
Bloc
Caroline St-Hilaire Bloc Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC
Obviously then no one will be able to answer.
My second question concerns mainly CIDA. When I questioned the Minister of International Cooperation about funding sent to China, she clearly told me that no funding was going there. From what I understand, funds are not sent directly to the government but CIDA funds programs in China. If I understand correctly, this represents $43 million a year, which is not negligible.
First, I want to know whether you do assessments allowing you to determine the impact of your projects and whether they have a positive impact on human rights. Since the committee has been studying the issue of China, we have been told that the situation there has never been so bad in terms of human rights, despite the constant increase in funding from the Canadian government to various programs.
No doubt there is work to be done, to say the least. However, as a public servant, do you not find it somewhat paradoxical for the Canadian government to fund programs in China through CIDA and for China to send money to Darfour? We are trying to help improve human rights, but they don't seem to be improving at all and, at the same time, China thumbs its nose at us by sending money to Darfour. Is this not a funny message being sent to taxpayers? In your opinion, how can we explain this situation to the public?
Vice-President, Asia Branch, Canadian International Development Agency
To answer your second question, I will say that human rights are not very important to the Chinese government. That is why our program specifically focuses on human rights.
As for the Chinese aid for Darfour, in Africa, it is important to note that the international community has the opportunity to influence China regarding the implementation of this aid program and to encourage it to consider factors such as governance and rights.
Director, China and Northeast Asia Division, Canadian International Development Agency
I would like to add a few words in response to the second question. I want to clarify that no resources are provided to the Chinese government that could be used for purposes other than implementing our joint projects. When we send Canadian experts to China, the Chinese cannot use that expertise to promote projects elsewhere in the world. There is no direct or indirect ties between the development assistance we provide to China and the Chinese programs overseas.
On the first question, about the extent to which we try to measure the impact of our work, in fact we devote quite a bit of time, energy, and resources to this. Every project, and all of the projects that you see in the information you have, has a performance measurement framework at the beginning of the project. It's a condition for a project to be considered for approval. The performance measurement framework includes objectives, and targets and indicators for the outputs of the project, which is how many people, say in a training project, get trained; the outcomes of the project, which would be what the institution is able to do at the end of the project that it was not able to do at the beginning of the project; and the impact of the project, which is how that project affects people's lives.
Really, it's on the impact side that we try year by year. We do annual reporting within CIDA. All of our projects have to make an annual accounting to us of their progress in that 12-month period against those three benchmarks of outputs, outcomes, and impacts. We do a reporting for the China division. We do a reporting upwards within CIDA, an annual progress report, that gives an accounting of those results.
On the impact side we look at where there is progress in terms of systemic impacts. That's a long-term proposition, for sure. China's a very big country. As Mr. Tse has mentioned, there are some areas where we have found that our projects are having some impacts. There are other impacts, we hope, that will come in the future, as projects complete their outputs and their outcomes.
But we have a rigorous system for assessing this. When you talk with institutions in Canada that implement projects that are supported by CIDA.... As MPs you may hear complaints from time to time that CIDA is difficult to work with. I think you'll find, if you ask for the details of that, that one of the challenges they face is the rigour with which we approach these questions of performance measurement. We spend a lot of time working with them, asking them very detailed questions to provide us with more information about the impacts of their projects.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our presenters today, continuing along our discussions of human rights.
When we talk about human rights issues, I think we maybe tend to forget the amount of poverty that still remains. I probably am still on the record in Hansard as asking the same questions that Mr. Silva asked, but I think we need to recognize—and I appreciate the comments—that there are still an awful lot of people who are living below the poverty line, who live on less than a dollar a day.
Can we be assured that none of this money goes to places we don't want it to go—goes to the government—and instead goes to those poor people?
Can you give us an idea of how many people in China still live on less than a dollar a day, and how we're addressing that?
Vice-President, Asia Branch, Canadian International Development Agency
If you look at the numbers, the income per capita in China is about $1,700. Depending which sorts of numbers you follow, in the case of the Chinese and using their standard, there are about 30 million below the poverty line.
Conservative
Director, China and Northeast Asia Division, Canadian International Development Agency
I can help out here.
In terms of the international standard, a dollar a day, it would be more than 100 million people in China. In terms of a two-dollar-a-day standard, which is not a lot of money, it would be more than 200 million people in China, and a substantial proportion of the people in the world live at that level of income. In terms of new projects that have been brought forward since 2005, our program is no longer focused on directly assisting poverty reduction in China, because the Chinese government has programs in place to deal with that. We have worked with them in the past on how they can target those programs more effectively, but in line with Canadian foreign policy priorities, our current focus is on the areas of human rights, democratic development, good governance, and environment.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
We get conflicting messages. We've heard from many witnesses who say human rights abuses are worse than they've been, and yet we have other people telling us the human rights record in China is improving. What do we use for a benchmark? What do you use for a benchmark, both Foreign Affairs and CIDA, to decide whether or not it is getting better or getting worse?
Director General, East Asia Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
I could venture a general answer. This is not a simple question. This is 20% of the world's population. It's possible both may be true at the same time, and I'm not trying to be facetious. It is simply that with increasing prosperity in China, although relative--and we've just noted a couple of hundred million people who are living close to abject poverty--certainly their conditions of life have improved.
At the same time, we see no signs that the grip of the Communist Party, the authoritarian nature of the political system, is changing or mellowing in any fashion. On the other hand, many Chinese now have limited access to the Internet. They're able to travel. These are not insignificant things. They used to be limited in the places they could travel and fixed in their addresses. They had to have permission even to get on a train and go to another part of China, let alone go outside China.
It's a very mixed message, but what concerns us is that particular groups, defenders of human rights in particular, people who raise their hands and protest, people in minority groups who try to organize to improve their condition, these people are in very difficult straits or find themselves very quickly under arrest or in detention. Any sort of political organization quickly seems to bring the hand of the authorities down upon it.
I would submit that both are true. There are ongoing problems, some of which have got worse. On the other hand, there have been some very substantive improvements, particularly on the economic side. How do we measure this? It's not easy to measure it in exact numerical fashion, but there are groups that attempt to do that. We certainly exchange views with other countries, other western countries in particular. I was in Washington last week and spoke to the American government and institutions there on their take on human rights as of 2006. My colleague has just come back from Europe, and we travel regularly and exchange, of course, through e-mail and correspondence. We read each other's reports, and by that, one gathers an overall picture, but one has to share it because the resources are incomplete.
We do the best we can to gauge the overall state. Of course we ask each mission, including Beijing, to produce an annual human rights assessment for our government as to particular improvements or degradations in the state of human rights in China, and policy-makers use that as a guide as well.
Director, China and Northeast Asia Division, Canadian International Development Agency
To answer your question about the big picture in terms of the CIDA program, we keep an eye on the larger indicators and larger progress, but in practical terms we do our work in particular sectors. China is a huge and complex country. Any country is complex, but China is particularly huge, and so we focus our analytical efforts and the staff we have in the embassy and in headquarters on the particular areas where we are hoping to make a difference and where we see openings in areas like legal and judicial reform, helping to build a civil society. We look at progress and track progress or lack of progress more closely in those areas.
It's more meaningful for our day-to-day work and seeing where Canadians can really have an influence than focusing at the macro level, because we're trying to inform how we can plan better interventions on the part of Canadians.
Vice-President, Asia Branch, Canadian International Development Agency
For us, we have to operate at a very practical level. To give you one example, we have a project dealing with migrant labour rights. The reason we've been able to do it is that right now China has a tremendously large number of migrant workers. Therefore, it becomes an opportunity for the international community and for us to be able to look at how we can address some of those labour rights issues.
And you can look at the early days when we started to work with them in establishing legal aid centres. It started with four of them in four provinces, and now there are over 2,000.
The issue is complementing what our Foreign Affairs colleagues are doing in advocating on the larger human rights--because it's not one little thing, there are so many different aspects to it--and advancing the human rights agenda with the Chinese at a policy advocacy level.
Within CIDA, we are looking for those practical opportunities where we would be able to influence. It's not about a big amount of money per se, because China is just too huge. We try to do our best by working with our Foreign Affairs colleagues, as well as internationally, to see some of the areas where we can make a practical difference.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
Thank you, Chair.
I'm going to pick my words carefully here, and you'll understand in a second. I want to tell Mr. Houlden that I agree with his evaluation that there are some areas of human rights that are improving and some that are going downhill.
I met last week with a person from Hong Kong who works underground in China with the civil society groups. This is why I'm going to choose my words carefully. This person was telling me that they believe in the last 15 years there has been a fairly significant change in human rights and that there have been improvements. What this person spoke about, though, was that it seems the military or the police in certain districts are more offensive than in others in the area of human rights. It's almost like the government itself doesn't have that control; it's not systemic through the government.
I'm just thinking for a second, because again I'm watching my words. This person was saying that they're watched, they're interviewed, but they're not apprehended to the degree they used to be. It still occurs, but not like it was before.
I have one question for CIDA. Has there been an external evaluation of your human rights programming in China?
I'll just go a little further and come back. I've made the suggestion here, and others have spoken to it as well, that the dialogue should be accountable to this committee and reporting to this committee. I'd like to see what folks think of that.
The final one is for Foreign Affairs. What specifically has been done, that you can comment on, to ensure the safety and to secure the release of Huseyincan Celil?
Director General, East Asia Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
May I go with the last question first, if that's all right--
Director General, East Asia Bureau, Department of Foreign Affairs
--particularly because of its importance. Of course, as you know, it has attracted the attention of our Prime Minister, who has spoken out strongly on this case, as have others, including some around this table and our chair.
In our view, this is a particularly egregious case, because this is a Canadian citizen who is being held incommunicado. He was travelling on a Canadian passport in a neighbouring country with whom we now have not been able to secure consular or humanitarian access.
Where has it been raised? As you know from the media, it has been raised at the highest level by our Prime Minister with the President of China. It has been raised in multiple meetings with the Chinese foreign minister. It has been raised through public comments by our political leaders. It has been raised in meetings between our ambassador and the authorities in Beijing. It has been raised by our ambassador when travelling in Xinjiang, the region from which Mr. Celil originates. It has been raised with the Chinese embassy here.
I don't mean to give an exhaustive list, but at each opportunity that has any utility at all, this is something that comes to the fore. I believe members of Parliament have raised this issue as well during visits to China.
We're not going to rest until this situation is resolved. It is a particularly troubling case for us. It's not simply a case of human rights; it's also one of consular access and protection for Canadians.
Conservative
Director, China and Northeast Asia Division, Canadian International Development Agency
You asked the question about evaluation. The answer is no, we have not had an external evaluation of our human rights programming taken as a whole. We have had numerous evaluations, and it's something we do regularly on individual projects. We've had at least 15 evaluations or major reviews of individual projects in the last five years on our program. A number of those have been on individual projects dealing with human rights and rule of law issues. These are commissioned externally and they're available to the public.
Director General, Human Security and Human Rights, Department of Foreign Affairs
Perhaps very quickly on the final point about the bilateral dialogue and where it could or should be reporting, that would be a decision for the government and for our ministers, of course. Simply to repeat again, it's a government-to-government dialogue.
December 5th, 2006 / 12:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Jason Kenney
Okay. Before we go to the second round, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.
The first question is for CIDA officials. What percentage of the programming is in the area of the legal system, training judges, etc.?