Well, that speaks about the international and national media and the choices they make in their reporting. Frankly, as an international NGO, essentially, that works on the ground, we see to a large extent the poverty of international reporting from the ground up. The media are extremely concentrated.
In terms of helping national NGOs, which I think is the starting point if we deal with these kinds of issues, on the one hand, as I said before, NGOs can build clinics but they can't build courts, so we should never abandon the government-to-government assistance to build state-based institutions. There is no substitute for that. NGOs can't run prisons. The entire justice sector cannot, one hopes, entirely be privatized. I think there are some who believe parts of it could be privatized, but we all understand that it's essentially state-owned.
In other sectors, support for national local NGOs is really critical. If I could leave you with one thought when it comes to international assistance, it would be that many countries, as you may know, have passed legislation preventing their own national NGOs from receiving foreign funding, or in some cases limiting their budget to no more than, say, 10% of foreign funding. This is a very pervasive way for governments to shelter themselves particularly from human rights organizations who would challenge them, although they're very happy to receive lots of money and assistance for their own programs.
This is something that I think should be government-to-government and in international forums. Certainly Canada could champion the issue that international aid and international assistance should flow not only to state institutions but to civil society actors. That's what democracies are about. Again, it's about the empowerment of people to advance their own interests.
That blockage, I think, is really alarming, and it's quite widespread--