Thank you.
Canada can do a lot. Earlier, I was saying that Canada has credibility in the eyes of the international community. One of the main things Canada can do is to insist that voting machines be eliminated. They are frowned upon by everyone—in another words, the UN, the African Union, the European Union, the SADC, and even the opposition parties that are invited to participate in the election. Everyone is asking for a paper ballot. We are asking that voting machines be eliminated because we suspect that those machines will lead to cheating. Canada can apply pressure in that sense on the UN Security Council, on the Congo's European Union partners and on diplomatic embassies to ask that a ballot be printed.
The Congolese diaspora in Canada, specifically the francophone diaspora, is dynamic. Thanks to organizations such as COCOT, we provide training and orientation sessions under various programs to help Congolese people integrate the Canadian population better, since they become Canadians citizens afterwards. Some of our programs focus on the understanding of good governance, and we have a program for the professional and economic integration of the Congolese in Canada.
You must know, madam, that, if the Congolese are still managing to survive on the ground, it is because members of their family here—all of us—regularly send money to the Congo to help them. We believe that we, the Congolese Canadians, have structures that enable us to work directly with the government of Canada to help our people in the Congo through organizations we know that work well, are credible and understand good governance policies, as Canada expects.
I think that, if the diaspora could intervene with the government of Canada, it would be through organizations like COCOT, which represents Toronto's Congolese community. We also have other organizations across the country representing Congolese interests.
Let's now move on to diseases and the World Health Organization. You have heard about the current Ebola cases. Today, I received information on a case identified at Mama Yemo Hospital. For your information, that hospital is the main such establishment in Kinshasa, where diseases converge. At the outset, the small city of Kinshasa was designed to be home to 800,000 people, but it is now home to 12 million. Those Ebola cases need only spread in the city for us to have an epidemic on our hands.
So we think it is very important to ask the government of Canada to work once again with our Canadian organizations. Those organizations understand the importance of good governance, they understand the importance of not giving in to corruption or embezzlement and of collaborating with organizations on the ground to successfully increase the number of individuals working with sick people. There are a number of diseases. Today, we are talking about tuberculosis in the city of Kinshasa. Tuberculosis is just as dangerous as Ebola or the dozen other diseases we have in the Congo.
We believe this could be done in direct collaboration with Congolese organizations established in Canada, and with the Canadian diplomatic mission in the Congo. I was in the Congo not too long ago, and I stopped by the Canadian embassy. That diplomatic mission includes a cultural attaché. If we work together, I am sure that we could find ways to bring solutions directly to the affected population.