I'm the vice-president for government relations, and our department implemented a scholarship program in Yemen. We have now selected 90 students to attend university in Calgary. Once Nexen does the selection, every year 10 new students will come to Calgary and get their complete degree paid for by the company. It's one of our ways of giving back to the community.
In the long run, over a 20-year period, 200 Yemeni students could come from Yemen to Canada and learn our culture, and believe me, we learn theirs, because we spend a lot of time with these students. It's interesting to watch how our company has changed, and how the students change when they come to our Christmas parties and understand the celebration of Christmas. It's interesting that in our society in Canada we think that to be politically correct we should get rid of things like Christmas, but that is not what the Yemeni students or Yemeni families want; they want us to practise what we practise. They want to see it.
They came to my house for Christmas dinner. You watch 15 young Muslim women and men at your house at Christmastime and you talk to them about what Christianity means, for example, and they tell you stories about their religion, and we all go away much stronger and better for this.
This goes far beyond the dollars and cents. That's not to say the dollars and cents aren't important, but there's wonderful work going on that I think is the 180-degree difference to what we're trying to do in Iraq, which is to teach democracy by forcing it on people.
I think there's a much better way. Canadians can play a much bigger and more important role if we're more engaged. Our scholarship program, the clinics we build in the country, and our hospitals have given us huge opportunities to grow as a company. We just wish the Canadian government was there in Yemen to be part of this experiment, rather than waiting until it becomes a failed state. If it should become a failed state like Afghanistan or Iraq, then there's no question of money.
You don't think very much about whether we should put $100 million into Afghanistan after it's a failed state, but what about a preventative program, a wellness model for democracy, to save those countries that are trying and putting their best foot forward, as many of the countries in Africa and in the Middle East are doing at the present time?