I think another member of this committee said that it's a practical way of doing business; it's a pragmatic policy. I would have to say that I find the supposition that we would have a firewall between our political and economic diplomatic resources to be unsophisticated and ultimately would not deliver on Canadian interests.
I also think the idea that firms don't care about human rights in the countries that they operate in is also startlingly naive. Firms believe in human rights, because not only is it the right thing to do, but they are also obliged to by domestic and international laws. They have employees that are also fully embedded in those communities as business leaders. Those who run operations in emerging markets live in the very markets in which they are operating, so they care as citizens if not participatory members of society. I think the naive division between political and economic policy is no longer realistic, if it ever was.
Having spent 10 years in the public service, and it was my great honour, at one point, to be a public servant in the Department of Foreign Affairs, I don't know a single Canadian ambassador who didn't understand both his or her political mandate as well as the economic interest that he or she may have the opportunity to deliver on.
I don't think there's a single Canadian firm that would question, for example, that there's such a thing as a national interest and a Canadian public interest, and that certain values we all hold as Canadians are above and beyond and far more important than the interests of any one firm. There isn't a single CEO in our organization that would question that principle and that would not endorse, for example, the Canadian diplomatic community’s acting on important human rights issues as well as the basic and important developmental needs that my esteemed fellow witness has pointed out, for example, in sanitation, maternal health, or education. These are not mutually exclusive goals, and I reject wholeheartedly the thought that our diplomatic assets, our ambassadors, are not sophisticated enough to understand at what point they have to act on these various interests.