Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's good to see you here, Rick, helping us organize this chaos.
The CIDA minister continues to paint the rosy picture of her rollout of aid in Africa and Afghanistan. There's a report today in the National Post. It's a quote on the failure of the anti-drug program, the anti-poppy program, in Afghanistan. There are some quotes here from some international sources saying:
There is something inherently wrong with the entire program, from the complicated application process, to confusion over what projects are eligible, to the sheer impossibility of working out who's actually doing the approving and the rejecting.
It states that the Afghan bureaucracy is cumbersome and can only roll out so much of the program. There's been $3 million allocated to this program, and it's ineffectual and it's not being rolled out properly. The Senlis report has been often criticized here today. The Senlis report has some good ideas about dealing with the poppy eradication, and it's only fair to our troops that we deal with the whole situation of the poppies in a proper way. The Americans are not doing it in a proper way. We should not be following their suit.
I'd like to ask the minister of CIDA what she is going to do about increasing and getting some efficient rollout of the program and showing some results. As Mr. McGuire mentioned, in those two southern provinces the poppy cultivation is up as of last year.