Thank you for your question.
At CANADEM, we feel that we need a mechanism for deploying Canadian civilian staff, just as our armed forces and the RCMP have mechanisms to deploy their soldiers and police officers around the world.
However, those civilians lack support. So we have a large number of civilians who participate in global missions of the UN or other multilateral organizations, such as the OSCE, but who do not receive much support from the Canadian government or Canada in general. I have worked as a Canadian civilian in a number of locations, such as Afghanistan and throughout Africa, but it had nothing to do with Canada. I was rather working for various multilateral organizations or even for the German government.
However, we are still Canadians and we represent Canada, whether we like it or not. We are seen as Canadians, and we take our Canadians values with us. There are many extremely qualified Canadians around the world, including many women. In that regard, it is important to recognize under UN resolution 1325 that there are a lot of Canadian women on mission around the world. The goal of Paul LaRose-Edwards and CANADEM is really to establish a centre that could support all those Canadians and train them.
As Ms. Mason explained a few minutes ago, not much training is provided to civilians. Soldiers and police officers receive training before deployment, but Canadian civilians don't have that opportunity. A number of countries have training centres, such as Sweden and Germany. Those countries are somewhat similar to Canada in the sense that they have the same values and the same desire to be represented in international forums.
The idea would really be to create a centre to help Canadian civilians be better trained and equipped once on the ground, but also to establish improved connections with the Canadian government, so that the government would be better informed of everything those people are doing around the world.