The government has just announced 20 countries of focus, and there were three criteria used to select them. The first one, as you would expect, is need and whether or not there was significant need in a country, from a poverty reduction point of view, in terms of both absolute poverty and relative poverty, and whether or not the country was particularly vulnerable, for example, due to natural disasters.
The second criterion was really Canada's ability to make a difference, and that was assessed in a number of ways. Really, can that country use our assistance effectively? Do they themselves have the kind of governance and management tools that we would expect to ensure we would actually have pretty good results with them? We would also look to see whether or not we had presence and capacity to monitor our work in those countries. We also looked at whether or not Canada had a potential to really have some influence. Could we actually have a significant influence? Because we would be one of the major donors.
The third criterion was the extent to which the countries selected were aligned with our foreign policy priorities. As you would expect, that had to do, for example, with our democratic values.
If we felt that in one of the 20 countries selected the conditions were deteriorating--either they were inconsistent with our foreign policy priorities or we felt they were not able to make effective and efficient use of our resources--then we would take corrective actions and we would bring advice to the minister if we were going to stop. We chose the countries to prevent that from happening, but if it did, we would certainly monitor and we would take action.