Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General noted last year that CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, spent about $3 billion. It has spent similar amounts during the last 25 years of its mandate. Bangladesh alone has received over $2 billion over the last 25 years. The Auditor General notes that the people of Canada are asking whether this money has been spent wisely and whether they are getting a good return on their taxes.
I have a weak spot in my heart for CIDA. In 1978 I lectured and did research at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. My salary and my family's moving expenses were paid by CIDA through the University of Alberta which administered the program of technical assistance under a contract from CIDA. My housing expenses in Nairobi were met by the Government of Kenya.
My personal experience illustrates some of the difficulties which the Auditor General found to exist with CIDA programs more generally.
CIDA had a very tight control over the design and delivery of the technical aid program or what might be called the input. The University of Alberta had worked closely with the University of Nairobi and the Government of Kenya in the determination of the role which Canadian professors would play in the teaching program and development of an effective business curriculum. There was also much care taken in establishing my suitability for the task in preparing me for the problems I was likely to encounter.
As many critics, in particular the Nielsen task force report of government spending programs, have noted, input control and accountability are the easy parts. The difficult part is showing that spending has achieved specified goals and that the investment has yielded the expected rate of return. Let me illustrate the problem, again by reference to my own experience.
I look proudly back on the services I delivered in Nairobi. There were the large courses I taught, the research papers I wrote and published, the students and faculty I induced to go on
to graduate work at my university and the influence I have had on the public discussion of the government's economic policies, including an invited lecture at the School for Kenyan Civil Servants.
What I do not know and what has plagued me ever since my experience is whether the positive things I accomplished were worth the money Canadian taxpayers invested in the project. I do not know that I or anyone else could make such a calculation, even with large resources and the best of will. Nielsen noted that the inability to do so is exactly at the heart of the problems which many Canadians have with their government.
However, as Nielsen and the Auditor General noted, not all government programs have non-measurable outputs. Roads, water works, factories and other tangible projects fall into this category. It is with these that the Auditor General has found particular problems. The most important of these, repeated a number of times in the chapter, is that some have been undertaken at great cost and have failed to deliver the expected benefits because the host government did not have the resources to continue its operation or even maintain the physical structure. I personally have seen roads built with foreign aid deteriorating at alarming rates and some ending in the middle of a desert.
Reform supports the Auditor General's request that CIDA engage in a systematic assessment of the availability of local support funds before it commits Canadian resources to any project. In addition CIDA should be required to report to Parliament the results of its efforts in this direction and in following up the use to which the projects have been put.
Reform also hopes that the government will follow up on the Auditor General's most basic recommendation: that the minister in question is accountable for measuring and reporting on the results of CIDA's programs. Reform would push for this recommendation further and urge that Parliament have greater involvement through consultation and debate over CIDA's budget.
The Auditor General's report identifies a large number of issues which are of a fundamental nature and that lend themselves to such a debate without interfering with the agency's efficiency in its day to day operations.
I recommend to hon. members a reading of this chapter. One of the issues raised by the Auditor General concerns the fact that historically CIDA has given aid to many countries. He and his consultants have agreed that this approach should be changed and that spending should concentrate instead on a limited number of specific countries. Parliament can make valuable contributions to the solution of these matters.
Another important issue identified by the Auditor General is the conflicting nature of some of the most important mandates of the agency. Thus it is required to help the poor directly but also increase the productive capacity of the poor. These two objectives involve an irreconcilable conflict. Food aid keeps down the prices of agricultural products and discourages local production. It creates dependence.
It is ironic that the exact same problems face domestic Canadian spending on social programs and the interprovincial equalization program extended through Bill C-3. I discussed these problems and offered possible solutions the first two times I spoke in this House.
The proposals of the Minister of Human Resources Development for the redesign of domestic social programs will be discussed by Parliament. So should the CIDA programs and mandates. In this context there would undoubtedly be an evaluation of the Auditor General's view that programs in some countries lack coherence, that they use an inadequate knowledge base and may have failed to review development effort in the light of recent changes in the understanding of the nature of the basic development process.
In the evaluation of the CIDA spending in Bangladesh the Auditor General noted that the country's structural weaknesses make self-reliant development very difficult. I wonder whether this assessment is a code for one of the ideas advanced by some students of development aid, namely, that aid should be made conditional upon the receiving country making structural changes that support the development process such as freeing of markets and prices, the protection of property rights and the introduction of democracy. Certainly this topic would be one on which many members of Parliament would want to have an input.
One of the criticisms of the Auditor General is that CIDA is overregulated and suffers from the widespread bureaucratic disease which makes staff more concerned about following a risk minimizing process for spending money than in getting good results. These are almost the verbatim words of the Auditor General. He believes this state of affairs should be changed by making the management staff and process simpler and more transparent and focused on goals identified in co-operation with recipient countries.
In addition, CIDA should adopt a learning culture and devote more effort to the identification of problems that develop while projects are under way. The Auditor General believes that such a change will be forced on CIDA by making its staff, management and ministers explicitly and directly accountable to Parliament and through it to the general public whose taxes finance its operation.
Reform agrees with this assessment made by the Auditor General. It urges the government to force CIDA into becoming more responsive to Parliament, not only in its day to day operations but in setting goals and processes for the selection
and evaluation of its programs. The people of Canada deserve no less.