Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. If I had that answer it would certainly be wonderful.
There are a few things, I would submit in my humble experience, we could do. One would be to address the international security aspects. We cannot get a country back on its feet until the security aspects are dealt with. As I said before, that involves freeing the country of mines and putting in place a strong judicial system, as well as the necessary foundations of democracy to have a populace with confidence in its government. We are a democratic country, one that is well respected for our democratic institutions. We can and have done a lot to help these democratic institutions.
Another fundamental aspect is how we channel our aid. I think we will find a lot of agreement in the international community that international aid must go through NGOs as opposed to through governments. Much aid in the past has gone directly into the hands of foreign governments and in turn has become parts of personal bank accounts in Switzerland and other countries, or has been used to build people's personal empires through the purchase of arms and bribery. That is completely wrong and is not where our international moneys were meant to go.
As I said before in my speech, we need to look at the NGOs to determine which ones are doing a good job and which are not. We have to determine a set of criteria. We have to determine an end point that we want to address through committee reports. That is something the government agrees on. We wish to help the poorest of the poor. We can do that but we have to determine which NGOs are doing a good job and which are not. Once we do so, we can determine where we are proportioning our money.
It is an interesting and an exciting project, one that I hope the government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of International Trade will take up. If we can do that, we can effectively channel the aid money Canadians give to other countries.
I will finish by saying that many people in my riding and other ridings ask: "Why are you giving money to people half a world away?" If we want to argue purely on selfish grounds, the economic impact in a positive way to our exporters is very great because we are generous on the international stage. We take part in international organizations in an effective fashion and we bring forth to the international community some sense of peace, stability and sensibility.
If we continue to do so we will have on the international stage a clout far greater than what our population would normally give us.