Madam Speaker, I asked a question in the House which was not answered satisfactorily with respect KAIROS and its abuse by the government. CIDA has cut KAIROS off from a 35 year relationship with the government over an amount of about $7 million.
All the studies and all the reports indicate, the latest being the Auditor General's report, that CIDA is in a state of disarray. It is a broken system. There is a high staff turnover. There are too many people in Ottawa and too few people in the field.
All the reports are themes and variations on the same thing. CIDA is broken. There is no impetus on the part of the government to fix it. There is no senior leadership that is prepared to fix it. There is no attempt to make the minister responsible for CIDA an independent full-fledged minister. There is no effort on the part of the government to make CIDA into the institution that it should be.
Bill C-293, the one legislated mandate with respect to CIDA, is ignored completely, so the minister is left to set her own priorities. Over the past number of years, there have been dozens of priorities that have literally been set and reset.
Into this maelstrom of a mess, of a dysfunctional ministry with a weak minister and an ever-changing set of priorities, comes KAIROS and every other NGO. Therefore, KAIROS applied for its funding. It was told by the agency that it would qualify and it sat on the minister's desk for six months. Then literally one night it gets a telephone call, saying it does not qualify because it does not meet the priorities, whatever the priorities are.
Then a couple of weeks later, the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism said that really the reason it was defunded was because it is anti-Semitic. If KAIROS is anti-Semitic, then so also is everyone else in the House.
It is just awful. It is even worse than that. Not only was it defunded because of some political agenda, but this hurts people. This hurts the poor people.
In this morning's paper, there is an article by Geoffrey York about the way in which rape is used as a weapon of war in the Congo. It describes a variety of programs that are not effective. The one exception is the KAIROS program.
Here is what Geoffrey York says about it. He goes on to describe a situation involving Eliza M'kazine who was raped. She said, “I was like a dead person. Whenever I saw a man walking toward me, I was afraid it was a soldier coming to rape me again”.
He says:
Ms. M'kazine was counting on help from a Congolese human-rights group, Heritiers de la justice, which promised to train her to instruct sexually assaulted women about their legal rights. The program was to be launched this year with $75,000 from Canada. “It gave me strength and courage”, said Ms. M'kazine.
But the program was cancelled. The Canadian government abruptly halted its grants to KAIROS, the Canadian church charity that was supporting the Congolese human-rights group. Citizenship Minister...said it was because of the charity's position on Israel. After a storm of controversy, he said it was actually because the charity did not meet the government's "current priorities...
The church leaders have asked for a meeting to clear the air with the Prime Minister. Yet the government has repeatedly refused the church leaders for an opportunity to clear the air.