Mr. Chair, I hope that my answer will be useful. When I was in Senegal, the country was holding a democratic election that involved a turnover of power and no violence at all. The whole process was fully transparent. It was a democratic process we could have been proud of.
The following day I got phone calls from Senegalese people who were thanking me for the election. I asked them what we had done. Their answer was, “the journalism school”. Journalists had been trained in Canada, and in turn they had become good reporters and were able to hold their government accountable and bring issues into the public sphere. For the Senegalese people, this was one of the main factors that had enabled the country to have such a flexible and peaceful transition to democracy.
That is one example of many, but I think that is the key point. It is not a matter of Canada going into a foreign country to tell people what to do or what not to do. It is a matter of developing local tools and resources to force the government to be accountable and to have a fully democratic system. This process first and foremost includes civil society.