Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here. In fact it's a bit of fun for me, in the sense that I spent a number of years working on developing-country issues with the World Bank and the IMF. I toted up the number of countries I worked on during the late 1980s and in the

Foreign Affairs committee  Actually, I should that say in a number of missions I was involved in, the Canada trust funds that were given to the World Bank or to the IMF were used to help pay for the consultants who would work in various countries. That's done at the minimum. But I think more than just that

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that's a good question, and I hope I answer you well after hearing the interpretation. In any of these things, I think it's really important that you engage the appropriate NGOs in a country that can help deal with that. For example, we had some tax officials coming fro

Foreign Affairs committee  Just very quickly, I think part of it is bringing people to the table and part of it is long-term relations. I think Canada would need to focus on some countries. Working with different countries is a lot of work. Probably the best place is where we have a prominent role in those

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, infrastructure and education are probably the two most important capital-building types of expenditures that governments can undertake, and of course they can be very poorly done, as opposed to well done. What you want to do is get them well done. Also, we know tha

Foreign Affairs committee  On the tough love, that's effectively what the IMF and the World Bank do on conditional loans. They say if you want the money, there are certain things that they require.

Foreign Affairs committee  It's aid too. What I'm saying is that the conditional loan programs effectively are a bit of a tough love program, in the sense that the IMF and the World Bank work with a country. They try to work with the governments themselves, and it is a tough love approach in the sense tha

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm not sure. I'd have to think through how successful that would be. I always like to look at the problem first and see what we need to get done and then figure out what kinds of resources you need in order to achieve that. To me, that's a much better approach than to try to say

Foreign Affairs committee  Retired people, for sure, because they have tremendous human capital, could be used to help, to come in and bring up that public policy capacity. A good example of that is the tax administration side that I've seen where retired civil servants go in and help various countries. Th

Foreign Affairs committee  My experience with Canadian companies is I've seen it on both sides, both as working with the government and also on the other side too. If the government has put in the right regulations and the right transparency, companies will comply. Canadian companies are very much used to

Foreign Affairs committee  They understand that, and that would be true working in any country. I'm not talking about working in Canada, but Canadian companies working in other countries. This is why I go back to the importance of having the right public policies in place, and the right public policies a

Foreign Affairs committee  It's hard if you're not going to get reception from the country. I have to admit that of the 18 countries—and that's why I gave you a couple of examples of Guyana and Bulgaria—in some cases the governments are very motivated. They really want to do much better and they're very re

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a bit like the tough love approach: if you're not going to be receptive, then we're not going to have much success with our aid and our programs, so we have to be pragmatic and see what's going to work best. To give you another example, I worked in Egypt at one point, an

Foreign Affairs committee  Oh, absolutely; it's amazing. My French is imperfect, so I'm not very good in it, but they were often looking for Canadians to work in various French-speaking countries particularly, because there are not that many countries, outside of France, that you can get to work there.

Foreign Affairs committee  Actually, it's an area I've dealt with a lot in the past. Canada has a pretty good system for outbound investment in terms of not creating an obstacle for companies trying to make outbound investments. We have many tax treaties, which is important. We also have now tax informat