Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm very happy to be here to meet all of you and to have this chance to share my thoughts and analysis with you today. As you've heard, I'm a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa. I'm also a member of the McLeod Group, wh

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. There's no doubt that resource extraction can generate revenues that can be used well by a developing country. This is something that has been touted by CIDA, and in fact by the Prime Minister, as sort of the wisdom of relying on resource extraction

Foreign Affairs committee  I very much believe that it is not the direction we should take. In fact, it was interesting listening to the presentation of my colleague here, Mr. Shariff. None of that, as far as I noticed, involved any use of public funds. The other thing I wanted to underline was that this w

Foreign Affairs committee  I have not.

Foreign Affairs committee  No.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, I haven't.

Foreign Affairs committee  I can't really comment on what other countries are doing or not doing, as much as I can comment on the implications for Canada continuing to do so. As I mentioned, there is a huge reputational risk. These companies have been accused of all sorts of environmental and human right

Foreign Affairs committee  In fact, the Mining Association of Canada has commented that we need that in order to compete. The implication, I believe, is exactly what you have said. Other countries are bundling aid and non-aid in ways that we don't think is right. We have signed on to agreements that say

Foreign Affairs committee  I think under exceptional circumstances it is good policy for ensuring things like access. For instance, to subsidize access to broadcasting or the Internet in the north or for postal services and things like that, I think government involvement would—

Foreign Affairs committee  I could only answer that on a case-by-case basis, but—

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. I'm in favour of assistance.

Foreign Affairs committee  My main concern is that public funds are needlessly going to activities that could be financed otherwise, and that those funds would be better spent elsewhere. I'm not saying that the activities are necessarily bad, but this is not the best mechanism or necessarily the best place

Foreign Affairs committee  No, I think that's inaccurate. What you're doing is what I mentioned earlier: conflating different kinds of businesses. I'm especially in favour of things like microfinance and supporting start-ups of companies in developing countries. I'm less in support of public funds going

Foreign Affairs committee  Please let me finish my sentence.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm less in support of public funds going to large, highly profitable Canadian multinationals to undertake activities that they themselves say they have no expertise in.