Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. My name is Colin Robertson. I served in the Canadian foreign service for more than 32 years. I am currently vice-president of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and a senior advisor with McKenna Long & Aldridge, a Washington law firm. I work throug

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for your question. I am sorry I am not a woman but I hope, nevertheless, to be able to answer your question. Integrations are very difficult. For those of you who have read Harry Potter, it's a bit like a visit from the Dementors, because it sucks all the energy out

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly. There has been a sort of rethink about development assistance. We've put close to $1 trillion into it, and the results are not what we intended. So we began to have people ask what's not working. Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, William Easterly, and others began to say i

Foreign Affairs committee  Trade follows the flag in many cases. In this case, in Africa, trade is now ahead, so I think we're going to be back in for all the reasons that Lucien has given.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, we've always had instant, immediate relief to places that have had disasters, and that's always been a key part, but at the same time, there's the whole idea of development designed to basically take us to the point where you don't have to provide development. We use all sor

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm reminded of a phrase of Lester Pearson, whom I greatly admired. He inspired me to join the foreign service. His view was, don't spend a lot of time studying foreign policy—this was in the context of the Trudeau review—do it. But remember, he built on a whole career and a grea

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, but it's based on experience and talking with people in the private sector, particularly in the field, going into our offices. I'll use Africa as an example and to a degree Latin America, where companies were going in and trying to seek assistance from CIDA to help them get

Foreign Affairs committee  Leaving personalities aside, the legislation as I read it now makes this a significant part of the portfolio of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has overall responsibility, which I think is a good thing. You do need a single point of contact. I think in adding that to the m

Foreign Affairs committee  If I could use the phrase “corporate social responsibility”, companies now realize that's how you do business. Corporate responsibility covers things like women and girls. This is good business practice. This is now becoming part of the culture of companies. They do this, not bec

Foreign Affairs committee  There's a whole series of best practices. I know the departments are going to be looking at this. They should provide you with this information as to what are the best practices. I talked about the who, what, when, where, why. These are all questions you have to ask. We have a de

Foreign Affairs committee  There have been a lot of bad experiences that we can talk about, but I would look to the more positive. It's what you learn in these things. Every case is a little bit different, but I do think the road we're going down is the right one. After all, we talk about trade and develop

Foreign Affairs committee  I think this has been talked about for a long time. I go back. The external aid office was part of Foreign Affairs. We did the Colombo Plan under the old external affairs department. It's not as though this wasn't a piece of it and then it was taken out. Again, we're talking abou

National Defence committee  Thank you, Chair. My comments today will address the strategic environment including the threat of cyber, the value of diplomacy, and the enduring value of our defence partnerships with the U.S.A. through NORAD and NATO; the strategic value of sea power and the importance to our

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. I would just reiterate, that in the United States, as you pointed out, DARPA has made huge investments and, in a sense, is probably why we got the Internet. You yourself, I think, said you worked with the RAND. That's been a big asset in the United States establi

National Defence committee  I would say supply chains or areas in which we have particular excellence, for example, communications and transportation. We have to be very good at those because of our geography and the kind of country we are. I use the MDA Radarsat example. These are part of the crown jewels