Foreign Affairs committee  Good morning, Chair. Good morning, members and colleagues. The organization I head, CIGI, has been working on the broad area of finance and development finance for several years. We've published a number of papers. I have spent the better part of three decades, first at the Inte

Foreign Affairs committee  On the one hand, you have needs at the other end, and on the other hand, you have the expertise in the source country. I think we have to be guided by what Canada does best. We have to be guided by what we have said we will avowedly want to change. There are two or three things

Foreign Affairs committee  The way the IFC, other multilateral institutions, and indeed the CDC in the U.K. work, there is a private rate of return, which is the financial rate of return. Then they try to compute something called the “social rate of return”, which is an attempt to capture those wider gains

Foreign Affairs committee  These are off-the-cuff figures, but let's say $300 million over five years. Let's assume that the operating costs are modest. That $300 million, if you divide it by five, gives you $60 million annually. If you then have a 5:1 leveraging ratio, you want to raise another $300 milli

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. That is, in some ways, exactly the right dilemma that we face. There are a number of things that one would want to unpack about this. What I guess I would say is that this goes to my last point about not Christmas-treeing the DFI with objectives that are all valid an

Foreign Affairs committee  I think those are very good observations embedded in the question, and I share some of the points my colleague from Oxfam made. First, whether we like it or not, in an era of stagnant and perhaps even declining ODA—and by the way, there are good reasons for it—the fact is that th

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, indeed, and it also ties into the previous exchange on local know-how. If you want to be effective in the development sphere, you need on-the-ground expertise. If you have an operation of $50 million or $60 million a year, then how are you going to get the local nuance? Is i

International Trade committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for having CIGI join your discussions on this important and timely issue. I look forward to engaging with you and the other witnesses on an interrelated set of issues that bear lots of scrutiny. By way of introduction, my organization, the Centr

International Trade committee  As we say in the brief, and we use our words carefully, Canada has the technical and legal right to take vaccines from COVAX. COVAX is a global fund. Canada remains the fifth- or sixth-largest contributor to COVAX, but it does go against—and this is the word we use—the ethos of C

International Trade committee  Our advocacy has not been on just a modernized TRIPS waiver. What we've said is that the way we create intellectual property and the way we protect it has to be modernized. At the time that TRIPS came into being, this kind of activity was centred in a very few countries, as you'v

International Trade committee  I'd go back to the points I made earlier. My list would be a well-funded COVAX; transparency in vaccine pricing; properly negotiated subsidy contracts, so that when governments subsidize research there is some give-and-take, which did not happen this time; opacity in contracting,

International Trade committee  I don't have any particular insights on what the inside thinking might be. I would only be doing informed speculation. To be fair, the original proposal from India and South Africa was flawed. One could make the case that it was self-serving, that it would have benefited firms

International Trade committee  Is that for me, Mr. Blaikie?

International Trade committee  I think that's exactly right. Markets have underpinning them certain presuppositions: full and free information, rational behaviour, and competition. However, when it comes to many markets, and certainly in pharmaceuticals, that is not the case. There tend to be oligopolies and t

International Trade committee  No worries.