Foreign Affairs committee  Normally, the funding for an election observation mission occurs at the very last minute. So we got the funding for the current mission on Christmas Eve. The workaround for that one is that you find the right experts and they've already been doing this. They've been doing it for

Foreign Affairs committee  I think it would have been worse, because they would have sucked up all the funds. If it were going to be a National Endowment for Democracy such as they have in the States, whose job is to disburse funds, that's a separate case. This is where my ambivalence is about having th

Foreign Affairs committee  I agree with Jean-Paul on this one. Consistent funding would be helpful. I don't mean unexamined funding—hold our feet to the fire—but there has to be funding. There's also a feeling, and perhaps it's a Canadian disease—I've witnessed this over my full career—that once an organiz

Foreign Affairs committee  They're intertwined, obviously. Also, I'm a big fan of the UN. I think the UN is extremely important. We need to strengthen the UN by getting more qualified people in there. I always view individuals as the ones who make change and make reform. I think, then, that we need to st

Foreign Affairs committee  But, yes, the UN brings a lot of these issues together, and that's the utility of multilateral relationships.

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly, on the the big scene.... I'm actually an optimistic person in this regard. I think the world is moving forward very well. People are paying more and more attention to democratic issues, and so in the big picture I think things are going well. There are many organizatio

Foreign Affairs committee  It's rolling out very well. We already have 50 long-term observers with Mission Canada out there, the Canada mission. We also have another eight over at the OSCE, run by the OSCE. Right now the selection process is just culminating for the short-term observers. They will start de

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a lot for us to handle. CANADEM's history has followed this track. Initially we had an annual funding of a $147,000. After a while we proved ourselves and we got more funding. Our biggest funder for the past four years has been the British government, because we've proved

Foreign Affairs committee  No. Ukraine is, as you know, almost a case apart because of the Canadian Ukrainian community. The utility of having a large stand-alone Canadian mission there as well as of staffing the OSCE electoral observation mission makes a lot of sense. One of your earlier comments in a p

Foreign Affairs committee  One of our strengths, being an NGO, is that life is a lot simpler for us than for civil servants. We have very pared-down rules and regulations for ourselves, so we can turn on a dime and can do these things literally in days. Having said that, election observation has changed d

Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. Chair and members, thank you for the opportunity to address the committee. CANADEM has been doing democratic promotion for two decades. I've been doing democratic promotion for three decades, starting with my diplomatic posting to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, Engl

Foreign Affairs committee  We'd love to go to the west and do targeted recruitment, but it's about getting the funding to do that. So we are very careful about trying to recruit more than we can handle. In other words, if we trigger 500 people from Calgary registering tomorrow, we have to screen them all.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, that's never happened. I've been doing international human rights for 25 years, and if I figure that it's not a credible mission out there, we're not going to act on it.

Foreign Affairs committee  I've got a whole bunch of board members behind me. Warren Allmand, for example, would jump all over me if I stepped outside the bounds of what was appropriate. No, we have never been in that situation.

Foreign Affairs committee  Exactly. It's having rosters of Congolese, rosters of Nigerians, helping them to create their own rosters that are merit-based, lean, and mean, and having those feeding into the UN.