Foreign Affairs committee  What have we been doing? Probably the easier question is, what have we not been responding to? We respond to or focus on about a thousand mission openings a year, and for some of those missions, it's for four, five, or ten. We counted the Ukraine mission as one, although we had almost 500 individuals deployed on that one.

Foreign Affairs committee  That tends to be through an international window, so IFIs, or NDI, or the Parliamentary Centre here in Canada, or any one of the multitude of UN agencies, or the Commonwealth Secretariat. Those entities, working locally, would come to us and say they need a Canadian who is of Congolese descent and has recent knowledge of the Congo; that they're looking for someone who is a former MP; or that they're looking for this kind of an individual and there would be a real advantage if it was a woman because they have an underrepresentation of women; or whatever they want to set out as criteria.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, there are a lot of organizations similar to us. There was a certain niche that was not being filled. We've got a lot of implementing agents for doing things in the field. What we did not have was a roster. There was no national roster, and that remains our biggest value-added.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you're absolutely right, it would be extremely valuable for MPs to be part of the CANADEM roster, because among other things, the CANADEM roster is a networking tool and will be increasingly used for that. So whenever someone is looking for a particular kind of Canadian expertise—and it may be for a one-day effort or for a longer period—CANADEM is one vehicle for them to drill down into Canadian expertise and find that expert.

Foreign Affairs committee  We're what I would call a “quango”; we're a quasi-non-governmental organization. We don't have a constituency as you would have in an Amnesty International. That said, we're not part of government either. The fact that we're not part of government makes us valuable to government.

Foreign Affairs committee  This is actually a fairly standard construct, not only in Canada but internationally. For example, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees will quite often engage NGOs to run refugee camps. Almost all of CIDA's activities are carried out by implementing partners that are outside of government, outside of CIDA.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll clarify what CANADEM is and is not. We don't in fact run anything on the ground, per se. First and foremost, we are this roster of 8,000 people. A modest add-on is that we can get people out onto the ground. So we can take an individual, give him equipment and a weapon, and we'll deploy him down to Haiti.

Foreign Affairs committee  In response to your first question—continuity, and are we leaving too fast from mission areas?—obviously that's been a challenge from time immemorial. I suspect that's not going to disappear rapidly. There's a shortage of funds, and I think we'll constantly try to find ways around that.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me to be part of your process. I think democratic development, the issue you're looking at, is a critically important issue. As you said, I head CANADEM, which is Canada's civilian reserve. I'll try to keep my comments brief, because I agree that we'll probably get more out of the questioning.