Foreign Affairs committee  It could be the OECD. It could be a United Nations agency. There are any number of.... Canada could lead on it. Different countries could take the initiative in particular countries. Canada could do it in Mozambique and Britain could do it somewhere else. But this idea that we're all different and all unique and that our answer is best only confuses people.

Foreign Affairs committee  Part of the issue has to do with relationships. We talk about partnerships all the time, but what we have are not partnerships; they're contractual arrangements between people with money and people who don't have money. Often, these partnerships are not very solid, they're not very old, and they don't last very long.

Foreign Affairs committee  Development delayed is development denied.

Foreign Affairs committee  You shouldn't start a project if you don't have the accountability nailed down in advance. There shouldn't be cause after one or two years. Unless something is going seriously wrong, there shouldn't really be a need to hold up the project for accountability reasons. You should have sorted that out at the beginning.

Foreign Affairs committee  On the first one, accountability is not brain surgery, and it doesn't have to be. The basic ideas of accountability don't have to be reinvented. Accountability to Canadian donors, whether they're Canadian NGOs, CIDA, Foreign Affairs, or IDRC, shouldn't be vastly different from accountability to anybody else or to local governments.

Foreign Affairs committee  It is a big question for a short answer. People talk about how bad the situation is in many African countries 45 years after independence. I sometimes remind people that 85 years after independence in the United States they had one of the world's worst civil wars, genocidal wars against Indians, and slavery.

Foreign Affairs committee  I listened to a group of Sierra Leonean NGOs ten years ago talking about the problem they had in getting money. I talked first to a group of international NGOs who said the problem with the Sierra Leonean NGOs was that they lacked capacity and there were problems about accountability.

Foreign Affairs committee  The idea of results-based programming and focusing on outcomes rather than inputs and outputs came to the Government of Canada more widely I think in the early nineties. I think it came from the United States. It was one of the first initiatives of the Clinton administration in the United States: let's talk about what the impact is of our work, not the inputs; let's evaluate the results.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a very big question. Now that CIDA has created an Office for Democratic Governance, perhaps that is the place where lessons will be rolled up and learned and remembered, but in fact we already have an International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, and it is funded by Parliament.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm a bit of a contrarian on the idea of focus. We talked in the last couple of years about narrowing the geographical focus of what CIDA does. It's cut back to 25 countries, and I understand it is going to focus even more on 20. One of my concerns is that in the process of deciding which the 20 are going to be, we've cut off a lot of countries where there are real opportunities to do things.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for inviting me to be here today. I want to talk a little bit about democratic development and how it has evolved in Canada, how our thinking about the promotion of democratic development has evolved. I want to talk a little bit about what it is, why we promote it, and how we do it.