Foreign Affairs committee  Just to echo that, it's not just NGOs that need that certainty and stability. If you are recruiting teachers, you need to be able to pay them in three, four, five years' time. That's why you keep a very close eye on what's happening on the commitment side of the ledger. Also, this issue about remittances is a really important one, because it draws attention to potential other sources of financing.

Foreign Affairs committee  Those numbers would be captured on a different basis, as remittances, which we don't capture here. But you're right, and I'm not disagreeing with your central point. Indeed, if you look at flows of remittance income across borders, it heavily outstrips what happens through official development assistance.

Foreign Affairs committee  Again, it's a mixed picture. If you go to the most recent OECD development assistance committee review of G-7 countries, it does cite a number of countries that are falling short of their Gleneagles commitments. Those are 2005 commitments. Canada isn't one of those countries, but Germany, France, and Japan are all cited as falling some way short of commitments in terms of program data in the pipeline now.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a really good point. The Haiti example really demonstrates that in the extraordinary outpouring of generosity you've had in Canada and other countries across the world in response to that crisis. Unfortunately, the limitation of this data is that it captures what is officially reported to the OECD as development assistance by OECD countries.

Foreign Affairs committee  It's a mixed picture. I'm not going to get into the business of drawing up a G8 lead table of who is doing the most, who is second, third, fourth, and so on, but there are clearly some leaders within the G8 on this, and I would put Canada and the U.K. as being part of that broad leadership group that has consistently attempted to keep this at the centre of the agenda or tried to mobilize resources consistent with the goals, and so on.

Foreign Affairs committee  I can't claim to be an expert on Afghanistan, but one of the cases we look at in this year's report is Canadian aid to education in Afghanistan. Of course, it's one of the most difficult environments in the world to try to do long-term development work. In fact, it's probably the most difficult environment in the world at the moment to try to do long-term development work.

Foreign Affairs committee  One of my colleagues is here from the Global Campaign, and she'd be much better placed to answer that.

Foreign Affairs committee  I completely agree with you. In the way I think of this, it isn't a form of charity. This is an investment in future prosperity and the achievement of the wider goals that have been set by Canada within the international community. Now is absolutely not the time to be scaling down on those commitments.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for feeding me the lines. I do appreciate it. If you had to summarize the great drivers of the progress of nations across history and you had to pick the one that had made the most fundamental difference across time, if you summarized it in a single word, the word would be “education”.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think those remarks and the points you raise are exactly the rights ones. I think Canada, going back to the period since the Gleneagles agreement was made to double aid to sub-Saharan Africa, actually has had a very proud record since then. There have been big expansions to the aid budget.

Foreign Affairs committee  They're both very good points. We estimate that the total shortage of teachers for sub-Saharan Africa in relation to those goals is around 1.2 million. Of course as a government, hiring a teacher is not a one-off annual commitment. It's a central part of the recurrent budget. But that's also why governments need to make the long-term revenue-raising commitments to finance those investments and why donors themselves have to do far more as well.

Foreign Affairs committee  That is the figure for commitments. These are forward-looking commitments.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. That graph is recording commitments that were made in the relevant years, so 2008 is the latest data that we have.

Foreign Affairs committee  To the best of my knowledge, no, unless there are internal CIDA reports that do that. In our report, because it's global, we take the latest data that's available for a comparison across countries. In this case it's 2008.

Foreign Affairs committee  You know, I haven't personally discussed this with CIDA. I have a meeting with them this afternoon. I should say that one of the issues with commitments and aid flows is that they're very sensitive to lumpy investments and commitments to individual countries. One of the things that I want to understand from my discussions with CIDA is why the profile looks like it does.