Foreign Affairs committee  Briefly, we're trying to work those out. One document we've looked at in terms of consultation advice was actually a very effective guide produced by, of all things, the state government of New South Wales. It's a guide to effective amalgamations of public sector institutions. T

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm convinced it's going to move forward very smoothly. First of all, in terms of machinery of government changes, I've been a public servant my whole career and I've seen a number, including in the Department of Foreign Affairs. There's a lot of expertise on how to go about doin

Foreign Affairs committee  I guess that comes to me, since I've been a head of mission on two occasions, and the heads of mission are among the people we're consulting. The role of a head of mission is as always to integrate and coordinate all of the Canadian government's presence abroad and to provide se

Foreign Affairs committee  To be candid, I haven't looked at that. Vincent, have you? They have different structures from what we are putting forward.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'd be happy to answer that. In the conversations that we had in the countries I mentioned, we didn't get into looking back, which is exactly what they did at the immediate moment of transition. We were looking at how they made the integrated departments work. They were also cand

Foreign Affairs committee  None. In fact, in every case, as I said, if they made any changes, they were to increase coherence. I could parse them out separately, but they always found that they needed to go further than what they had done originally, once they had stood up the initial set-up.

Foreign Affairs committee  Maybe my colleague Mr. Rigby would like to add something, because I was the beneficiary of a lot of prior analysis and a trip that was organized by his group. His section of CIDA in particular takes a very close look at what other donors do, and all donors, including Canada, repo

Foreign Affairs committee  I was overseas at the time and read about it in the budget announcement. At that point I sent a private message to the deputy ministers indicating that I had some advice and some experience that was relevant to the project, which is why I'm in front of you today.

Foreign Affairs committee  What I can speak to is that the experience of other countries is highly relevant, so I took part in a visit to four other European donor countries, along with the two deputy ministers, the president of CIDA, and the deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, and had some fairly frank an