Foreign Affairs committee  May I add one thing? Although Canada has been generous in this area, we haven't sent that many police officers, given that CivPol is at 1,500. Right now, we have 100 police officers, we sent 25 extra for the elections, and the head of CivPol is a Canadian, but there are 1,400 or

Foreign Affairs committee  [Inaudible--Editor]

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the conditionality that was applied in 2000 was because of the senatorial elections. It was because there had been some electoral irregularities during those elections, and it was to kind of push Aristide to either hold new elections for these seven senatorial seats or to

Foreign Affairs committee  Are you saying there are only so many resources and that donors don't believe they should be going towards something like municipal elections?

Foreign Affairs committee  Is that the Haitian government's position?

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. My view is that donors only have so much funding that they've made available for this and that donors tend to prioritize big showy national elections. I see the point—the national election is essential—but if we really want to provide the kind of participation needed and bui

Foreign Affairs committee  I completely agree with a bottom-up approach, and I think it's interesting---and you might be aware of this fact--that in Haiti there are local elections for CASEC, and even though Canada promotes democracy and we are $30 million in there on federal elections, we are not really i

Foreign Affairs committee  I think there have been success stories in Haiti that have then not been supported--for example, the work of CECI in Quebec. They've done excellent work in the agricultural sector. In fact, they were awarded from the World Food Programme an award in the mid-1990s for their work o

Foreign Affairs committee  I would agree with that. I just want to reiterate what Francine Lalonde has said. In terms of what we've done, we did poorly in the past. CIDA applied what I would call strict conditionality to Haiti in 2000, trying to alter its good governance policies and so on, and its macroec

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you bring up an interesting point, which is what I call “the building civil society agenda”, which I'm very nervous about, because when we're building civil society, what we're actually doing is propping up certain social forces in countries, which then affects the politi

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, well--

Foreign Affairs committee  There was a study done in 1991 by Bob Maguire at Trinity College that showed that international donors--including Canada, the IDB, all the big donors--proportionately selected elite-driven NGOs for support over popular-based NGOs. This was a strategy after Aristide was first elec

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, 60,000 is a generous number; it's between 40,000 and 60,000. Out of 8.5 million people, that's not a huge chunk.

Foreign Affairs committee  The assumption that underlines your question is that this money trickles down. In other words, if this person is now making the fantastic sum of $2 a day, this will trickle down through the community to spark other development or increase the standard of living for folks.

Foreign Affairs committee  We found it doesn't seem to happen that way. In other words, the detrimental effects of this strategy and the fact that food prices more than doubled have actually hurt more people than the small number who are making that wage. In other words, the effects of the strategy at that