SHUR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

SOUS-COMITÉ DES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE ET DU DÉVELOPPEMENT INTERNATIONAL DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET DU COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, November 4, 1998

• 1537

[English]

The Chair (Ms. Colleen Beaumier (Brampton West—Mississauga, Lib.)): This is the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Development of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. I'm going to call the meeting to order now. We're going to proceed with a reduced quorum, because our witness, Mr. Jim Michel, chairman of the Development Assistance Committee, has to leave by 4:25 p.m.

Welcome. This is the first meeting we've had this session of Parliament, since the summer break, and we're delighted to have you here as our first guest. You've appeared before committee before, have you?

Mr. Jim Michel (Chairman, Development Assistance Committee, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development): Yes, I have, Madam Chair.

The Chair: Okay, so then you know the routine. If you'd like to start with your presentation now, we'd be glad to hear it.

Mr. Jim Michel: Thank you, Madam Chair and distinguished members of the committee. I'm very pleased to be back here in Ottawa and have this opportunity for dialogue with you.

I'd like, if I might, to give you a little bit of a progress report. When I was here two years ago, I talked about the report that had been compiled by the ministers and agency heads who make up the membership of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. The document is called Shaping the 21st Century, and I have a couple of copies, if anybody doesn't have one.

That report sets out an effort to respond to a changing global situation in which the rationale for international cooperation for development has moved away from the security paradigm of the Cold War into one of shared interests in a global economy and a global community that is confronted by a lot of common problems. There's also a recognition that there's not only a moral imperative in trying to bring more equilibrium into this world, in which a few have a lot and many have very little, but also there are practical reasons for wanting to advance the basis of shared interests that can allow us to work together to address the challenges and opportunities that will confront this world in the coming new millennium.

• 1540

The heads of agencies and development ministers drew upon a lot of work that had been done before, in particular in the major summits and conferences organized by the United Nations during the 1990s, and they came up with this report in 1996.

The framework of this partnership strategy—inspired to some extent by a Canadian effort with Mr. Pearson's commission in 1969, which talked about partnership—is to try to project a shared vision of development, defined by selecting some of the measurable goals that came out of that series of United Nations conferences. Those relate to economic, social, and environmental conditions within a framework of stable and safe societies governed by a rule of law with respect for human rights.

The economic dimension is represented by the goal of reducing the percentage of people living in extreme poverty by one-half by the year 2015, building on the aspiration of the Copenhagen Social Summit.

The social dimension is represented by some goals that come out of Copenhagen, Cairo, and the women's conference in Beijing. These are: universal primary education gender equality, evidenced by eliminating the disparity in school enrolment between boys and girls; dramatic improvements in infant, child, and maternal mortality; and universal access to reproductive health services, including family planning. Again, we're talking about the goal of 2015—roughly 20 years from the time of the report.

Environmental progress is represented by the goal of having in place and implementing national strategies for sustainable development, with a reversal of trends in the loss of environmental resources evident by 2015, so that you not only have the plan, but you have something to show for it.

How do you move forward on those goals? The idea there is partnership. Partnership means you don't look to the outside parties—the rich countries and multilateral organizations—to come up with the answers. You say countries are going to develop because of their own efforts from within. It's going to be their ability to take the initiative and formulate the policies that will generate the resources and strengthen their human resources and their institutional capacities to participate in this global economy.

What you can do from outside is support those efforts, but that support should be coordinated. It should be consistent and not have conflicting policies, especially within the same government, where maybe you do one thing on the trade side, another thing on the fisheries side, and something else on the aid side, and they cancel each other out. We should be consistent, we should provide adequate resources, and we should provide coordinated support for those local efforts to strengthen capacity for self-reliance.

That's the bargain: to work in a way in which the government and civil society really have primary responsibility for the direction in which they want to go. If they want the cooperation, they have to demonstrate that this is a shared interest and there are shared goals. Then there has to be discussion about who makes what contribution toward those shared goals. So it takes the nature of a partnership agreement, or a compact.

Over the last two years, we have had a lot of discussion about this approach, and we're gratified to see the extent to which it has attained momentum in the international community. It's been endorsed by the G-8, most recently by the Birmingham Summit. It was just followed in a major meeting held in Tokyo on African development, in which 80 countries and 40 international organizations came together.

• 1545

It is being implemented and put into the practices of the members of the Development Assistance Committee. We review their performance, as we've reviewed Canada's performance, on a regular, recurrent basis. And it is being put into place now in the programs of the United Nations and the World Bank.

So there's a lot of momentum for this idea of a more mature way of doing business with developing countries. It has a greater prospect of achieving these measurable results that the goals are intended to set out.

We've had good dialogue with developing countries. We see that there's a need for a lot of emphasis now on about four things.

One is to come up with a better way of addressing poverty. We in the Development Assistance Committee are not experts on child mortality. We can't do what UNICEF can do, and there's no point in our trying to do what they can do better. But we think we can, and we've been asked by our members to help them, identify more effective ways to address poverty strategies and to achieve this tough objective of reducing poverty by one-half by 2015.

We need to be able to measure progress toward these goals, so one of the things we've done is come up with a limited number of indicators, based on the use of existing data. We've done a lot of consulting with the developing countries and international organizations so that there's a common understanding on some useful ways to measure that progress. I've distributed a page that describes what those indicators are.

I'll just give one example. If you're looking at education, you want to see improved education and improved enrolment, but you don't want to see improved enrolment if it means kids get in school and then drop out or repeat the same grade over and over again. So you want to look at three things: you want to look at enrolment; you want to look at attainment—do they complete four grades?—and you want to look at what they've learned after they've completed those four grades—is there literacy in the population that has just been through their school years? So we're looking at those three factors to make a judgment as to whether education is improving.

The second area where we're going to have to work beyond trying to accelerate progress on the goals is to try to get this partnership way of doing business into practice in a more systematic way. A dozen or more pilot efforts are going on under the auspices of various donors, such as the World Bank, the UN, and the European Union. We need to get beyond the pilot stage and make this a way to do business, rather than competing or project-oriented or donor-driven ways of carrying on aid, which are still all too common in practice.

A third area we have to work at is coming up with more intelligent ways to deal with the complex issues of finance in a world in which development assistance is an increasingly small percentage of the total of global finance. Private flows far outweigh the official flows, but they only go to certain countries for certain things. How do you use the official flows in catalytic ways that contribute to the ability of countries to generate their own resources and to make their countries attractive for private investment? And how do you deal with other finance issues, such as debt? The finance agenda is an important one, because lack of finance is an important impediment for development.

Finally, there's the coherence agenda. We are working with the member countries in OECD to look at how policies on environment, trade, investment, and development relate to one another. The ministers of the OECD last year gave us a mandate in the organization to come up with ways in which we can advance coherence and bring these polices together to make this partnership strategy more effective in contributing to the mutually desired results.

We've made a lot of progress, and there's a lot of work to be done. In the next high-level meeting, we'll be reporting to the ministers on where we are and where we hope to be, but we are on our way toward a new paradigm in development cooperation that has a lot of promise and a lot of momentum behind it.

• 1550

The review of Canada's program that we did in January looks at Canada in the context of that new paradigm and that partnership strategy. I would say generally that Canada's objectives track very closely with the objectives that were drawn out in this study, and Canada's effort to work in a partnership mode with others, both on the donor side and in the developing countries, is very much in line with this strategy.

I want to close by also mentioning that Canada's very extensive and active program looking at issues of governance, participation, rule of law in human rights, civil-military relations, and constraints on unproductive military expenditures is contributing a great deal to the collective common effort to make this partnership approach in practice live up to the potential it has in theory.

Madam Chair, I'll close at that point. I hope this is of value to the committee in monitoring how this Canadian program fits into the broader international effort. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you. I'm sure we have lots of questions here. It's a very interesting area.

Madame Debien.

[Translation]

Mrs. Maud Debien (Laval East, BQ): Good afternoon, Mr. Michel. Welcome to our subcommittee.

You concluded your presentation by saying that Canada' objectives track very closely with the Development Assistance Committee's cooperation and development objectives. That's one of the very last things you said.

However, in 1998, in your Development Cooperation Review of Canada, you cast a rather critical eye on Canada's official development assistance policy. Among other things, you note the following on page 1 of your review:

Reductions in ODA, combined with the growing range of goals, brings into sharper focus, for example, the issue of the wide dispersion of Canadian aid efforts. It is already clear that ODA budget cuts have reduced programming in many partner countries to levels at which past activities can no longer be continued and previous leadership roles have to be relinquished.

You are quite critical of the fairly drastic cuts to ODA. I would be interested in hearing more of your views on the subject.

My second question concerns the Development Assistance Committee's objectives which correspond to CIDA programs, among others, in the area of education. You stated twice in your presentation that one of the objectives to be achieved, and this would seem to be the primary objective of the DAC and of CIDA's ODA policies, was the eradication of poverty. In the reports which you presented to us when you were last here, you emphasized that education was the key to eradicating poverty in the poorest countries.

• 1555

As everyone knows, CIDA's educational programs are very limited. What surprises me about Canada's foreign policy is that considerable emphasis is placed on information and knowledge-based technologies. Clearly, there are some commercial objectives at stake here.

Canadian information and communications technology is quite advanced and our country would like to sell that technology. That's not bad in and of itself, but I don't think we're doing much to provide basic educational resources to developing countries, that is primary and secondary level education. Often, people in these countries can't read or write, and all the while, we're emphasizing the sale of information technologies. CIDA's official development assistance policy is contradictory in many respects and I would be interested in hearing your views on this as well.

[English]

Mr. Jim Michel: Thank you.

I'm really glad you asked about the cuts in the budget. I said Canada is very consistent with the philosophy and the approach of partnership, and that's true. A risk to this whole partnership approach is that not just Canada but other countries as well—and I would say the large donors perhaps more than the small ones—have been reducing the size of their budgets, so official development assistance overall on the part of DAC members has declined by more than 20% since 1992.

If we're going to developing countries and saying to them, “We want to work with you as partners, we want you to take on more responsibility, and we want to support your efforts, with you at the centre; and by the way, we're cutting our budget”, their response will be, “Ah, then we understand what partnership is really all about.” Then we undermine the potential of this otherwise very powerful, very promising approach to development cooperation.

So we did express concern about aid cuts in Canada, as we have expressed concern about aid cuts in other countries, and we'll continue to do so. I hope Canada will be among those who are starting to turn around that trend that we've had in the last few years. Several members of the committee have been able, as their own economies have regained health, to restore increases in levels of funding that had been drastically cut over the last five or six years.

As for where those funds go in terms of poverty reduction and education, I'm going to consult with Ms. Mains along the way. I don't have in my head statistics for Canada with respect to education, but I know there has been some discussion with CIDA about the statistics, how they are kept, and how they are reported. CIDA thinks there may be a better story than the statistics show. We have that matter under discussion.

I would say that the emphasis on information technology, including the hosting of the Global Knowledge for Development Conference in 1997 in Toronto, is a very positive thing for development cooperation.

I'll give you one example. Ethiopia, a very poor country, worked with Canada, the secretariat in OECD, the UN, the United States, and a couple of other donors in trying to come up with a system in which they could track what is going on in their country with respect to development efforts. This provides a tool of enormous benefit for a developing country trying to deal with advanced countries that have all this information technology.

• 1600

So Canada's lead role in information technology can be an appropriate benefit to some very poor countries.

That's not an alternative to investing in primary education. These goals we've set out are for primary and secondary education. I'm not saying we should provide information technology and forget about education, but the two go together. Certainly an education that includes computer literacy and an ability to use information technology is going to be much more relevant for the kind of knowledge-based economy that we're going to be seeing in the coming century. There certainly is a role for that within the context of support for primary and secondary education.

I couldn't agree more with your point that an emphasis on primary education—and I might say, within that, an emphasis on education for girls that brings equality of opportunity to half the population—is very basic. Test after test and study after study shows this is a central factor in development, and more equal development, which in turn contributes to faster growth of economies.

So I agree that an emphasis on education is right. As I say, there is some uncertainty between us and CIDA about how much Canada is really emphasizing that. I know that in the reports they send to us, they say, and the 1997 report says, that poverty reduction is a basic objective of Canada's policy and that basic human needs constitute the basic element within that. But beyond that, as to the details, I can't say what the budget is for education or primary education within that.

I don't know if Ms. Mains has any information that is readily available.

[Translation]

Ms. Cathy Mains (Senior Policy Analyst, Strategic Planning Branch, Policy Directorate, Canadian International Development Agency): Unfortunately, I don't have those statistics with me. However, I will get them to you.

Mrs. Maud Debien: Don't worry about it.

I have here a table drawn up by the Canadian Centre for International Studies and Cooperation which shows that CIDA programs contribute very little to basic education. These are, of course, the centre's figures. I don't have CIDA's figures.

Could I ask you one more brief question on the same subject?

[English]

The Chair: Could we come back after Mrs. Finestone?

Mrs. Maud Debien: Oh, okay. Thank you.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone (Mount Royal, Lib.): I find this quite fascinating. This wasn't going to be my question, but Madame Debien's question begs a clarification.

I don't know what you qualify as primary education, but it would seem to me, when I go to see a CIDA project in New Delhi, Peru, or Chile—and I have seen CIDA projects in about 26 countries now— This is not to say that I think everything CIDA does is in that direction, or always in the direction I would have chosen, but anyway—

Where you are giving a commercial cooking stove so that they can make products that are saleable to the local hotels, and they have trained the women to do the cooking, to calculate their price and their cost, and to do the marketing and the distribution—and they use their children for the distribution mechanism—for me, that's a very good basic education program. It does a number of things, and I don't think you qualify that.

Mr. Jim Michel: No.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: I'm not sure I would agree with that.

Secondly, where we would send videotapes and programs produced by Radio-Canada, TVA, TV Ontario, Télé-Québec, or Radio-Québec—and we do this in an international arena—those are all part and parcel of what I consider to be the growth of a democratic vision of society and an educational format.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: So I understand education, but I see education in a very broad brush. You have defined it in a very narrow sense—not that I disagree that it's necessary, certainly for girls.

• 1605

Mr. Jim Michel: Let me respond to that, if I may. There are two parts to this. One is, what is education? The other is, what is primary education?

We've been asked by our members and by consortia of NGOs and a variety of other organizations around the world to try to distinguish. So in our reporting of statistics, we look beyond education.

Another thing that is education is providing these classes in capitals, attended by middle-class kids. Is that the same as putting money into rural one-room schoolhouses for children who otherwise would be doomed to a life of illiteracy?

So we have two categories. We have education, which is the broad category and includes the things you say. It's not that these are bad things; it's just that they are not the same as—

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: I was a little concerned when you criticized Canada. That was what I wanted to say.

Mr. Jim Michel: Oh, okay.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Not that I think we're perfect.

Mr. Jim Michel: Okay. But what we do have is this distinction. We collect statistical reporting on education, and second, within that, we ask for an indication of what part of that is traditional primary schoolhouse education, grades 1 to 4.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Would you consider the building of schools part of the qualification for primary education?

Mr. Jim Michel: Sure.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Because they also do build schools in Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Mr. Jim Michel: Sure, yes.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Okay.

My second question is this. When you talk about the issue of official flows of dollars into financial and development assistance—and I'll come to the question of debt in a moment, but on the official flows—could you indicate what is the financial commitment and support by the United States, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Japan? I don't ask you to do it right this minute, but would you send us a list of these countries and how they participate financially?

I'd be very anxious to know in particular, though, if you do know it off the top of your head, about the question of the support given by the United States to the OECD projects and these programs.

Mr. Jim Michel: You say “OECD projects”.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Well, whatever you want to call the focus you now have through OECD, which is the partnership project, to address in particular alleviation of poverty and self-development.

Mr. Jim Michel: Okay. That is a policy that countries have come together and agreed on. OECD is not a programmatic organization. We don't have projects or programs that are managed by OECD. Rather we look at what the members are doing, and we have a policy coordination forum in which members come together and try to pursue the common effort in a more efficient and effective way. This includes periodic reviews by peers of how they are doing, as in the case of the Canadian report.

As a matter of fact, I can leave with you the mid-term press release for mid-1997, which shows the levels of support that are provided by all of the DAC members. It's in the Canada report for 1996, but I can give it to you for 1997.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: I'd appreciate that very much.

Mr. Jim Michel: It shows the breakdown of official flows for all of the DAC members by the amount, by comparison with the year before, and by what percentage of their GNP it constitutes. That might be the most useful response. As well, there's an estimate of private flows that are going to developing countries.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Thank you.

I attended the ASEAN conference, which addressed itself to the issue of debt and the crisis they were undergoing. The bottom line was that they want to be able to take care of themselves, they want to control their own destiny, and they certainly want to become a more affluent and productive nation and see to the improvement of their society.

• 1610

Their biggest complaint was the International Monetary Fund and the mechanisms put in place by the IMF to enable them to repay their debts, which in the end became crippling and caused more dislocation and more poverty than they felt they would have had had they been able to restructure their debt repayment in a different way.

Does that become part of your examination when you look at the area of partnership and sharing goals and moving forward so that there is a sense that they're going to have some control over their destiny and find some of the mechanisms for self-reliance and the capacity to grow?

Mr. Jim Michel: This is an area where I indicated we are looking in our work program for principal fields: the goals, putting the partnerships to practice, finance, and coherence. This falls very squarely within the issue of development finance, where we do have to look at debt, at private flows, and at official flows.

We do not review, I might add, the programs or policies of the IMF. The IMF is an observer in the DAC, but our members want to deal with their policies toward the IMF in the Board of Governors of the IMF, and Canada and others are represented in that forum. So we're not in a position to evaluate or review, as we do our members' programs, the programs of the IMF. That's not a task that the Development Assistance Committee could easily take on.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: But do they integrate? The world has become such a global village that an interrelationship and a partnership is taking place—which, by the way, would include civil societies and NGOs as well.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: It would seem to me that you need the cross-fertilization of ideas and results to be able to evaluate whether progress is being made.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes, and in the study of development finance, which is programmed to take place over the next two years—and it's fitting into a broader effort undertaken by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, which is planning a major high-level meeting in 2001 on this subject—the Development Assistance Committee is looking at financing scenarios. The DAC is engaging with the multilateral organizations—not just the IMF, but the IMF, World Bank, and United Nations agencies—in looking at how development finance might better contribute to the achievement of development goals and how these issues could be better addressed than they are at present.

So that's a subject for study. I just meant to distinguish that from the procedure of doing periodic reviews of members. We don't do periodic reviews of the multilateral organizations. That's all I meant to say about that.

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: Then how do you develop your baseline to then be able to move it forward to see what the progress has been?

If you go, for example, to Kuala Lumpur, as we did, you will see that they have literally wiped clean the bamboo trees and planted oil palms. They are magnificent to look at; the city is a gorgeous, green city. But in the meantime, it has destroyed the natural habitat. They have given precedence to the development of oil, and what would happen if the oil market fell flat on its face? I wonder. That's the choice they make.

[Translation]

I'm sorry, Maud. I can say it in French if you like, but—

[English]

That's the choice they have made in Kuala Lumpur, for economic development and growth, amongst other things of course. It was quite fascinating to see that and the magnificent buildings, etc.

I don't know how you develop your baseline and put into that evaluative procedure what may be destructive of environmental development and environmental safety. What might have been destructive because textiles were good in another country— With the dyeing of the products, they're polluting the water, and you see discoloured water in the river system.

• 1615

I don't understand whither your baseline comes or where and how you measure it against poverty, safety and clean living, and the health spectrum of the citizenship. I'm sorry; I know I'm new, but I don't understand how you do this evaluation. I'm sure you have a way, but how do you do it? How do you get yourself a baseline from which to evolve a better portrait to know if you've removed poverty, described by—what?—the amount of food, the weight of the babies, the health of the mothers, the educational content, the job creation? What do you do?

Mr. Jim Michel: Well, we have a more humble approach. Malaysia has made its own decisions about what it was going to do—

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: As you said they should.

Mr. Jim Michel: —in structuring whether it was going to have bamboo trees or oil palm trees. No donor told them what to do about that, I don't think. That's their own decision.

But what we have done—and I think I mentioned this—is, in selecting some of the hundreds and hundreds of goals that have come out of the UN conferences, we've picked a few as representative of progress, recognizing that countries don't all start at the same point. They don't have a common baseline. Mali is not in the same place as Malaysia. But recognizing that countries have to set their own goals and aspirations, it's within this framework of poverty, social progress, environmental sustainability, and participation in governance.

So what we have done, in cooperation with a lot of developing countries, the UN agencies, and the World Bank, is come up with a working set of indicators. All this is statistical. We're not making judgments about whether the dyeing is good or bad or whether the economic benefits in the short term outweigh the environmental damage in the long term. Rather we're asking, what do you measure to see if poverty is being reduced?

We look at four things. We look at how many people in the country—what population—lives in extreme poverty, on an income below $1 a day.

Then we look at the poverty gap: How deep is that poverty? Are they living on 99¢ a day or are they living on 10¢ a day?

Then we look at inequality within the society. If you look at the 20% of the population that is the poorest, what share of the national wealth do they have? It's not going to be 20%; it's going to be some very tiny fraction of that.

Then we look at a non-monetary indicator in order to have another way of looking at it, looking through a somewhat different lens. We picked child malnutrition and the prevalence of underweight children under five years of age, so we're looking at it from a non-monetary standpoint.

This is tracked year after year. A web site has been set up, and you can look at this in charts or diagrams. We have a pentagon, and we ask, on this axis or this axis or this axis, how is this country doing? How does that compare to some other country? How does this quintile of poorest countries that is furthest from the goals compare to the quintile that is closest to the goals? Are they lagging in education, health, or environment? You can track that year to year.

As we approach 2015 and as the policy dialogue goes on between the external partners and the governments and civil society in these countries, you get a sense of where the greatest needs are and what is being done about them—what the policy response is. And through the statistics on things such as primary education, you can check where the investment is going, what investment is being made, and whether those investments are relevant to those goals.

So it is more of a statistical process of measurement and transparency, because it is up on the net and anybody can see it. That's the approach.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Bonwick.

• 1620

Mrs. Sheila Finestone: I just want to say thank you. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. Thank you.

Mr. Paul Bonwick (Simcoe—Grey, Lib.): Yes, thank you very much for your presentation. I'm sorry if I missed a few things right at the start.

I just want to tag onto Mrs. Finestone's comments. When you're providing the information she requested on the various countries she mentioned, can you provide it to us not only in dollars and cents but as well in percentage of GDP?

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes. I have that here, and I'll leave that with the committee staff, if I may.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: This question has three parts to it.

You've touched on the policy portion of our foreign aid—and again, if it's in here, I apologize—but in your opinion, is the money being put to good use? Is it effective use of Canadian taxpayers' money, or could you provide examples of areas where it's perhaps not of good use? Could you provide examples of areas where it is of good use, and then we could encourage and foster future investment in those areas?

And do you have suggestions that you haven't outlined as to where we could be of more benefit? The obvious one is increasing the allocations or the dollars.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: But perhaps, as our cabinet ministers and our Prime Minister—our heads of state—are visiting other countries or are involved in bilateral or multilateral agreements on trade or investment, they could also, as part of their agenda, have four aims. I just wrote down a couple of comments here. The fourth is to encourage and have open discussion and dialogue on raising that ceiling from 0.22% to 0.3%. I would assume that if all of a sudden, as a percentage of world GDP, it went from 0.22% to 0.3%, you would be dealing with billions of dollars in increased revenue.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: And lastly, in the presentations you've made in writing, I've seen a lot of percentages cited. For example, pre-1990 we were at 0.45%, in 1996 we were at 0.33% or 0.34%, and it's forecasted that by 1999 we might be below 0.3%.

Mr. Jim Michel: Yes.

A voice: What's that, the ODA money?

Mr. Paul Bonwick: Yes.

A voice: Okay.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: I'm just wondering how that equates to dollars and cents as well. Are there actual drops in the physical dollars we're spending, or are they just percentage drops, according to the fact that our GDP has grown substantially in the last five years?

Thank you.

Mr. Jim Michel: On good and bad use, my memory doesn't bring out anything that we found egregiously bad, where we could say Canada was being bad.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: I'm sorry; I'm not saying Canada was being bad. I'm saying it wasn't good use of Canadian taxpayers' money. I'm not trying to cast a shadow on foreign policy.

[Translation]

Mrs. Maud Debien: Could I pass some information along to Mr. Bonwick?

The Development Assistance Committee has released its Development Cooperation Review of Canada. I have here a copy of the document entitled "Summary and Conclusions" . It paints a fairly accurate picture of what the DAC is asking of Canada and is critical of certain programs, particularly those run by CIDA. Its criticism is not directed toward the Canadian government per se, but rather toward CIDA's programs which for a number of years, have been ineffective.

• 1625

If you have this document—

[English]

The Chair: I think that was Mr. Bonwick's point as well.

Mr. Jim Michel: That's the first chapter of this blue book.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: We were just provided that today, but I'm asking you to outline it. I thank Madame Debien for her intervention there, but could we go back to my questions? I haven't had a chance to review the matter Madame Debien just suggested. Anyway, going back to the questions—

Mr. Jim Michel: Okay, let me say that the principal concerns we had were with respect to what could be done to improve. We were concerned, as we discussed earlier, with the direction in the budget and with the decline in resources. We expressed concern about a particular aspect of that, or maybe two.

One is the question of how many country programs and how many activities you can manage with a declining budget and a declining personnel base, and is it all as well managed and effective as it could be if you had either more resources to put into that variety of activities or a more concentrated effort with fewer activities? That's one question that was posed and discussed. We're not the judges of the universe here, but these are policy issues that are discussed in the committee.

Related to that is this. At a time when we're looking at partnership as the paradigm, the model, the way to do business—which puts more of a premium on coordination with what others are doing and more of a premium on policy dialogue that tries to strengthen capacity of the developing country, its institutions, and its civil society—that means it's important to have an adequate field presence with the delegated authority and the skills to carry on that policy dialogue. Because of budget reductions, Canada has been forced to withdraw people from the field and bring them back and operate on a more centralized basis, which is more economical. It's not an irrational decision, but it is one that detracts from the effectiveness of Canada's ability to operate in that partnership mode.

As to the percentages versus the dollars, this is a bit more complicated, and we don't try to deal with it in the short report, but every year we publish an annual report, and we do publish for Canada something that shows the levels of assistance that were provided. I can tell you that, for example, net disbursements of official development assistance—and I'll just read these numbers off, if I may—were $2.4 billion in 1993, $2.25 billion in 1994, $2.067 billion in 1995, and $1.8 billion in 1996. So in absolute terms, it was going down.

As a percentage of GNP, in 1993 it was 0.45%, the following year 0.43%, the following year 0.38%, and the following year 0.32%. So it was going down in both.

In 1997 there was some recovery, because of paying two years' arrears to IDA and the World Bank, but that's a one-year statistical blip.

The Chair: Mr. Bonwick, you weren't here when we began. We would love to have Mr. Michel continue, but Ms. Mains is looking pretty panicky there.

Mr. Jim Michel: Oh.

The Chair: You have to get out of here.

Mr. Jim Michel: I have a plane.

The Chair: Yes, he has to leave for a flight.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: I can follow through with questions afterwards too.

Mr. Jim Michel: Please.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: I certainly appreciate that you could take this much time.

The Chair: Yes, we appreciate your being here.

Mr. Jim Michel: I could leave this annual report, with the caution that there will be a new one in February. But if this is of interest to the committee, I could certainly leave this copy here.

The Chair: Yes, please.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: Absolutely. The clerk could compare it to the next report that's coming out as well, for the benefit of the whole committee.

• 1630

Mr. Jim Michel: Great.

The Chair: We certainly appreciate the time you spent. As you can see, we could keep you here for a couple of more hours.

Mr. Paul Bonwick: Or days.

The Chair: However, you do have a plane to meet. Thank you very much.

Mr. Jim Michel: Madam Chair, I'm delighted at the interest. I hope there will be future occasions when I or my successor might have the opportunity for further dialogue with this committee. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.