FAAE Committee Report

At this point in time, there is a need for more effort and there is also need for new thinking and approaches in democracy promotion.

Vidar Helgesen, Secretary-General, International IDEA[258]

In Parts I and II of the report, the Committee has tackled a range of conceptual and comparative issues in democracy support, as well as looking at the evolution of Canadian involvement in assisting democratic development and the assets that Canada can bring to this complicated field. We have argued that much more needs to be done to generate practical knowledge of what constitutes effective democracy assistance — ideally knowledge that is shared among donors and applied to practices that are better coordinated — as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of sums that are already being spent for this purpose.

The Committee also believes that Canada can and should be doing more to promote democratic development. In this part of the report, we therefore turn our attention to the questions of substantially upgrading both Canada’s political commitment to democracy support and the financial resources which Canada devotes to democracy assistance activities in other countries, bilaterally and through multilateral channels. To that end, we propose at the government level the establishment of a comprehensive and coherent policy framework on Canadian support for democratic development as a Canadian international policy priority. We further propose the establishment of a major new arms-length Canada foundation for expanded international democratic development initiatives as a key recommendation of the report. We also address new Canadian actions in important sectors — including that of political party development — and in the different and difficult contexts for democracy support that challenge the resolve of all who are committed to advancing the cause of democratic development on a global basis.