[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Thursday, April 18, 1996
.0854 
[English]
The Chairman: Order. Before I introduce the minister, I'd like to speak briefly to the purpose of today's hearings.
The background is that while we were doing the estimates, probably two years ago, and we were looking at CIDA and trying to understand the role of development assistance and what we could do as politicians in better understanding that role, I spoke to Betty Plewes, who's the chairperson of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation. She felt that it would be a good idea if we could explore as a committee, with the NGO community in Canada, a better way of understanding the parliamentary-NGO relationship.
.0855
Many members of this committee will recall that when we travelled to Washington to consider the international financial institutions, we were informed at the World Bank, for example, that there are some 4,000 NGOs directly interested in the work of the World Bank.
When we travelled across this country doing the foreign policy review, we were impressed by the number in the NGO community and with Canadians who were interested in foreign policy and development assistance and what we are trying to do in Parliament with respect to those issues.
So that is the purpose of today. We will find out what we have achieved at the end of the day. The purpose of today is to explore together how we can do our work better as Canadians in understanding a much more complicated, integrated world.
Thank you very much. I want to thank all the members of the NGO community who have come to share their experiences with us today.
[Translation]
Our first witness today is the Minister, Mr. Pettigrew, who informed me this morning that he had appeared before this committee with Mrs. Stein two years ago, but in another capacity.
Several people who were on the committee then are still members today and you will no doubt find yourself in familiar surroundings. We welcome you. Congratulations on your election and on your appointment to Cabinet. Please proceed.
The Honourable Pierre Pettigrew (Minister for International Cooperation and Minister responsible for Francophonie): Thank you very much for your hospitality and for your warm welcome.
Two years ago to the day, I appeared before this committee as co-chairman of the first national forum on foreign policy organized by the Chrétien government. The objective was to involve as many Canadians as possible in the exercise of defining our foreign policy.
A broad consultation process took place and I was very pleased that the government had asked me, at a time when I was working in the private sector, to co-chair this forum. I didn't know that two years later, I would be the Minister of International Cooperation in this very same government.
[English]
I want to thank you very much. It is with great pleasure and honour that I accepted your kind invitation to join you today. I had been looking forward to this. This is, as you know, my first official meeting as Minister for International Cooperation with the members of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
I do want to congratulate you warmly, the standing committee and the CCIC, for this initiative. Its outcome can only help broaden the base of public support for Canada's involvement in international cooperation.
[Translation]
This reflects the extent to which you play a vital role in the operation of government. You take the time to reflect upon the major decisions that we in government must make in the course of our work.
Having co-chaired the first forum on foreign policy and taken part in the second, I realize how important the foundations on which policies are formulated really are. I intend to work very closely with you in the coming months.
[English]
Although my agenda will not allow me to attend your panels, I assure you that I will pay close attention to your findings. I too am concerned by the generally low level of public knowledge about Canada's contribution to the international community. I certainly want to do whatever I can to help improve this unfortunate situation. As Stephen Leacock once said, ``I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it''.
[Translation]
I won't deny that I seen an urgent need for Canadians to be made more aware of the importance of international cooperation.
The rapid pace of change on the international scene could play some unfortunate tricks on us if we are caught unawares.
.0900
Now more than ever, it is important for us to maintain our presence within international institutions and major multilateral agencies. This presence is, in my view, fundamentally important as it provides us with a unique vantage point, one which benefits Canadians as well as the developing countries that we assist. This presence must, therefore, be maintained.
To this end, we will have to work harder to explain to Canadians the benefits that our presence provides. This will be the focus of today's discussions. In the process, we are respecting the government's commitment as reflected in its foreign policy statement which you know well and which highlights the importance it attaches to transparency, partnership and the participation of Canadians.
Having devoted the better part of my adult life to examining international issues, I have seen for myself the fruit of our labours. If it is true that people are judged by what they do, Canadians have every reason to be extremely proud of their country. Unfortunately, because of internal squabbles tearing Canada apart for the past 30 years, we have paid more attention to issues that divide us rather than to those that unite us. I agreed to jump into the political arena in the hopes of putting an end to this situation.
At the risk of sounding like an idealist, I would like to see Canadians adopt a new attitude toward their country. I believe that if we emphasize the contribution that Canada has made to international assistance worldwide, we will help Canadians become aware of the ties that bind them. The solidarity that our country has shown toward countries of the South is unique in the world.
What sets our policy apart from all other aid policies is the fact that Canada is not driven by a desire to become more powerful. Our objective is to answer to the needs of developing countries. The solidarity that we project as a government and that Canadians project around the world flows from the solidarity that we feel as Canadians within the Canadian federation. It is this national solidarity that we project to the world and that is what gives us our extraordinary, unique character.
[English]
Canada's aid program reflects the values, respect, generosity, and tolerance shared by all Canadians, Quebeckers and other Canadians alike. These are the values we want to help Canadians rediscover. It is the same generosity among Canadians that will help us to keep this great country together and allow us to face together the threats and opportunities of today's world.
[Translation]
In my view, one way of achieving this goal is to underscore the tremendous contribution Canada has made in the field of international development and the high esteem in which our country is held by the international community. I know that Canadians have a reputation of not blowing their own horns, but I think that we have to set aside our modesty which is stifling us and tout Canada's rightful place on the world scene.
[English]
At the risk of sounding immodest myself, I would say politicians do have a role in shaping opinions. Our challenge is to find the ways and the words to do that. I welcome the committee's initiative in making public awareness a priority and I wish you well in your work.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Thank you, Minister, for appearing before the committee this morning. We don't have time to ask you questions, but I can assure you that when you come back to discuss the budget, we will have the opportunity to review your new responsibilities. Thank you very much.
Mr. Pettigrew: I will be very happy to come back and answer your questions. Thank you.
.0905
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
[English]
I invite Mr. Michael Adams and Mr. Smillie to come to the table.
Mr. Assadourian (Don Valley North): Can I have a copy of the speech?
The Chairman: Do we have a text of the minister's speech?
Mr. Godfrey (Don Valley West): Is that the question?
The Chairman: Yes, I'm asking the parliamentary secretary to the minister if we can get a text of the minister's speech.
Mr. Godfrey: That's not up to me.
The Chairman: It seemed to me that of all the people in this room you were the closest to this possibility.
Mr. Assadourian: Are we asking the wrong person?
Mr. Godfrey: Oh, no.
Mr. Assadourian: Very good. We'll get to hear the answer yet.
The Chairman: For the other members of the committee, Mr. Assadourian has asked if he can get a text of the minister's speech. Would the other members like it circulated to the committee?
A voice: We'll give it to you whether you like it or not.
The Chairman: Perhaps you would be good enough to ask the minister -
Ms Beaumier (Brampton): Are these not recorded proceedings?
The Chairman: Yes, they'll be recorded.
Now, this is the first panel we are having in today's proceedings. I'm very pleased to welcome Michael Adams, who's president of Environics Research Group and may be well known to many of you; and Mr. Ian Smillie, who's a very knowledgeable consultant in this area. They are going to examine with us the current profile of Canadian public opinion - and to some extent, I understand, other OECD countries - of development assistance. This will be an excellent way of setting the stage for hearing from other interested members of the community later on.
Mr. Adams, are you going to go first?
Mr. Michael Adams (President, Environics Research Group): Sure.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr. Adams: Mr. Graham and members of the committee, I'm very pleased to be here today and to provide you an overview of Canadian public attitudes, public opinion and public values with regard to the issues related to development assistance.
Together my colleague and I are going to be providing an overview of Canadian public opinion, which is my focus. After my presentation Ian is going to give an overview and widen the focus. We thought it would be most efficient if we did our presentations and then had questions afterwards.
I have about four or five overheads that give public opinion on the issues we are going to be addressing today.
[Translation]
The Chairman: I'm sorry, Mr. Adams, but a point of order has been raised.
Mr. Bergeron (Verchères): Mr. Chairman, will we ever have the French text up on the screen or will it always be like this?
The Chairman: The documents are in the package that was handed out to you. Mr. Adams will put this up on the screen, but the translation is in your package.
Mr. Bergeron: Excellent. Thank you very much. I apologize.
The Chairman: That's all right. If you wish to speak in French, Mr. Adams, then go ahead.
[English]
I know, as every member of my riding of Rosedale... We often speak French on the street corners.
Mr. Adams: I hope you'll be able to make your way through my Bloor-Yonge accent. It's a special regional accent in Canada.
.0910
International development is an important activity of Canada's foreign policy that in some ways is viewed positively by most Canadians. However, it is not a top-of-mind priority of Canadians.
This is a survey done last fall, but it's still relevant today. As you can see in this slide, domestic economic problems such as unemployment, the deficit, the economy, are the top-of-mind concerns of Canadians, followed by national unity.
Canadians are almost equally divided over whether Canada spends too much, the right aount, or not enough on foreign assistance. I think the important point here is that you can see they're equally divided: one-third on too much, the third bar on the right amount, and then not enough. You can see the clear trend is Canadians believing we are spending too much on foreign assistance. The numbers have increased in the three surveys we're quoting here. There's a growing sense that we're spending too much on this activity.
Part of this has to do with what you could call ``official aid fatigue'', and in particular the doubts about the effectiveness of aid. There's also what the minister referred to as low levels of awareness of international development issues.
However, less than one in five Canadians we've surveyed believes assistance is not necessary. So only one in five thinks we don't need to do anything. A majority do believe foreign aid is the duty of rich countries.
Nonetheless, there are these negative opinions that do have to be addressed. The majority of Canadians believe aid does not go to the needy, that too many Canadians need help. There's enough anxiety and concern about, again, issues such as unemployment, the economy, the effect of free trade. They also believe foreign assistance, if it's not done right, can lead the recipients to be dependent. It's similar to attitudes to domestic welfare policy.
A large majority of Canadians say we should focus on developing trade. Over the last ten or fifteen years Canadians have become conscious and aware of the fact that we are a trading nation and trade is important to us. Canadians do see the connection to foreign assistance, that it will help us open up new markets. That argument does have resonance with Canadians.
Despite their top-of-mind focus on economic issues, Canadians do tend to continue to believe Canada has a very important role to play in the world in protecting human rights, in environmental protection, where for a number of years Canada was the leading country in the world. In fact, it was the only country in the world, certainly in the OECD countries, where environmental protection actually hit number one for most important issue in the late 1980s. So Canada has a role there, and in UN peacekeeping. Human rights, environmental protection, and UN peacekeeping are seen as three very important areas for Canada. Fewer Canadians believe we have a very important role in military alliances, promoting Canadian culture abroad, promoting economic links with various regions of the world, or promoting assistance to poor countries.
Canadians' attitudes towards foreign assistance and Canada's role in the world are symptomatic, I believe, of a more general evolution of Canadian social values. In many areas of their lives Canadians are evolving to a more adaptable, pragmatic attitude, which you could characterize as strategic or enlightened self-interest. As well, there is the trend that of course you and the public sector have seen, the development of the trend in Canada toward autonomy from traditional institutions, including government. Traditional motivating factors such as the Christian sense of charity, guilt, or noblesse oblige are in decline in Canadian society. While older Canadians continue to do subscribe to these values, they do not hold for the baby boom generation, born after the Second World War, and even less so for Generation X, the successors or children of the baby-boomers.
.0915
The international development community cannot pin its hopes for public support on these declining values. Rather, I believe it should focus its communications strategies on emerging values, those that are becoming mainstream in Canadian society.
On the negative side, Canadians are skeptical of the efficacy, efficiency and credibility of traditional institutions, especially governments purporting to act on their behalf. On the other hand, NGOs retain a high level of public confidence as Canadians shift their allegiance from large, formal institutions to smaller, less formal networks.
In my view, NGOs should cooperate and use their credibility and resources to present a coordinated message that will benefit all NGOs involved in international development rather than focusing only on the goals of their own particular organization. Such a message will not play on the emotions of guilt or noblesse oblige that may have been characteristic of appeals in the past to those traditional values, but rather to the growing autonomy of Canadians and their growing sense of enlightened self-interest.
I believe the message should emphasize past successes in making the recipients of foreign aid self-sufficient and autonomous. Even if a whole country has not become self-sufficient there may be communities within it that have. The message would point out that though many problems remain and new problems may emerge, much has been accomplished in recent decades with what we have done.
I'd also urge the NGOs, in pooling their resources and coming up with a united message, to certainly consider using the medium of television, the most emotionally evocative medium yet invented. Like that oil-soaked seabird in Prince William Sound that had more power than 10,000 editorials in The New York Times, TV is an extremely effective medium for putting items on the public agenda. However, of course, as you know, it often takes a crisis that could have been avoided or mitigated to bring items to the public's attention.
Finally, when we ask assistance for long-term development it should not be positioned as assistance for never-ending dependence. The public should be assured that - and I think we have to use different language - it is investing its money in the eventual financial autonomy, if not of an entire country, certainly of communities within that country. If as a result this community becomes a market for Canadian products, so much the better.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Adams. Mr. Smillie.
Mr. Ian Smillie (Individual Presentation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I should perhaps begin by saying that I'm not an expert on public opinion. I work as an international development consultant. My background is work with NGOs in Asia and Africa and here in Canada. I do a lot of writing about development and I think that's why the development centre of the OECD asked me if I would undertake a survey of public attitudes toward development assistance throughout the OECD.
When I was doing that study I had access to a lot of opinion polls in Australia, Sweden, Japan, Britain, the United States and Canada. They weren't just current opinion polls. Some were from ten or twenty years ago. Here's one of the first things... I thought I would just read you a quotation I put in the report I did.
- International support for development is now flagging. In some of the rich countries its
feasibility, even its very purpose, is in question. The climate surrounding foreign aid programs
is heavy with disillusion and distrust.
In looking at the opinion polls from Canada and from other countries I have found that despite a lot of dips and rises, over time public opinion in Canada and throughout the OECD has been remarkably supportive of aid to developing countries. Canadian support has fluctuated usually between about 70% and 80%. A 1995 Insight Canada poll found that 74% of Canadians believe that Canadian aid should be maintained at present levels or increased. Fifty-one percent said to hold it as it is. Twenty-three percent said it should be increased.
.0920
In Europe the figures vary from a low of 73% in France to a high of 88% in Italy and Spain. In Switzerland it was 78%. A couple of years ago in Japan it was about 80%.
There are lots of problems with opinion polls, and I'll come back to that in a moment. But the numbers I saw were consistent, and they were consistently high over time.
I was looking for other proxies, other ways of trying to determine what people think about foreign aid, and the more I read about polls, the more I worried about them. So I took, as a proxy, donations to NGOs, because when somebody gives $10 to an NGO it's a sign of support that goes beyond the tax dollar. It's over and above what they're already giving in the form of taxes.
In the first four years of this decade donations to NGOs went up quite dramatically, not just in Canada but throughout the OECD. The donations tended to be skewed towards emergencies and to organizations involved in relief, because we've had a lot of disasters. In the late 1980s and early 1990s we had Ethiopia, the Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and other smaller ones, such as Mozambique and Angola.
Since Rwanda, which happened two years ago - and more in the last 12 months - there's been a bit of a tapering off in donations for some organizations, but for most of the larger NGOs donations are still higher than they were in 1990, and they're considerably higher than they were in 1980. Donations to NGOs have been growing at a fairly impressive clip, and they have outpaced by far the rate of inflation.
There are problems, however. Smaller NGOs and those focusing exclusively on development as opposed to relief are definitely feeling the donations pinch. I think there are two reasons. One is that some of them are losing their market share to domestic charities. As government withdraws from certain areas, there's more and more pressure on domestic organizations to take on the role that governments once did. So there's competition between international charitable organizations and those working only in Canada. Also, a lot of development organizations are losing some of their market share to emergencies and to bigger, brand-name organizations with more sophisticated fund-raising machines.
But if opinion polls and donations are any guide, there's no evidence of aid fatigue in Canada or anywhere else in the OECD.
We have to ask ourselves where the phrase ``aid fatigue and compassion fatigue'' came from. It came from maybe three different places. One is smaller NGOs that are losing their market share and are mistaking this for aid fatigue. Second, it comes from a flattening of donations after four very generous years of donations from the public. Also, it comes from what I call aid administration fatigue, not aid fatigue, especially in bilateral organizations such as USAID and CIDA.
Aid administration fatigue comes from a great variety of things. One source is the chronic inability of committed aid managers to delink official development assistance from commercial and political interests and an inability among aid agencies to focus on human priority concerns.
Another problem has been that there have been failures in the aid business over the years. That probably was to be expected. If we had known how to create jobs in poor countries, then we would have done it a long time ago. A lot of this is risky and a lot of it is experimental, but a lot of it has failed and that has created a certain amount of demoralization within large aid agencies.
The decline and collapse of some southern economies is also a reason for demoralization. If you work for a bilateral agency and it's been working very closely with a government and you see it wither and decline and even disappear, then of course you're going to be discouraged.
Deep cuts to aid budgets in the 1990s are another reason for aid administration fatigue. There is a decrease of direct control and involvement by committed aid managers as more and more aid money goes through private sector non-governmental agencies and consulting firms.
Another area for demoralization is the public belief, which is strongly expressed in most opinion polls that I saw in Europe and North America, that national governments are not the most useful or effective means of channelling development assistance to the Third World. In Europe there tends to be a lot more favour for NGOs, church organizations, and the UN.
.0925
Surprisingly, in the United States there's very low support for government assistance to the Third World. Almost 50% of Americans feel that government aid, money from taxpayers, should be channelled through UN organizations. I would never have imagined that would be the case.
A final problem is the greying of the aid establishment. There was a huge increase in intake as the aid programs grew in the 1970s, but as the intake of staff tapered off in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there really weren't new career opportunities for young people coming into the aid business. The aid establishment is getting older and perhaps more cynical.
I don't think any of that, though, gives us cause to believe that there is aid fatigue. Maybe aid opponents are more vocal, maybe aid agencies are more defensive, maybe there are shifting levels of support for different types of organizations, but this is not the same as aid fatigue. In fact, all evidence shows that Canadians are concerned, that Canadians do want to help, that their underlying values are solid, and that they want to help other people who are in trouble.
There is a problem, and I'm coming back to the question of polls now. The problem is that while people are supportive, they don't really understand it. The knowledge base on international development is pretty limited. There's a very famous polling question in the United States: Do you think government should do more to help the poor? Overwhelmingly the answer is yes. If you asked the same question in a slightly different way - Do you think the government should spend more on welfare? - the answer is overwhelmingly no.
A lot of the results you get to questions depend on how you ask the question. Another famous one is: Should President Nixon have resigned? Everybody says yes. Do you care? No.
So maybe the question is this. Should Canadians care, and if they should care, why should they care? In the past we've given them two basic reasons. One is that people are in trouble and we can help; that's the altruism answer. The other is that it creates jobs for Canadians. That message is usually reserved for speeches to boards of trade and exporters' associations, but it's quite a strong one.
I'd like to just look at those two reasons we've given Canadians very briefly. First, the message about people in trouble works, but we tend to describe the symptoms, not the solutions. We tend to describe the child, the hungry child, the starving child, and not the parents. That's one of the reasons that child sponsorship is such a successful way of raising money for NGOs, but as long as the parents don't have a job, as long as the parents can't look after the child, we're really not explaining the whole thing to Canadians properly.
I think you've probably all heard the expression ``Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he can feed himself''. I don't think that's really the problem. The problem is that people know how to fish, but those who buy the fish aren't really willing to pay the cost of fishing. They're not really willing to pay a fair price for the fish. They're not willing to pay enough money so that fishermen can buy the nets and boats.
We have to stop overfishing. We have to stop polluting the water so there will be fish for the next generation. These are not always things that people can do on their own. Not all countries can take the blow to the fishing industry that Canada has and survive. Not all can send destroyers to chase away Spanish trawlers.
NGOs tend to give the wrong message, in my view. They tend to give the ``teach a man to fish'' message when the ``fair price for fish'' message is infinitely more important, or they simply show pictures of starving babies. A lot of NGOs do very good work on development education, but for every dollar spent on development education there are ten dollars spent reinforcing messages that portray the Third World as a disaster area populated by people with no ambition, people who are simply waiting around for handouts from the rich. I spent a lot of time travelling in Africa and Asia, and I can tell you that this is not the reality of the Third World.
The media reinforces all this with news about disaster after disaster without cause and effect, as though all these disasters are unconnected to each other and as though they're unconnected to us. It's as if they have nothing to do with us, as if once the fighting ends everything is going to be okay.
The second message is that aid creates jobs for Canadians. I think it's true, but it's true in a limited way. Jobs are maintained by aid purchases, but they're not sustainable unless countries can buy Canadian goods and services with their own money. You can't buy Canadian goods and services if you have no money, if you're poor.
It's true that Taiwan, Korea, and other newly industrialized countries are able to buy Canadian goods and services with their own money, but for each one of those countries there's another one, and these are often giants that are on the edge of political chaos and anarchy - you may have heard the news from Egypt today - Nigeria, Turkey, Algeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Mexico, possibly even China.
.0930
A lot has been written about how to engage the public on an important issue. The issue must be clear and understandable. I would suggest that development is not clear and understandable to the average Canadian. It's either overly complex or overly simplistic. It's structural adjustment versus starving babies. A lot of Canadians don't understand why we have to do one and why we have the other, after all these years when we've been working and saying it's going to end.
The issue has to have direct relevance to Canadians. One of the reasons the women's movement has been successful, one of the reasons the environmental movement has been successful, one of the reasons people have changed their behaviour around the AIDS issue, is that they have direct relevance to the average Canadian. Direct relevance is why child sponsorship sells so well. You can have a child of your own, with a real name, pictures, letters from the child. It's much more direct than actually digging a well in a country that wasn't even on the map, wasn't even in the atlas, five years ago.
The issue has to be concrete. That is why people give money for Rwandan refugees. The pictures from those camps were real, immediate, and dramatic. Fuzzy concepts about empowerment, the ``one world'' campaign - that sort of thing has tended to fall largely on deaf ears.
Those promoting the issue have to be credible. One of the things all those opinion polls in Europe and North America showed is that governments are not a very credible source of information on international development matters. People tend to believe the media first. After that they'll believe UN agencies, they'll believe the church, and they'll believe NGOs. But governments simply don't have a very high creditability rating.
Then of course there has to be publicity. In an era of twenty, thirty, or fifty channels on television there has to be a lot of publicity around these issues. It has to be sustained, it has to be repeated, and it has to be fairly unambiguous.
Far too little of this is happening, in my view, where development assistance is concerned. The media do not make the connections. More and more NGOs are becoming band-aid factories. Politicians don't lead. Large parts of official development agencies have been diverted, or even subverted, to immediate short-term political and commercial interests.
The development assistance committee of the OECD held a meeting on this subject in 1983. The conclusion was that the main rationale for aid in the public mind was and remained emergency relief. Ignorance about development, about aid programs, and about the south remained widespread. The growing doubt about the effectiveness of official aid had now more or less solidified. That was 1983. Since then, very little has changed.
What can be done? You will hear from a lot of other people today about what can be done. I have three suggestions. These are my own ideas.
One is that we have to clarify the purpose of aid so the public can understand it. You may remember there was a big debate at the Copenhagen conference a couple of years ago about whether official aid agencies should spend 20% of their budgets on basic human needs. The Canadian government wants 25% of Canada's ODA to go to human priority issues or basic human needs. Why 25%? Why not 50%? Why not 80%? I can think of some reasons, but the average taxpayer would be well justified in asking why such a small amount is going directly to help people in trouble. We have to be able to explain this to people so they can understand it.
Secondly, we have to alert Canadians to the fact that the results of Third World poverty are not going to be stopped at international borders. Refugees, pollution, global warming, war, terrorism, drugs - these all come from poverty, and they're all coming closer and closer to Canadians. They can't be stopped with band-aids. We spent $1.3 billion Canadian on Somalia; more on trying to put out that fire in Somalia than we spent on all countries in Africa combined in that year. And what do we have to show for it? Somalia is still a mess. The band-aids tend not to work if we go in too late.
Fear is regarded by many as a very poor motivator, and a lot of NGOs tend not to use these kinds of messages when they're talking to donors, but I think it has all the makings of a very good catalyst. It worked well on raising awareness and behaviour and spending levels on issues such as AIDS and the environment, and it has other advantages. It's clear and can be made understandable. It's concrete. It has direct relevance to Canadians.
.0935
Finally, if the concerns were more recognized, more widely adopted on a non-partisan political basis, if they were written into public policy, adopted by NGOs, turned into media-worthy stories, perhaps this would also help to change public awareness and attitudes.
If I could just finish on a personal note, I started my work in international development 29 years ago. I went to a small country in West Africa, Sierra Leone, to teach school. In 1967 Sierra Leone had been independent for four or five years. There you could see development on the move. Roads were being built, schools were being opened, clinics set up. Because there was no electricity - there was electricity closer to town - my students would do their homework under street lights at night. They would get up at 5 a.m. to do their homework so that they could do the chores at home and also go to school.
You could feel development. Parents were pushing for schools and hospitals to be opened. They wanted a better life for their children than they had had. It was exactly the same kind of attitude that Canadians have. They want a better life for their children.
Sierra Leone today is a country with 2 million displaced people and refugees out of a population of 4.5 million. There's been a civil war going on there for four years. We often hear that Canada is the best place in the world to live. It's number one on the human development index. Sierra Leone rates number 171 out of 174. The authority of the government doesn't go more than about 30 miles outside of Freetown.
There are a lot of reasons why Sierra Leone didn't develop, why it went the way it did: corruption, mismanagement, a lot of things that Sierra Leoneans and the Sierra Leone government could have dealt with. But it also had to do with the price we were willing to pay for fish and the fact that Sierra Leone was never a strategic pawn in the Cold War so it never was a large aid recipient. It didn't have some of the advantages and maybe some of the disadvantages that other countries have had.
I'm interested in Sierra Leone because I'm going back next week to see what people are doing there to reverse the trend. The push for peace, democracy and good government has been especially strong in Sierra Leone in recent months. There were attempts by the military to head off the elections that were scheduled for March but public pressure was so large, even within refugee camps, that they forced the elections to go ahead. It was a fairly representative election and now Sierra Leone has a civilian government.
The United Nations had a combined appeal for Sierra Leone last year of $18 million - $18 million for a country with two million displaced people and refugees! Just to put that in perspective, the budget of OC Transpo was $180 million, ten times what the UN asked for Sierra Leone. OC Transpo got its budget. The UN got only half of what it was asking for.
If countries like Sierra Leone are ever to get out of the mess they're in - and we helped them to make that mess - they're going to need help. If we want to stop some of these disasters, stop them for our own sake and stop them for our children's sake, we're going to have to make much greater investments and we're going to have to treat the issues with much greater urgency. Above all, we're going to have to explain to Canadians why a little place like Sierra Leone, which most Canadians have never heard of, is important to them and to their children.
Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Smillie.
I might say before I turn it over to questions that those of us who participated in the foreign affairs review will recall that this committee came to the same conclusion you have urged in your speech, to the effect that if we had a better trading relationship with many of our partners in Africa and other corners of the world that require development, it would go much further than aid would ever go towards providing a sustainable form of living for them. I think most of the members of this committee would agree with that conclusion of yours, and it was in our foreign policy review actually.
Thank you very much for your comments.
[Translation]
Mr. Paré.
Mr. Paré (Louis-Hébert): I want to welcome our witnesses here this morning. There job is a difficult one, because to my mind, it is clear that Canadians in general and Quebeckers support international aid.
My question for them is not how we should try and influence Canadians' opinion of international aid, but rather what can Canadians do to pressure the government into restoring its earlier level of generosity. That is the real question.
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The government's target remains at .7%, but one must realize that in 1998-1999, the level of international aid expressed as a percentage of GDP will be only .29%. Yet, we maintain this target and continue to make speeches. We continue, in the statement's preamble, to speak of the generosity and compassion of Canadians, when in fact, we act in the exact opposite way.
At one point, the previous witness stated, and rightly so, that the money was going to expert accounting firms and the like and was not really being used for development purposes.
Let's look at one very concrete example. Very recently, CIDA awarded a $7.5 million contract to companies to advise Vietnam on institutional reform. Am I to believe that these $7.5 million go to the people of Vietnam who are most in need of it? I doubt it.
The first witness, Mr. Adams, stated that assistance should not be never-ending. I agree completely with him. However, what should we do to ensure that this is not the case? We have to invest in sustainable development, in education, in health care, and in basic services which will enable people to take charge of their own lives.
However, this is not what we are doing. We are providing bilateral assistance. Everything possible is being done to make NGOs tow the line because they are disruptive.
When our foreign policy was reviewed, many groups who appeared told us that NGOs should spend 5% of their budget to promote awareness among Canadians of the importance of international aid.
What measures did the government take in its 1995 budget? It reduced the aid given to NGOs involved in promotion by 100% and today, here we are at a forum on the importance of promoting public awareness. The joke has gone on long enough!
The real question I want to ask is this: What can Canadians, who are known for their generosity, do to get this government to assume its responsibilities in the area of international development?
[English]
The Chairman: Would either of the witnesses wish to pick up the question? I think it is a bit of a challenge.
Mr. Smillie: Maybe I could just say a word about development education.
It's true that the budget for development education has been quite dramatically cut by CIDA, I think in part because it hasn't in the past been very successful. But I think it's important that we understand how expensive good public communication is. NGOs that spend $10,000 or $20,000 on development education are going to have a very limited impact. I think in a sense somehow we have to think development education through a lot more carefully.
Last year the United Nations recommended that government spend 2% of official development assistance on development education, not as publicity but to try to explain to the public what it is their tax dollars are going for. I think in this country we spend less than 0.5%, so we're a long way away from the target set by the United Nations.
There really is no substitute for getting these messages out and trying to explain projects to Canadians. I know why we don't spend every single penny on poverty-related projects, and CIDA has some extremely good projects. I can think of one in Ghana. It looks like an industrial project, but it's really helping very small entrepreneurs to get off the ground and get started. It's creating a small market for Canadian goods and services, but ultimately it's creating jobs in Ghana. It really is doing something about small entrepreneurs, who in a sense are among the poorest and who need that leg up. We don't explain this to people, and there really has to be much more effort put into explaining these things carefully, so that people understand them.
The Chairman: We'll be enabled, by virtue of the fact - and I should have announced this at the beginning - that the proceedings of this particular committee hearing will be broadcast tonight on CPAC. I hope that perhaps one of the purposes of our being here today is precisely to ventilate these issues to enable Canadians to understand them better. Maybe they'll communicate with us about them as a result of this.
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Mr. Adams, did you wish to make any comments about those observations?
Mr. Adams: I'm moved by members' comments and have to believe that it is going to get ever more difficult to do what you want to have done. In the postwar period, when Canada could count on 3%, 4%, or 5% growth every year, when we were expanding the social welfare state, when Canadians had more money left in their pockets even when they were giving more money to their governments, we could defer to the elite leadership of the country, who felt, in a sense, a Christian sense of duty, a sense of noblesse oblige, that we had to help poor countries. There was, in a sense, deference to the elite leadership that wanted to do that sort of thing in Canada.
Today, however, we are paying the bill for building the social welfare state. There is a tremendous sense of tax fatigue in the country. There is a decline of deference to elite leadership, putting politicians and governments at the top of the list.
As we balance our budgets, as we pay down the debt - and it will take Canada five or ten years before it will be in this situation - you're going to find that government budgets will come under very critical scrutiny and that the types of things that Canadians will want protected will be the programs that affect them personally: health care, education, roads, and so on. There is going to be a greater sense that in the things that don't affect one and one's family personally the government should be pulling back, or maybe not doing those things.
When we suddenly get rich again and win the lottery again as Canadians, we will be able to start being generous again.
That is going to mean that the private sector and individual Canadians are going to have to take up the slack, whereas in the past governments took the lead.
I'm seeing with clients such as the United Way of Metro Toronto and so on that in the past they could rely upon older values to motivate the population, particularly the people who have strong religious values, but these sorts of appeals are no longer having resonance with the baby boomers and Generation X. If we do not figure out a way of appealing, with information and in an emotionally evocative way, to individual Canadians who are asserting their personal autonomy and who want to have personal choice as the cornerstone of how they're going to govern their lives, where they are voluntarily making these decisions in ways that involve them, as my colleague has said, then you're going to find it ever more difficult to build up public support for the politicians to do what they've typically done in the last 50 years. I am in fact not sanguine that you're going to be able to do that.
What government needs - and my colleague said this as well - is source credibility. Governments do not have source credibility on this issue as they once did. Others do. NGOs do.
It seems to me that you should be thinking about partnerships with others who do have source credibility. I'm urging these NGOs to understand the values of these Canadians and to speak to them in ways that are, again, factual, personally relevant, and emotionally evocative so that they will voluntarily do the kinds of things that all of us in this room want to have happen.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Adams.
I don't know about Mr. Paré. Now that he's been qualified as a member of our elite, I'm pleased to see him in this corner again. This will change the dynamics of this committee.
I think that is a helpful observation.
Mr. Godfrey: A thought occurs to me. I have to admit a coincidence of interest going back to the past. I used to sit on the board of CUSO when Ian Smillie was its executive director. So we go back a long way, and it's nice to see him again.
I guess the question for me is whether, as part of the solution, we need to change the attitude of NGOs in this country. There have been a lot of accusations that the media doesn't get the right stories, and all the rest of it. I'm wondering if it's because the NGOs don't tell the right stories. I'm wondering if it's also because when the average person who wants to do something is confronted with an overwhelming situation - either overwhelming in its scale because of the size of the disaster in Rwanda, or overwhelming in its complexity - that person walks away because he or she has no sense of ownership or control of any of that.
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The story I will just tell briefly is that I got involved in the African famine crisis of 1984. This involved 24 countries in Africa and millions of people. How do you deal with something like that? The first answer was to try to deal with one part of it, to chunk it out so at least you're doing something. I think this is the appeal the foster parent plan has always had: at least you're doing something for a tangible situation, for a person with a face and a name. And we managed to create an organization called Ethiopia Airlift, which focused on a specific part of the country and delivered information back about what we'd done.
What is also interesting is that we were able to go beyond this after the emergency phase. There was something called Adopt a Village. It paired a community in Canada with a community in Ethiopia and studied the long-term development story. Then we said let's tell the good news on a scale large enough to understand some of the dynamics of development but small enough to have personalities.
In this storytelling we linked a number of Canadian communities through Canadian NGOs such as CUSO and WUSC with African villages for the long haul and the good news stories. My contention was that because we were able to tell the story correctly, we were able to involve local television stations and to get cameras there. We were able to ask viewers to remember six months ago, when this was the problem, and to say let's go back and tell the story again and see where people are. In doing this we created, at various local levels, communities of concern learning about development issues. So when they asked, for example, why these people have so many children, we could really get into it.
It's not the whole answer for development, but presumably in creating a community of concerned and increasingly well-informed people about one micro situation, you've then created a population with more understanding of the larger issues. This population will say I'm doing my little bit, but I'm also feeling the situation is under control.
The challenge to the NGO community is to learn to use those techniques, and to be accountable. Part of my suspicion all the way along was that they didn't really want to be accountable to the public on a case-by-case basis. While participation in the Third World was seen as an ideal thing at the village level, it wasn't so evident to me that participation in the First World was an ideal. After all, what should the public know about these complicated issues? Leave it to us professionals and send the cheques.
I offer this as a provocative thesis for your comments and observations.
Mr. Smillie: It's a bit like finding a thread on your sweater and pulling it: you find it's attached to every other thread, and soon you don't have a sweater. It's actually attached to everything else in the universe.
There's a large Dutch NGO called NOVIB. They have a fundraising program called ``Guest At Your Table''. They do a lot of emergency work and they get a lot of donors on the basis of a particular emergency. A donor sees something on television and gives $10 for Rwanda. They try to keep this donor, and they try to convert the donor who is concerned about the urgency of that issue into a donor who will give money for development. Then they try to convert this donor into a sustaining donor. If they can keep these donors - there's always attrition and people drop off - they try to bring them into this ``Guest At Your Table'' program.
This is a special program where NOVIB basically takes a pool of donors and links them directly to a particular organization in a Third World country they're working with. But the interesting thing is NOVIB doesn't tell all these Dutch donors exactly what is going on in the Third World. Once a year it gets people to come from the Third World to Holland to meet with these donors. Holland is a small enough country that you can do this. They can have two or three meetings and basically everybody can come.
They ask the southern NGO, the Third World partner, to help write some of the fundraising material so it isn't all doom-and-gloom and starving babies. You see it from the perspective of the people who are being assisted.
They try to make sure people understand development can be a long-term process. It doesn't happen in two-year projects. And they also tell people 25% of what they give is going to be used for development education to try to convince other people in Holland this is the best way to go. It's a very large program, and they have been able to convince a large number of Dutch donors that 25% of their donations can be used for development education in Holland. They've been able to make people understand how important this is.
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It's a slow process, and it's not cheap. One of the problems for NGOs is that everybody thinks development is something cheap and quick. NGOs have fostered this image themselves. But it's not true. Development is not cheap and quick, and it isn't going to happen overnight. You can't do it for 10% overheads. This myth of the 7% or 10% overhead, or even 20% in some cases, is foolish.
When a donor is asked for money for cancer, they don't ask the cancer fund how much money is spent on overheads. When you get an appeal from the kidney association, you don't ask how much money is spent on overheads; you know that there are going to be overheads. It costs money for researchers, doctors, and all of the rest of it. But for some reason, development is supposed to be done for almost no overheads at all.
And you have very different kinds of work. You have relief. You send volunteers. You may have a very complicated well-drilling project. You have all different kinds of projects with all different kinds of overheads.
We haven't explained any of this to Canadians, so when there's an exposé of an organization that has spent 20% on administration, everybody is upset and the organization is devastated. Somehow we have to explain the reality of these things to people. I think this Dutch example is one in which you can see that the public, if it is taken along the road carefully, can change its opinion.
The Chairman: Did you wish to add anything to that, Mr. Adams?
Mr. Adams: Yes, I think that's fine.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr. Morrison.
Mr. Morrison (Swift Current - Maple Creek - Assiniboia): Mr. Smillie, just as an aside before I get to my question, I think you'd find that there are people who don't give to domestic charities unless they know something about their overheads. I know I certainly don't.
You mentioned Sierra Leone. I don't think the case of Sierra Leone is really unique. There has been a really rapid breakdown over the last three decades, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, in countries where you had this rapid transition from colonial dependency to complete independence. It didn't work. I know that 20/20 hindsight is wonderful, but they weren't ready, so you had this post-colonial downward spiral into chaos.
I don't know what you do about that now, because the few people who had been trained by the colonial powers to be administrators, to take over and run the country, by and large, have been killed in a lot of these countries. They were the elite, and the people who staged the various and sundry little revolutions didn't like them, so they got rid of them.
What do you do now? How do you replace the infrastructure in countries where you now have virtual anarchy? Even your NGOs can't just elbow their way into these collapsed societies and say they are going to feed the children and get this job done. That's because there are gentlemen with Kalashnikovs who will say that we will not feed their children unless we give them half of it first.
The UN doesn't have the power to offer support to NGOs, or even to their own UN personnel, in situations like this. You can't do a Herbert Hoover in Russia and just go in and take charge. Actually, Herbert Hoover didn't go in and take charge, because he had the Red Army backing him when he did his relief organizations.
Who is going to back our relief people to try to get into places like Sierra Leone and Rwanda? What is the answer? In a practical sense, how can you do anything now?
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Mr. Smillie: First of all, I agree that Sierra Leone is not unique. The reason I mentioned Sierra Leone is because that was where I started my career. But it's also because Sierra Leone isn't in the news. There are two million displaced people and a civil war has been going on for four years, yet most people have never even heard of the country, much less the problem. How many more problems are there? How many more incipient disasters are out there? How far can we let them go before it's too late?
I suppose one of the answers has to do with what we are going to do about Liberia. Will we do anything? Maybe Liberia is gone. Maybe it's too late. But the lesson from places like Liberia and Somalia is that if you leave it too late, then you may not ever be able to pick up the pieces.
In terms of independence, I often think about what happened to the United States 70 or 80 years after independence. It was in the middle of one of the most horrific and devastating civil wars of all time. Maybe in Africa they're doing it a little bit faster, and they'll get it over with a little bit sooner than did the United States.
I don't know exactly what the answer is, but I know that the answer is not sending $9 million to try to deal with two million displaced people and refugees. The opportunity often is missed.
In Sierra Leone, there is a real opportunity because they've just had an election. People pushed hard for the army to get out. They want reconciliation. They want an end to the war. So somehow we have to take cognizance of these opportunities when they arise and do more than what we're doing.
I spoke to people in Freetown yesterday. I asked whether the Liberia situation was having any impact on them. They said they could hear the helicopters as they come from Monrovia because they transit at Freetown. Then the big planes take the refugees off to Senegal and Europe. They can hear the airplanes, but nobody is stopping to have a look at the disaster in Sierra Leone. There's the opportunity that's been created by a million people, half of them in refugee camps, voting out a military government. We have to take advantage of these opportunities when they arise.
Mr. Morrison: But how, Mr. Smillie, from a purely practical, physical sense, can we help these people? You can't send the army in to support and protect your aid workers, yet you send your aid workers without any support and protection and they can't do anything. What is the answer?
Mr. Smillie: One of the first things in a situation like this is that you have to demobilize combatants. A lot of these combatants are not in the army; a lot of them are just young fellows whose only alternative up to then was to be a shoeshine boy in the capital city. There really have not been enough jobs for young people, so when somebody with a gun comes along, whether it's a warlord or somebody with a legitimate beef, it's very easy to get cannon fodder for these emergencies. That's what happened in Somalia and Liberia.
Demobilizing the combatants requires money. It means not just getting them out of uniform and taking the gun away from them, but trying to find ways to get them employed so they don't go back to this sort of thing. Job creation in countries in which you have 40% or 50% unemployment is very serious. The poverty that results from that is what is leading to many of these disasters. That's what leads people to the drug trade as well. It's much easier.
I was in Pakistan last year. I saw a wonderful U.S. aid program aimed at getting people in the tribal areas to stop growing poppies. The project was to build roads going into the tribal areas so that there would be better access for fertilizer and seeds to be put in and for extension workers for, I think, rapeseed or some alternative.
I asked one of the farmers what the best price was that he could get for the next best alternative to poppies. It was going to be about 20% of what he could get from producing poppies. Why would he stop growing poppies? Poverty is what pushes people to do these things, as well as lack of control, meaning lack of government authority, government breakdown.
The Chairman: Mr. Flis.
Mr. Flis (Parkdale - High Park): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I welcome our guests to help us in how we can better educate Canadians to help them appreciate the importance of our foreign aid.
I wanted to ask our witnesses: have there been any polling and studies? Which combinations of aid are the most effective and the most welcome by Canadians? Is it where the NGOs raise most of the funding? Is it where there's a combination of government and NGOs, and if so, at what rate, fifty-fifty, twenty-eighty? Or is it government doing its thing and NGOs doing their thing? Have there been any studies to look at it in that kind of detail?
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Mr. Smillie: You will have the opportunity to speak to other NGO people and CIDA people later in the day. They can perhaps tell you more about it.
I may be wrong, but I think Canadian NGOs raise about $200 million a year, plus or minus. The Canadian government is spending about $2 billion. So the amount of money raised from the public by NGOs is a good deal smaller than what the government spends.
A great proportion of what NGOs spend, however, is derived from CIDA. CIDA supports NGOs very generously. So I would say probably more than half of what NGOs spend... In a way that $200 million is leveraged through matching grant programs, and probably another $200 million, $300 million, $400 million supplied by the government is funnelled through NGOs.
Mr. Adams: As I was saying before, this reminds me of something Marshall McLuhan said thirty years ago, when he was reflecting on the effect of television and the global village: we all become entirely involved with and responsible for each other.
The problem is that through this very powerful medium we become aware of the problems of six billion people all at once, in emotionally evocative ways. In the old days you could read about 50,000 people drowning in Bangladesh. You would turn the paper and ask how the Blue Jays did. But you see one face of one little kid, a baby... I know Keith Spicer talks about violence on television. My wife and I have trouble watching the news, because we see that little person and that's our family. It's an extension of our family. That could be our kid.
When that medium exposes us to all of these problems, a problem in Sierra Leone or wherever, there is a sense that maybe it's so much - we talk about ``millennial anxiety'' - there's so much, why do anything? We can`t have any effect. So it seems to me one of the things you have to do in the global village, when we're all responsible for each other, for that little guy in Liverpool or that little person in Ethiopia or whoever they are, is find some way of not making us all feel overwhelmed, feel there's nothing we can do and that the only thing I can do is take care of myself, so I put our security system in my house, put a wall around my house, this medieval attitude we now are...the social-Darwinistic dystopia we're seeing. Certainly we're seeing it in the United States, the way they've gone.
How do you keep people engaged in community? Who is that community? How do you connect in a meaningful way, a sense of efficacy? The minute I think it's not going to have any effect... Why waste my money? I'll keep the money. I'll spend it on myself. I'll take a trip to Florida this year.
It seems to me that sense of how we can bond with each other but also have a sense of efficacy... So maybe this country of 30 million people can't save the world between now and Christmas. Maybe we have to choose. Some is going to go to my community. Some is going to go to other parts of Canada. Some is going to go to other parts of the world. Make the case.
One of the things we've seen now, especially in the last ten years, is that the market is becoming far more important in the lives of all of us than it was before, where we had institutional leaders telling us what we could and could not do.
The Chairman: Could I just interrupt there? Figure 15 at page 31 of the document entitled Canadian Opinions on Canadian Foreign Policy directly addresses this issue of what types of aid prospects, aid issues, Canadians respond to. We might want to look at that later on, if you want to pursue that. It does set out helping to build infrastructure projects where they provide food and clothing, environment, etc. It's along the lines of your question.
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Mr. Flis: Mr. Adams, your polling showed that the majority of Canadians believe it is the duty of the rich countries to help the poorest of the poor. How do these same Canadians perceive Canada? Do they look at Canada as a rich country or not? If they don't, is it because of our $500 billion public debt? Is it because over one million people are unemployed? If we want to do a promotion job to convince Canadians how important it is to invest in helping people in other countries, we have to realize that maybe they have the wrong perception of themselves as Canadians.
Mr. Adams: They do see themselves as a rich country, and on a sunny day they're willing to admit that maybe it is the best country in the world. We've had a long winter this year, so they're complaining. With Canadians, you poke them and they kind of complain and they're pessimistic and so on, and maybe it's because they think if they are optimistic, somebody would laugh at them if it didn't turn out. We are very critical and skeptical people.
If you ask them about the economy, they say the economy is getting worse. Have we gotten out of the recession of 1991-92? They don't think we've gotten out of that recession yet. On the surface you find very big mood swings, but generally a pessimistic public attitude and public opinion. That betrays behavioural changes, where they're coming to grips with all the anxiety now that they've been told they have to be more the authors of their destiny rather than deferring to governments or deferring to the large monopolies and oligopolies that used to take care of everybody.
Now they're on their own, so they are adapting. They are becoming more autonomous. Half the new jobs created since the recession are self-employment, voluntary or involuntary. We are starting to move toward that sense of autonomy, personal choice. You are the master of your destiny. You make up your mind.
What do they think about the future? There's a very good question in one of our surveys: Is the globalization of the economy an opportunity for Canada or a threat? They see it as an opportunity. There is a sense that while we as Canadians can't admit that maybe things are getting better, we are a trading nation, things are pretty good here, and we will probably solve our problems. Therefore there is this idea that it is a duty of rich countries to help, and yes, we are a rich country.
However, I don't know whether I want to defer to a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa to make all the decisions, as I did in the past, because again over the next ten years you're going to ask me to make a lot of sacrifices. So once again, it's going to have to be more than just deferring. I think we're going to have to be a bit more creative in the future on this question of decision-making in this area.
Mr. Flis: Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Flis.
[Translation]
Mrs. Debien.
Mrs. Debien (Laval-East): I would like to get back to the public opinion polls on the level of support for development assistance. You know very well that we can get polls to say what we want them to say and it often depends on who has commissioned them. Mr. Smillie put his finger on the problem when he said that everything hinged on how the question was put.
Research conducted in 1995 on Canadian public opinion revealed that if foreign aid is presented as a budget item, without any explanation of the means and goals, public support for foreign aid drops considerably. However, when the importance of development activities is stressed to the public, support for foreign aid is strong. The more concrete and well-defined the aid program, the more the Canadian public supports the process. Basically, everything hinges on the questions asked in a public opinion poll.
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Therefore, the right questions must be asked in the future because it could make an enormous difference in public support for government aid programs.
My second comment is along the same lines as Mr. Paré's remarks. There was one very important recommendation made among the findings and recommendations reached by the OECD committee which you spoke of and I will read it to you:
- g) encourage and support NGOs, religious groups, professional associations as well as local
authorities in their efforts to promote development education activities for their members and
supporters and help them to achieve them;
In light of the fact that all of the development education programs set up by Canada in the past have now been completely abolished, you can understand why we sometimes ask ourselves what we are doing.
Thank you.
[English]
Mr. Smillie: I sometimes think, in a way, that by cutting off education we're writing the last chapter on official development assistance. If people don't know what we're doing and don't know the good stories - of course there are bad stories as well - why would they support it when people are worried about their own future, the economy and their jobs?
There was an opinion poll done by the University of Maryland system last year on American aid, which asked a lot of questions. There were the usual questions about whether you support this, or whether you think aid should be high or low or whatever, and it received the usual sorts of answers. But it asked one question that I thought was very important. It asked, how much money do you think the American government spends on foreign assistance? Most people thought that 20% of the federal U.S. budget was spent on aid. It was much more than 20 times higher than reality. People had no idea. I'm sure if you asked that question in Canada, you'd get the same wild swing in opinion about how much we spend.
People also don't realize how relevant it is to us. I keep coming back to this problem of drugs, guns, disease and pollution. These are going to have a direct impact on Canadians, if not today, then tomorrow. They're going to have a direct impact on our children and our grandchildren, and Canadians can understand that. That's why we've had such movement on the environmental issue, because people see the direct impact on Canada.
Somehow we have to get these messages across, and it won't be done by cutting expenditure on development education or publicity. CIDA certainly has to do more, as well as NGOs, but it's expensive. When everybody thinks NGOs should operate on a shoestring and have no overhead, who's going to pay for it?
Mr. Adams: I wonder if I could comment on your question about public opinion polling. I've been practising this profession for a quarter of a century and I have become very aware of the uses and abuses of public opinion research. I can tell you that in the private sector research is generally done for illumination, to find out what the market wants. What do the people want, what do I have to do to build a car that people will want to buy? I can't make a car they don't want to buy - they won't buy it, and that's the end of it; we'll fail.
In the public sector, and particularly in areas where there has traditionally been deference to elite leadership, polls are more often used for support rather than illumination. They're more often used to support something I intuitively think we should do. Go out and do a poll and find out that it supports what in my heart I know God and civilization think is something I ought to do.
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You can ask questions in a way that can support, where 80% can become 20% because you put something in the preamble that is very biasing and you can get wide variability.
I would ask the government and the NGOs to look at research from the point of view of trying to understand where the public is coming from. Don't judge the public. Don't take the elitist attitude that people are ignorant and we have to educate them to make them civilized.
We have to take people as they are. As Churchill said, democracy may be the worst system in all the world, but it's better than all the others. We must come to respect public opinion, understand its subtleties, and use what we understand about people's attitudes and their underlying values, which may be contradictory. We love freedom. We love equality. Sometimes there are choices to be made. So it's not always simple.
It's not always just one question that tells you exactly what you're supposed to do - it takes a lot of questions. It takes mistakes and it takes experience. Yes, polling can be abused and you need to understand it. The interpretation is important.
We need to respect public opinion more perhaps than the efforts I've seen by some political pollsters to try to use it to manipulate public opinion. We need to respect public opinion and the public.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Adams. Madame Beaumier.
Ms Beaumier: I consider myself a fairly average Canadian and the feeling I'm getting is why do we have to change the attitudes of Canadians? We have a problem here. Generally, most Canadians have a spirit of generosity and would like to help, but we see that we're asked to give and we have no input into foreign policy.
I think Canadians probably don't have as much of a problem with funding of NGOs as they do with government-funded projects. I think they have a problem with projects that involve direct government funding to governments we know are corrupt and abuse human rights. I think people who care about aid also care about the quality of life and human rights in other countries.
Perhaps we should work at changing our government and our department's attitudes about public input into foreign policy in general. If you're a taxpayer, it's good enough that we're going to take your money and spend it, but when it comes to giving direct funding to countries such as Vietnam and not being able to make economic decisions about the situation in Nigeria, it's very frustrating to Canadians. It has to go both ways.
I'm wondering if perhaps there should be more public participation and a change of attitude in government and the departments. I'm frustrated, and I have access to more information than most Canadians, so I can understand their frustration. Perhaps it's frustration and not a growing lack of interest in foreign aid.
Mr. Adams: I think you are part of the democratization of Canada, the democratization of foreign policy, probably in the tradition of the governments of Canada, Britain, France and so on that we know the best. A small group of highly educated people who felt they were the embodiment of all the enlightened values of western civilization made these policies. They were able to do it because the public deferred to them, and other parts of the government delivered health care, unemployment insurance and so on. I'm afraid now the people are going to join the party. They've done it with our Constitution.
The Constitution was done by a bunch of guys who owned property. They got together and made a deal and it gave us Canada. Without changing a word in our Constitution, we now must have the people vote in direct referendums. When a democracy moves from representative democracy to more direct democracy the people I've polled have to start accepting responsibility for the opinions that heretofore they've so lightly given the pollsters. It means they have to accept consequences.
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If the power is shifting from the elected officials and the bureaucrats to the people, the people have to stop complaining for four years about all the terrible things the politicians are doing and start to be involved and accept responsibility themselves.
Just as the reconfederation of Canada is going to have to involve 30 million Canadians, so too, ultimately - maybe not tomorrow, but some day - the involvement of the average Canadian in foreign policy will be just as normative as the involvement of the Canadians in the health of the companies selling products and services in the shopping centres.
We are transitional people and democracy is changing. You are seeing it happen now. I think that is the issue you are trying to confront now: how do we engage these Canadians? How do we engage these Canadians and get them to act upon these values of duty, responsibility and global commitment that we see in the polls? How do we get them to act in a way such that they actually do something, since they are no longer deferring to Ottawa, the bureaucrats and the elected officials to act on their behalf? In my judgment, it's a major transition in our democracy.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Adams.
We'll move now to Mr. Assadourian, if I may. I'm sorry, Mr. Smillie, do you want to comment?
Mr. Smillie: I was just going to say... The question is why should we change public opinion. I agree. I don't think we need to change public opinion. As Mr. Adams said, and as so many of the opinion polls I've seen showed, Canadian values are quite strong. Canadians by and large want to do the right thing. The problem is that they don't know how to do the right thing. I agree. It's because we haven't explained it to them properly. We haven't explained why it's important. We haven't explained what works and what doesn't work and why it doesn't work. Did it fail because we were stupid and bungled maliciously, or did it fail because it was a legitimate experiment that we learned from and are now building on?
The problem is that while these issues are becoming larger and more important for Canadians, the world out there is getting more dangerous, and the impact... We just can't pretend that it has nothing to do with us any more.
At the same time, we're cutting back on almost everything we're doing, and it's not just Canada doing that. The industrialized countries spent less money on development assistance last year than in any year since 1973. Ironically, the only countries increasing their aid programs are countries like New Zealand and Ireland, which are very poor. Ireland has 17% unemployment, but the Irish contribution to ODA is going up quite dramatically because Irish people support it. They understand it. They believe in it. Some want to do the right thing. Some understand how important it is and understand that if Ireland wants to play a role in the world and not just be an island on the west coast of Europe, it has to be involved.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Assadourian, will you be fairly brief? We're coming to a close.
Mr. Assadourian: I have two questions. One is to do with the presentation you made,Mr. Adams, about roles for Canada, your 1993-1995 columns. In 1993, as we well know, we were in the middle of a recession or towards the end of the recession period; unemployment was 11.6%, interest rates were high and what have you. Promoting human rights was higher than it was in 1995, when it was 65%.
The same thing can be said about environmental protection, about assistance to poor countries and links with the Soviet Union. It was higher in 1993 than 1995, which was a more prosperous period. Again, in perceptions for foreign assistance from 1977 to 1995, some questions were asked only in 1995. Are you telling me that these questions were never asked in the past, in 1977 or what have you? You have three questions like that. Can you comment on that? I'll ask my second question when you have finished with the first.
Mr. Adams: The 1993 and 1995 surveys were the two where we asked a number of parallel questions that we're able to compare. Some questions go back to twenty years ago, but not this particular question. We get smarter over time and ask more questions or different questions. I don't always have tracking from twenty or twenty-five years ago.
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You were saying about how in 1993 I suppose we were in the recession, in 1994 we had come out of it a bit and in 1995 we were slipping back into it again, so in both cases the Canadians were pretty pessimistic. They were pretty pessimistic about the economy. They were very worried about their own jobs or jobs for people in their families.
As you can see, over the period of the 1990s our tracking is showing is a decline in support for foreign assistance in Canada, as governments, including the federal government, are telling people that we are going to have to cut back on the benefits Canadians have typically had from the government, and telling people that our debt is so large, and so on... So there is that sense that we maybe should be looking after our own first and there is this declining support.
On the other hand, there is of course a sense of very high levels of support in areas like human rights, environmental protection and peacekeeping. Again, you have this conflict between our values, our sense that we are global citizens, and what's happening here. What in fact can we do that will have a real effect?
It is not an easy thing. There are a lot of complex motives and emotions in the Canadian pysche on this issue. However, the secular trend that I see is that more and more the individual Canadian will decide and will defer less and less to what I have called ``elite leadership'' to decide on his behalf.
Mr. Assadourian: My second question will be a quick one. Correct me if I am wrong. You have stated that what people see on TV affects their charity, their will to give to charities or NGOs. Am I right? If there is a violent bombing in Bosnia, for example, and you don't show that on TV, it will have a negative impact, according to what you said, on charity that we send to Bosnia. Am I right?
Mr. Adams: The workings of the human mind are complicated. If you see something on television that you can relate to, that is emotionally evocative, that gets you angry or sad or depressed or whatever, one prediction is that it's so upsetting to you, you do nothing because you don't know what you are going to do and you just... It looks like the world is falling apart.
Mr. Assadourian: In general, if you show it on TV it's favourable to the contributions, isn't it?
Mr. Adams: Generally, yes, and Ian would know this far better than I do. When you have an Ethiopia or Somalia and it's on television the NGOs are more effective in making their appeals for that period of time. As the TV coverage drops off I'm sure the level of public support drops off because it's not a hot issue. Some other hot issue has replaced that issue. Certainly television is the most powerful medium that we've ever seen for communicating to large numbers of people to move them.
Ian, you have a comment.
Mr. Smillie: My concern with that is that as long as it is in the news, fine, but when it's not in the news... There are a lot of things that aren't in the news that need attention. My example is Sierra Leone, which is not in the news. It can only get $9 million from governments, governments who do have information, who do have political information. They don't have to watch it on CNN. The general public has never been asked for a donation for Sierra Leone, so Sierra Leone just... Nothing happens.
The Chairman: Right. Perhaps I could just quickly ask you one wrap-up question,Mr. Adams. Then we have to move on to our next panel.
Minister Axworthy came before us just recently and talked about the inextricable linkings between foreign and domestic policy now, and we are very conscious of that in this committee. So when I look at your list of number one problems in the views of Canadians - unemployment 35%, national unity, economy, deficit - what I would like to ask you is... Listening to Mr. Smillie and listening to the direct relationship, for example, in relation to health, we know that AIDS and many of our other health issues are now coming at us from outside of the country and we have to be able to deal with them. We know environmental issues are not necessarily created in Canada. They're often ones we have to react to. The list goes on and on.
Your top three, apart from national unity, are unemployment, the economy and the deficit. All of those are inextricably linked to our international trading performance, the international economic world within which we live, the frustrations of globalization, etc.
When you tell us that these are the top preoccupations of Canadians, to what extent are you capable of segregating out of that and understanding to what extent Canadians understand that these are international and not domestic issues, and that we can't resolve them in an isolated context ourselves, that we cannot solve our unemployment problem, our deficit problem, or our economic problems totally by ourselves, with a totally made-in-Canada solution? Do Canadians understand that, and does that extend into the area we're interested in here today, an understanding that at some point, as Ian pointed out to us, the developing world fits into that picture of the ultimate security of Canadians, both economically and physically, in a much more integrated world?
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Mr. Adams: This is complicated, of course. Politicians look at public opinion for two reasons. First, they realize they have to educate public opinion and lead public opinion, and people are looking for leadership, because they don't have all the answers. In other areas you look at public opinion and say, this is what the public thinks; I have to respect it and I'll do my best to give it to them. It's always a judicious mixture of the two. FDR was a past master at using public opinion polls both to lead the public and to follow the public in a judicious way that helped him win four elections in a row.
It seems to me you must look at public opinion and say okay, if they are concerned about unemployment and the economy, then you would want to be making rational arguments to people of various levels of education and understanding and sophistication and so on that make a linkage about how our involvement abroad is something that in the end is going to help these core problems. So you tell stories about how countries were once desperate and dependent, foreign aid helped them, and you get the tigers in the east, and what are the tigers now doing? They're buying products from Canada. They're buying products from Canada and it's creating jobs in Canada.
I just invented a simple idea. It has to be rational. It has to be factual. It has to be made in a way that is emotionally evocative.
I think you do have to make a number of these arguments, understanding where the Canadian people are coming from. If that is the case, then there is hope for continuing behaviour by Canadians as individuals, as consumers, as citizens, in the support of something I guess everyone in this room thinks is important, which is that Canada has a responsibility abroad.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Before we break, I would like to announce to members of the committee and the other participants here today that we have with us Madam Nin Saphon, who has just arrived. She is vice-chair of the Committee on Human Rights and the Reception of Complaints of the National Assembly of Cambodia. She has joined us with Mr. Sunleng Hang to sit in on our committee proceedings.
Madam Saphon, welcome.
[Translation]
Welcome to the committee.
[English]
We will all have an opportunity to introduce ourselves to you at the break. We're pleased to have a parliamentarian from Cambodia here with us today.
I thank our two participants very much for their very insightful comments. We appreciate your attendance. Thank you.
I would like to adjourn now for five minutes, members, to give us a chance to get the next panel in place.
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The Chairman: Members, we're very fortunate to have with us in our next panel a representative group of people who can help us come to grips with the problem that is set out in your program about the need for an understanding of what the main actors need to do in terms of educating public opinion on global issues. This is an extraordinarily important issue, which was clearly illustrated in the last panel.
We are lucky to have with us six qualified competent people, and this will therefore not give us a great deal of time for questions. We will extend the time to 12:15 p.m. I've asked the panel if they'd be good enough to try to keep their initial comments to ten minutes, but even with that there will be very little time for questions, so members will hopefully be supportive of the chair if I try to make sure that the questions are brief and everybody sticks to the five-minute limits.
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I would ask if Madam Janet Zukowsky, who is vice-president of CIDA's Canadian Partnership Branch, could lead off.
Ms Janet Zukowsky (Vice-President, Canadian Partnership Branch, Canadian International Development Agency): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[Translation]
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the CCIC for proposing this forum, to the standing committee for proceeding with it and for inviting me to speak here today, to all of the other participants and to the development education community across Canada for their past and future efforts.
[English]
In view of the rapidly changing global context and competing domestic priorities, it is most timely to examine public understanding of international issues. In CIDA, I wish to point out, there are two major programs involved in increasing public understanding of international development. The first is the communications program, which focuses on increasing public awareness of CIDA activities and which Madam Labelle, our president, will address in more detail during the lunch session. The second is the development education program, which is part of the Canadian partnership program, for which I am responsible. It focuses on increasing public awareness of the broader international development issues through development information, development education and global education.
``The international development and global education community in Canada is at a crossroads''. This is a direct quotation from a recent proposal that CIDA received from the provincial councils, and I couldn't agree with it more. In fact, all of us in the international development community are at a crossroads: governments, NGOs, the private sector, academia and international organizations.
We are, all of us, trying to function often with outdated and unresponsive models in a time of dizzying change when nothing seems constant or predictable. Change, of course, implies uncertainty, insecurity and discomfort, but change also means new beginnings, fresh starts and opportunities that did not exist before.
That is the sum total of my introductory comments. Let me cut directly to the chase.
I recognize that one of the incentives for today's forum was the termination last year of CIDA's public participation program, a total reduction of just over $11 million, which eliminated funding to 101 development education organizations across Canada. Yet Canada's new foreign policy states very clearly that the government will, and I quote, ``continue support for programs which build development awareness and provide Canadians with information on Canada's development activities''. Why then was the long-time public participation program, which included global education, terminated?
I think the first important thing to note is that CIDA did not end all support for development awareness and education. In fact, much of the development education program remains intact. NGOs that are currently receiving project funding from CIDA may dedicate up to 10% of their funds for development education.
The development education funding of program-funded NGOs, universities and colleges, cooperatives, unions, municipalities and professional associations has been preserved, so that while much visibility has been lost, much of the money remains. Indeed, CIDA continues to encourage its partners to engage in development education activity by awarding points for it when deciding on future funding allocations.
Secondly, there is a rationale for bringing the traditional public participation program to an end. In the course of a dozen years CIDA spent $130 million on the program. It remained, however, for the most part a creature of CIDA, sustained by ODA dollars, not viable without that flow and in some cases not truly rooted n the community.
The termination of PPP was based on three principles: that the right place to spend ODA funds is overseas; that responsibility for development education should be shared between CIDA and its partners; and that responsibility for development education is best assumed by those partners working on development overseas.
There were, of course, many objections to that very tough decision. When programs are cut, jobs go, and we're all aware that a lot of people have invested a great deal of time, energy, intelligence and idealism into development education, often with admirable results, seldom with adequate, if any, pay.
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There were protests that the changed pattern of funding for development education tends to favour central Canada, especially Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. As a western Canadian, I confess that I share that concern.
Doubt was expressed about premature termination of global education, which was scheduled for phase-out in the year 2000. Again I assume we can all share the conviction that making young Canadians aware of the world they're growing up to inherit should be a high priority.
I'll comment on those concerns in a moment, but first I want to say why I believe that decision was made and why I also believe that, however painful its immediate consequences, perhaps in a broader perspective it was well timed and liberating.
In his Development Dictionary Wolfgang Sachs writes:
- The last 40 years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time
is ripe to write its obituary.
But the entire development education community - I speak of all of us, and I'll include government in this community - was essentially stuck in a rut on a dead-end street trying to get across a mix of messages that were fresh and relevant in the 1960s but are increasingly out of sync with the realities of the 1990s.
Those messages were not only increasingly irrelevant to Canadians, but also they were sometimes inconsistent and conflicting. Some of them aimed at encouraging public participation, some at advancing global education, some at raising funds. And when development messages did make it through the high level of background noise in our strident society, some of those messages were saying that development works, some were advocating charity for the poor, and some were urging involvement but aiming at quantity rather than quality.
Official thinking had fallen behind as well. Aid programs were shaped at the height of the Cold War, designed to show Third World countries that we cared about them more than others did. That aging conceptual framework had nothing left to lean on when the Berlin Wall fell.
I'll forgo further clichés about preaching to the converted and mixed messages and say just that I think the development education in Canada had come to the end of a phase and had run out of steam and needed renewal.
What lessons can we learn from the past to guide us in the future? I can't imagine any rational person denying that Canada's relationship with developing countries - in other words, with 80% of humanity and many of the world's fastest-growing economies - is important to our future. This means that globalization is needed by Canadians, particularly the young, as part of their world view and their stock of knowledge, so they can make informed choices in the globalized world of the 21st century.
We need development education. I believe it to be in the national interest. But the question is, where do we go from here? If we are standing at a crossroads, how do we get back on track?
I believe we need to go back to basics. We have to rethink the whole rationale for development cooperation and we need to reframe the messages that flow from it. Certainly, with the various afflictions of the industrialized countries, the upsurge of Asian economies, and the distress signals coming from the global environment, with each passing year the traditional concept of development is looking less credible and more like an intellectual artifact from an earlier time.
But there is fresh thinking we can tap into. The concept of development is changing from the simplistic materialism of GNP fixation to a more subtle and yet simple people-centred vision of what it means to be developed.
I'd like to cite just one brief quote from the Human Development Report of the UNDP, which I think has become an instant classic. That quotation is:
- In the final analysis, human security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job
that was not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not
silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons - it is a concern with human life and
dignity.
That's the kind of clear thinking, simple language and moral force that may have the power to renew the rationale for development cooperation, and give us strong, striking, consistent messages that catch the ear, win the minds and move the hearts of Canadians.
Not that this will be easy. We live in confusing times. We're drowning in media messages. Canadians have a lot to think about, to worry about.
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Fortunately, we have many assets to work with: we have 30 years of expertise in development education...and a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the developing world and its people, gained by many thousands of Canadians serving in the field, whether with CUSO or Crossroads or NGOs or Canadian companies.
We have a favourable, even a unique, reputation and positioning as a "donor" nation that is non-colonial, bilingual and multicultural, rich in capacity in key areas of development, and able to offer access to advanced technology.
And, best of all, we have a mandate, an official blessing for moving ahead with new thinking and new messages.
[English]
Everything is pretty well said in Canada in the World. Not only does it sanction development education, about which I was speaking earlier, but in the first chapter it talks about a rethinking of human security along the lines I've just discussed, and this comes after the end of the Cold War.
I know my time is running short, so I would like to just sum up very quickly. Maybe I'll do this bit in French.
[Translation]
I think the key to this lies in Canadian values, in our natural, national commitment to equity and social justice, to compassion and sharing, to human rights and democratic development. Those are values that shaped our NGOs, values that are part of our bedrock belief, our national character. Canadians want to see those values reflected in the emerging world of the 21st century.
Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Zukowsky.
[English]
Next we have Mr. Posterski and Ms Sutherns from World Vision Canada. Again, I don't know whether you both wish to speak.
Mr. Don Posterski (Vice-President, World Vision Canada): Thank you for the invitation to participate. Our attempt here will be to map the major strategies that we as one of the brand name organizations in Canada are using to influence public opinion and encourage response. We do so with a commitment to sustainable development as well as relief, alongside global education and advocacy in our nation.
In terms of identifying Canadian interests, we want to affirm the earlier comments that were made from other research perspectives, but we would like to look beneath the surface of Canadians' first recalled concerns. When we asked Angus Reid to assist us with research just within the last two months, what we discovered was that 50% of Canadians agree that even in these difficult economic times our government should maintain its current levels of aid to developing countries in the Third World.
With sensitivity to earlier references to religious values changing, emerging values, and mainstream values emerging, in Canada there are still approximately one in four Canadians who relate to religious structures. That means they're involved in a religious expression of life. When we compare frequent attenders with those who do not attend, those who attend are three times more likely to be giving to global compassion, but we do look to the future with concern in terms of emerging values.
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We asked further questions, however, and we see Canadians said ``I feel I personally have an important responsibility to help poor people in countries around the world''. Again, the majority of Canadians respond with an affirming yes, they would personally be involved.
Then an even more intriguing question. We asked, ``I would be prepared to pay higher taxes so that the government could do more for poor people living in developing countries''. We have two out of ten Canadians who responded in a positive way to the tax issue.
We agree also with earlier research comments. We would like to use research to help us understand our Canadian constituency. So in this same national bilingual study we have just done we looked at Canadian motivation. Of the group that indicate they give personal support to the needs of the poor around the world, 50% give less than $100. The balance of Canadians give more significant amounts. But what we also note in relation to Canada is that various motivations trigger different qualities of behaviour, if I could put it that way. Canadians who give out of a sense of altruism, out of a belief structure, out of a faith motivation, give more, they give more frequently, and they sustain their giving over a long period.
Ms Rebecca Sutherns (Public Policy Officer, World Vision Canada): Do you get a sense of the scope of what we're talking about?
As a Christian humanitarian relief and development organization, World Vision Canada's revenue this past year reached approximately $90 million. Of that total, 84% was raised from private sources. So as an organization we are heavily reliant on private funds. Approximately 80% of that would be people investing in sustainable development, as contrasted in this case with relief, primarily in regular donations from individual Canadians. This represents 32% of all of the private donations given to international development charities in Canada.
References were made earlier to some of the benefits of child sponsorship in connecting with Canadians and providing that relevance and the concrete reference. What we've discovered is that the four major child sponsorship organizations in Canada collectively represent 68% of those private donations receipted by Revenue Canada for international development last year. This demonstrates the importance of establishing a personal link between Canadian concern and overseas need, and the importance also of engaging in macro-level sustainable development while at the same time maintaining that personal link.
In response to the wide range of Canadian identities and motivations we've already talked about, it's important that NGOs do adopt multiple communication channels to get their message of sustainable development out. Communication must cater to the intended audiences, starting with where they are and moving them forward in their understanding. For this reason World Vision Canada intentionally engages in a broad spectrum of communication media, ranging from television and print advertising through to educational publications and advocacy and justice initiatives.
We also work proactively to develop strategic relationships with the media. As we've already heard this morning, the media, particularly television, are perhaps the most powerful social influence in our culture. In fact, this recognition did lead World Vision Canada to become involved in television promotion as early as 1976.
Used responsibly, television is an important public awareness tool. We do need to recognize its limitations, however, in explaining the causes behind what people are seeing, and its tendency towards desensitization, which Mr. Adams spoke of earlier. But it does greet people in their living rooms, challenging both their heads and their hearts to become more active as global citizens.
To use one very specific example of how NGOs can work to shape public attitudes, one strategy we use is focusing public attention on a particular issue of critical concern and connecting global issues with the lives of ordinary Canadians. I will cite just one case study of that.
The ongoing campaign to ban the use of anti-personnel land mines is an excellent recent example of the effectiveness of collective NGO action. Individual NGOs such as World Vision and the Mines Action Canada coalition to which they belong, with others, have worked actively over the past eighteen months with the media, government officials, including many of you here, and the public, to influence attitudes in favour of a legislated ban on land mines. It is a compelling issue, with a clear solution, and in that sense it is perhaps atypical of many of the development problems we're considering. It's a problem an aware public is eager to support.
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With the moratoria on mine use, production, and export announced in January, we have witnessed a remarkable turnaround in Canadian policy in response to public concern. Once seen as a marginal voice, NGO input is now actively being sought in shaping a Canadian government campaign to eliminate these weapons.
Although we're still seeking a fully legislated ban in Canada, the progress so far has rarely been seen in NGO development, education, and advocacy circles. We recognize the important role NGOs have played, and the catalytic role governments can play, in shaping public opinion on this issue.
[Translation]
If you are interested, there are documents available in French on the subject of anti-personnel land mines.
[English]
Recognizing that both individual and collaborative efforts are important in influencing and forming public opinion, World Vision Canada also has a strong commitment to the work of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation in these areas. Our commitment includes participating in the CCIC task force on building public support for sustainable human development, of which you will hear more this afternoon.
Mr. Posterski: We are also concerned about the growing perception of aid fatigue. We probed Canadian attitudes, particularly about Africa. We asked ``If you had $2,000 to give away to less developed areas of the world, in which of the following areas of the world do you think that money would do the most good?'' We continued to see that four out of ten Canadians identify Africa as the place where it can do the most good. Latin America is identified by two out of ten.
But when we look at Africa itself and ask whether we should continue to support Africa as Canada is doing at present, what we discover, again from this national bilingual survey, is that only 8% of Canadians think we should stop giving to prevailing and continuing need in Africa. You can see 13% would invite more need, and there is a growing perception in one-third of Canadians' minds that need should be connected to countries that are making progress.
When we compare Canadians who give to global concern with reference to those who do not, the pattern is quite predictable. Those who give think we should be giving more. Only 3% of those who give think we should cut back.
Also, Canadians who give are more compassionate. They are not putting conditions on giving. They're seeing need and they think we should respond internationally to it.
Ms Sutherns: As an organization in partnership last year with more than 300,000 Canadians across the country committed to working for a better future for the world's children, obviously we are concerned about nurturing long-term relationships with our donors. That's part of what building public support means. Because Canadian pessimism does prevail about aid getting to the people who need it most, we're especially concerned to assure our Canadian partners that their donations do make a difference.
An extraordinarily high number of Canadians do have a concern about whether the aid actually gets there. Yet they do give and they are supportive.
So strategically shaping these relationships are challenges that are in their beginning stages for World Vision Canada in terms of looking at how we nurture those relationships in the long term. We do know there are critical elements in building these partnerships, however. I'll cite just four.
The first is establishing a personal connection between those who support development here and people in developing countries. This refers back to some of the elements of relevance and getting a sense of personal control over massive international problems, as we spoke about earlier this morning.
The second one is the credibility issue: meeting the expectations of our donor partners through good customer service, organizational transparency, credibility, integrity, those kinds of things.
The third one, which is often done in partnership with other NGOs and with government, is advancing our donors' understanding of and engagement in global issues through education and advocacy initiatives. Again, it's part of nurturing a growing understanding over time of how they relate to us.
The final one is assuring our donors that their investment does make a lasting difference in people's lives. This is where the good-news stories come in, as we referred to earlier.
These principles aren't surprising. All of us want to work with integrity and make a difference in people's lives. World Vision's fifty years of experience throughout the world has given us the confidence to say we do believe international assistance is both a wise and worthy investment for Canadians.
The Chairman: Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation.
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[Translation]
Our next witness is Ms Carole Beaulieu from L'Actualité.
[English]
Ms Carole Beaulieu (Journalist, L'Actualité): Mr. Chairman, mesdames et messieurs les députés, my remarks will be in French. They're entitled ``The Impossible Route toward Global Journalism''.
[Translation]
My comments will focus on four questions which I will attempt to answer. The first question is this: is it the responsibility of the media to promote public awareness? Second question: how much coverage do the media give to development? Third question: what accounts for this situation? Fourth question: what lies in store for the future?
Is it the responsibility of the media to promote public awareness? The answer is no. The media do not have a mandate to heighten the public's awareness of any particular issue. Privately owned for the most part in our country, the media's primary responsibility is to earn profits for shareholders or, at the very least, to operate on a cost-effective basis. In order to do so, they must offer consumers a product that interests them enough to buy it. There are many things that catch people's attention. from the final score of a hockey game to the latest scientific discoveries, from the wide range of information that enables consumers to make enlightened decisions in their lives to the broad issues that affect our society. Our job is to satisfy people's curiosity.
With respect to development, we can accomplish this task in several ways. We can file either simple reports, somewhat more complex ones or very complex ones.
For example, a simple report would involve interviewing for the local newspaper a young co-operant just back from Africa. People are interested in this type of report because there is a human, touching side to the story.
More complex reports are those which attempt to explain how aid is provided, where the taxpayers' dollars go and how aid organization donations are used and to explore whether this aid has changed anything over the past 25 years. Reports like this capture people's attention because they don't want to see their money wasted.
The most difficult reports are those which attempt to explore the relationship between the people who live here in our country and who are increasingly caught up in market globalization, and the lives of people in developing countries.
In any case, people will absorb this information only if it is presented clearly to them, as part of programming or publications which respect their culture, their level of education and their daily constraints.
The public has never been as swamped with such wide-ranging information as it is today. Why would people choose to read about development rather than about green plants or snowboards? The experts have tried many times to identify what makes a story newsworthy. We will get back to this later.
Secondly, how much coverage do the media currently give to development issues? No comprehensive study has been done to determine whether the media today give more or less coverage to this issue than they did in the past. Some editors will tell you that coverage is greater than ever. Some correspondents, on the other hand, will tell you that coverage has never been so limited. There are those who will even tell you that there is more coverage given to this issue in Quebec than anywhere else in the country. Quite frankly, no one knows.
In the case of the print media, a study conducted recently at the University of Windsor showed that the international coverage given by the country's six major dailies to this issue declined from 35% to 26% of the overall content between 1982 and 1992. In Quebec's case, the decline was even more pronounced. We can assume from this that international development issues suffered the same fate.
Not a single media in Quebec has reporters who cover only international development issues. Our last news program on the subject, Nord-Sud, broadcast by Radio-Québec, is flagging. Elsewhere in Canada, only John Stackhouse from the Globe and Mail holds this kind of post. We currently rely almost exclusively on freelance journalists to cover this field.
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Never before have so many images from around the world been captured on television. However, these images, often ones of destitution, reinforce people's sense of powerlessness and turmoil in a confusing world that no longer makes any sense to them. The only sense they seem able to make of all this is that they are losing their jobs to the Mexicans.
International coverage is a costly proposition. Editors will argue that they have no money. In turn, correspondents argue that everything is a matter of priority.
Proponents of development maintain that the country is focused inward too much. Quebec media have only two permanent correspondents assigned to countries which fall into the category of developing nations. The situation isn't any better elsewhere in Canada.
What explanation do we have for this state of affairs?
You already know the obvious answers: lack of money; lack of interest on the part of readers, something which previous witnesses have explored; scepticism as to how useful aid really is; irritation in the face of waste and bureaucracy; confusion; other more immediate and more pressing problems deserving of our attention.
A less obvious reason was discussed at a recent conference.
The globalization of economies and communications hasn't only affected our trade relations; our societies have also felt the impact. When jobs disappear, when children must move away from home to find work and when the social safety net begins to fray, Canadians are no longer able to see themselves as donors.
NGOs working in the field are only beginning to ask themselves if they should appeal to people in their capacity as citizens.
Just as people accept the terms of the social contract whereby they must pay taxes for road maintenance, perhaps they will one day agree to pay taxes in order to have healthy oceans, rainforests that supply oxygen to North American cities and African neighbours who will no longer try to immigrate here because they will be able to feed their families in dignity in their homeland.
Perhaps that is the way of the future, but we are still a long way from there.
Very few politicians and NGOs adopt this approach to this issue.
Unions are just now starting to realize that their working conditions depend on those of their colleagues in Burma or China. They are slow to develop expertise and even slower to formulate strategies. The media cannot disseminate information that society's agents do not have. The practical problems are numerous.
It is an extremely complex and difficult process to give concrete expression in concise, human reports to the causal effect between the major problems of the Third World and the lives of the people here in Canada. Good subject sources are rare.
The costs are extremely high since correspondents must often travel to several countries. Too often, they are poorly or ill-trained to undertake this kind of reporting mission.
Finally, what does the future hold in store?
There are two areas that we should consider: training correspondents and stepping up our focus on the younger, highly mobile generation which is plugged into the new media and less attached to the old donor image.
Training: unlike the situation in the United States where reporters have access to numerous development grants and to many foundations capable of funding their investigations, journalists here in Canada are increasingly left to fend for themselves.
The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada has ended its bursary program which gave journalists an opportunity to familiarize themselves with an Asian country by spending over one month in the field. This year, CIDA ended its funding of North-South grants which allowed journalists to send young people to a developing country each year. Only a few bursary programs remain, notably the IDRC program. No other private or public program exists to encourage journalists to invest in this kind of training in world journalism.
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However, the outlook is not all bleak. The information highway provides journalists with new sources of information. Hundreds of NGOs in areas as remote as Rwanda are now connected to the Internet. New ties are being forged between Internet users. The latest issue of the FAO's magazine Cérès devotes approximately ten fascinating pages to these new networks. Young Canadians are more plugged-in than the older generation. They are also extremely mobile. Many of them know that their future is closely linked to the future of the developing world.
Media that fail to satisfy this generation's curiosity run the same risk as the dinosaur of prehistoric times. The communications field is itself undergoing numerous upheavals. Some analysts predict that newspapers will soon restrict their coverage to local news stories. People will surf the information highway for more comprehensive, up-to-date international news .
Signs of this trend can already been seen in Quebec. The consequences arising from this new approach to providing information are as yet unimaginable. Putting it simply, we will be navigating in very different waters in the years to come.
In conclusion, journalists are witnesses. If society throws in the towel and shows little imagination or visionary thinking, journalists will have no choice but to report what they see. They are no better or no worse than the society in which they live. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Beaulieu, for your optimism.
[English]
Our next speaker is Mr. Nazeer Ladhani, the chief executive officer of the Aga Khan Foundation.
[Translation]
Mr. Nazeer Ladhani (Chief Executive Officer, Aga Khan Foundation Canada): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm very happy to be here this morning. I will be very brief, because I think it is better to save time for questions.
[English]
Our brief is available to the members in both English and French. I'll be brief and leave some time for questions.
My summary will talk about context and perhaps explain why we at the Aga Khan Foundation Canada find that public engagement is of primary importance. I'll share with the members some of our strategic thinking on how we approach this very difficult task, what messages we use, what lessons we have learned, and what are the questions that remain to be answered.
To give a context, the Aga Khan Foundation has been in Canada since 1980, and today we enjoy the support of over 60,000 Canadians from all walks of life, from coast to coast. We have a large volunteer network of about 700 people across the country, and the Aga Khan Foundation of Canada is part of an international Aga Khan development network with a presence in 12 to 15 countries.
We look at public engagement as a top priority for us for the following reasons. First, we feel that we have strong and deep roots both in Canada and in the Third World, and this implies a special responsibility as well as an obligation to inform Canadians about the issues facing the Third World. We also feel that the building of public evidence is an essential part of the development process, not an afterthought.
Third, it's important to keep the public informed on the development issues and to counteract emotional fund-raising and the media focus on despair and disaster. NGOs, like any other stakeholders in the development world, need to build support with non-traditional audiences such as the youth and business - the segments that are not normally reached by most NGOs.
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Our strategy is based on three areas of focus. First, we do our best to create activities or events that engage the public directly. We are finding that passive messages bombarded on the public don't work. We like to create participatory activities that involve the public. Here the focus is very much on the grass roots.
As NGOs we always talk about grassroots development in the Third World, but we forget that we have our own grass roots in Canada that have to be engaged in a participatory way, to be involved and to become more supportive of international issues.
Second, there is our partnership with the mass media. We are very fortunate that the media has been extremely supportive of us. This includes The Globe and Mail, the CBC, L'Actualité, Le Devoir, Maclean's magazine, and so on. I will not cover them all, but from coast to coast the media has been supportive.
I agree that it's not the media's responsibility to inform the public, but it's the media's responsibility to allow access for the messages to pass through. We work very closely with CIDA in this. I'll discuss this as we move along.
The third part of our stratagem is collaboration with others. We work closely with cities, with business, with other NGOs, and with professional associations. In this way we can leverage our experience and learn from each other. We also try to create synergies between those three elements of strategy. We are finding that, where it is possible, that synergy can be extremely useful.
I will not go into the detailed examples of our activities, because parts of them are familiar to you: for example, Partnership Walk, which is held in 11 cities across the country, and some of you have been involved in this. We invest in volunteer training and in youth training. We provide career development opportunities for young Canadians to make a career in development issues.
One program I feel I should share with this group is our PSA campaign, which we call A Canadian Tradition. In this we have been working with CIDA's communications branch for the last four years. A Canadian Tradition does indeed portray the values of Canadians. The messages in there bring out the best in Canadians.
We are finding that development is also very important in creating national unity, because this is one common bond that all Canadians share.
Moving on to what messages we use, first, we preserve and promote the dignity of people in the Third World. We believe that people in the Third World have the same motivations, aspirations, and ambitions as we have.
Second, we feel that development works. Some mistakes may be made, but development works, and we want to show Canadians what a difference Canadian contributions are making, what the success stories are. We back the success stories with concrete monitoring, concrete evaluation, and so on.
We feel that Canadians are proud of their achievements, and if those messages are conveyed to Canadians, we find that they become increasingly supportive of the work.
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What lessons have we learned? First, I think it is possible to engage Canadians from all walks of life. It is possible to influence the skeptics and the unconverted, provided the right messages and right effort is put into this. We also find the most impact could be achieved if the messages are backed by solid research and solid evidence. Canadians, supportive as they may be, want more hard core evidence that development is working. We've learned that the minds and hearts of Canadians could be won.
This is, in brief, our experience to date. As I have said, we don't have all the answers and one area we are exploring is the role of systematic learning and the role of research in developing public support for international development. To this end, Mr. Chairman, we are planning a June round table to examine the issues of research and of systematic learning, and how these can contribute to building better public support.
I'll take this opportunity to invite all of you to join us here in Ottawa at the round table on June 22 and 23. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Ladhani. That's a very good suggestion.
Our last speaker on this panel is Mr. Wulff, who is the executive director of the South Pacific Peoples' Foundation of Canada.
Mr. Stuart Wulff (Executive Director, South Pacific Peoples' Foundation of Canada): Most of my experience in development education over the last fourteen years has been at the level of coordination and strategizing in terms of where development education can go. While I will touch briefly on some examples from the work of my own organization, what I mostly want to focus on are some of the general trends and issues I think are shaping where we've come from and where we have to go from here.
Historically, Canada has been viewed as a leader in development education, particularly community-based development education. I want to start with a quote, actually. This is from a report. In 1987 the Australians were setting up a government funding program for development education modelled on CIDA, as a number of other countries have over the years copied the Canadian experience. A fellow by the name of Jeffrey Atkinson came to Canada to study what was going on here and to write a report for Australian non-governmental organizations, reflecting on what Australia could learn from the Canadian experience. In his conclusion, he said this:
- There are a number of impressive things happening in the field of development education in
Canada. The ready availability of government funding means that people with ideas and
initiatives can have those ideas put into effect. There is a much larger number of people working
in the field than there is in Australia, and a strong network has been built up all over the country,
which has penetrated areas and sectors which we in Australia have hardly touched. It is no
wonder that development education in Canada is so highly regarded internationally.
Like any one of us, I think, who would be thoughtful, he concluded this could not all be attributed simply to the work of development education. There are many factors shaping different public attitudes here in Canada and Australia. But at the same time he felt the investment in development education in Canada had to get at least part of the credit for the fact that Canadians were so profoundly more positive than Australians around a whole range of international development attitudes.
The generally positive view of development education in Canada that exists internationally has meant many people come to study it here in Canada and Canadian practitioners are invited to go to other countries to share some of our experience.
As well, individual organizations have also gained an international reputation. For example, my own organization, the South Pacific Peoples' Foundation, started out developing development education programs targeted at Canadians. But as the years have gone by, we have found that much of what we do is also valued elsewhere. The quarterly periodical on development issues in the Pacific that we publish now goes to subscribers in over 40 countries. Our annual conference currently draws participants from a number of countries each year. And we find every week we get inquiries from many countries around the world asking for information about what's going on in development in the Pacific.
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Development education, in a sense, has existed in Canada as long as people have been talking about Canada's place in the world - as long as Canadians have travelled and come home and talked about their experiences. But as an organized and ambitious field of endeavour it really started in the 1960s and took off in the 1970s, when both government and non-governmental funding for development education increased rapidly and most of the organizations that do development education today were formed. In some ways I would say it started to plateau in the 1980s, and we've been struggling somewhat in the 1990s.
Obviously when one makes a short generalization like that it distorts to some extent, and there are certainly many examples that would fly in the face of that generalization. But I think many of us in development education right now are at a point where we're rethinking much of what we've done in the past. We are critically assessing where to go from here, and there's a lot of experimenting about where development education should go from here.
By the late 1980s, CIDA and others were quite critical of current development education efforts. There were questions being raised about the impact education was having. There were charges that we were only talking to the converted. In response to that, the previous government set up something called the National Advisory Committee on Development Education, on which I sat with a number of other people for about two and a half years. It was a very interesting committee and included a very diverse mix of people. I was the only one on the committee who was extensively involved in a direct way with community-based development education. It took a very critical look at what was going on, and contrary to what a number of people were saying, the report it provided to the minister and to CIDA took a somewhat different view of what was going on. It was quite highly positive about what was going on, while identifying a number of critical gaps that needed to be addressed.
I want to read just one quote from the first report that committee submitted to the government:
- While international development education has been carried out in Canada for nearly three
decades, it has never been the recipient of large amounts of funding. The funding levels have
always lagged, but never so much as they do today. Resources are seriously overextended. The
program's partners...
- - and this was speaking specifically about the public participation program, which is no longer
with us -
- ...have had to absorb inflation costs within their activities. PPP's partners are underfunded and
understaffed. In fact a great many development education groups are victims of their own
success. They have sensitized their target groups so successfully that demand for their services
has grown beyond the resources available.
The committee recommended that resources for development education needed to increase. At the same time, the committee recommended a number of areas that needed attention. As I said earlier, the community of people doing this work has recognized that even if the resources had stayed the same, it needed to think about new ways of using those resources.
There has always been a tension in Canada and in other countries between diverse community-based education by small organizations that are very close to the public, versus focused coordinated efforts at a national level. Canada went strongly in one direction, putting a strong bias toward the small community-based work, while most other countries went the other way.
Now all countries are recognizing that they went too far in the direction chosen. In Canada, we erred by going too far in terms of very good on-the-ground work by small organizations directly involving Canadians, with little attention paid to how to strategically focus or bring that together to have a larger broad impact. We're now starting to look at how to remedy that.
People in other countries are recognizing that they focused too much on a few broad national campaigns and they never engaged the public to the degree they needed to build real public support, so they're taking a second look at what we're doing in Canada. All of us are doing that in the context of a drastically changed world.
Janet made the comment earlier that development education was developed to respond to the realities of the 1960s and 1970s, but we're no longer there. I want to just comment on a few of the differences I think development educators are finding in terms of what we're confronting now.
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The 1970s was a rapidly growing period for both financial resources and human resources. Literally floods of young Canadians were starting to come back from overseas work experiences with organizations like CUSO. In the 1990s we're seeing - in some cases precipitously - a decline in resources available to do this work.
The 1970s were characterized by a general optimism in the public about Canada and our role in the world. There was a high public receptivity to a lot of what we were trying to say. While I think the values haven't fundamentally changed, there is greater pessimism and skepticism in the public today about our role in the world, how successfully we play it and what we can do. There is also more preoccupation with personal and domestic issues.
We found in the 1970s that there was a more coherent and accessible audience, as almost everybody watched one of two news programs every night. We lived in a society where a lot of our programming involved organizing public events, to which large crowds would come.
Canada in the 1990s is a much more atomized society. Marketers talk about it as a segmented market. It is much harder to draw large groups of Canadians in any one direction. It becomes necessary to try to reach Canadians where they are. People sit at home and watch videos rather than go out to movie theatres any more. I could carry on. It's a fundamentally different society, and the methodologies we use to reach that society must change to take account of that.
Personal approaches work well. More and more people rely on the media, while at the same time the media itself is fragmenting into a more segmented market. Simply working with one media outlet with one message is not going to reach large numbers of Canadians either.
Historically, youth have been highly engaged and receptive in development education, and fairly optimistic about their own future. Now, youth are more preoccupied with their own future, less optimistic, and less engaged in development education. I would also point out that they have remained quite extensively engaged at the local community level. One of the fears about the declining support for local development education is that we seriously risk losing youth at the one place where they are still actively and extensively engaged in the work we're doing.
For those development education groups that survived the March massacre of last year, this is a time of rethinking, creativity, experimentation and risk taking. I think those that have survived, though, were already adapting before the CIDA cuts.
There are a number of areas that I think need attention. We clearly need to diversify sources of support. Even if it continues, government support will not be the predominant factor it has been in the history of development education to date. We have to tap new resources.
Three years ago, my own organization was raising about $20,000 a year and depending on $50,000 to $60,000 a year in government funding to do our development education. We concluded that had to change, partly because we were concerned about the future of government funding, and partly because we felt it would give us more independence if we had more funding from other sources. With those increasing demands for what we do, we also felt we needed more resources than government would ever be able to provide us.
In the last three years we've tripled our non-government fund-raising and as a result were able to survive the cuts of last year. Four years ago those cuts would have terminated our organization, and we felt the work we were doing was too important to simply allow ourselves to be hostage to that possibility.
How do we deal with the fragmented Canadian public? Some groups are becoming more specialized. They are choosing to become experts at working with a particular part of the Canadian public, and are learning ways of getting to them. Another way we are increasingly responding to that is by working through intermediaries. Instead of directly going out and trying to reach every member of Joe and Jill Public, we're trying to identify partner organizations within Canada - as we always have overseas - that already work with those particular pieces of the segmented public. We are putting into their hands the knowledge, resources, and so on we have, and letting them do the job.
I think it is clear that the media is an important way in which Canadians are being reached. Therefore, we have to work with the media.
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There is a concern that often the media's coverage of these issues is, at least from our point of view, superficial and distorted. A comment was made earlier that very few media in Canada can afford to invest in full-time experts and development reporters. One way in which the NGO community is starting to respond to that is to work with the media more extensively. One organization I worked with eventually had two media professionals on staff training other non-governmental organizations in how to package our stories better for the media and offering assistance to the media on how to cover international stories.
The organization I work with now has gone the other route and is itself becoming more of a media organization. We have taken our traditional dry development education publication and transformed it into a popular magazine on development issues in the Pacific that wouldn't look out of place on a news-stand. It is much more geared to trying to portray things in a way that would appeal to a much larger audience. We're now looking at putting a home page on the Internet and exploring various new ways of reaching Canadians that way.
I want to conclude with two suggestions for where I think the government needs to move in terms of helping development education work effectively. One of those is still the area of resources. In most areas of education of the Canadian public, government investment in education remains important to the feasibility of a lot of what we do, not just development education. I'm not sure exactly how it needs to be done. I'm certainly not proposing that we reinvent the public participation program.
One option the government may want to consider is some kind of arm's-length institution, similar to the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, that would specifically focus on education of Canadians. It was commented earlier that the value of that is that increasingly the government itself is questioned by Canadians as a source of this information.
The second thing is that it would create not only a strategic focus around which money could be focused, not just government money but other money, but also a strategic focus where we could think critically about how that money is best used, rather than the ad hoc kind of decision-making that has prevailed in the past.
The second recommendation I would make is that the government itself and you as members of government need to take a stronger role in advocacy and leadership. One of the recommendations of the National Advisory Committee, which was accepted but I don't think has ever reached its potential, was to create something called International Development Week. The vision we had was that it would feature things like a parliamentary debate on development, which would be televised, and that it would see individual members of Parliament out in the communities working with non-governmental organizations during that week, helping to carry the message of the importance of Canada's global interdependence out to the public.
I don't think we've seen it reach anywhere near that potential. I still think it has the potential, but we're not there yet. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Wulff.
We have approximately 20 minutes for questions because we have some business we would like to do before we break at 12:15 p.m. We've had six very interesting observations, and I apologize to the panellists that we have such a short time for questions. I know the members would like to spend more time with you, but perhaps we'll have another opportunity.
[Translation]
Mr. Paré: When the minister opened the forum this morning, I was somewhat disappointed in that I felt his message bordered somewhat on propaganda and misinformation. However, since the minister isn't here, I won't attack his message any longer.
Getting back to what Ms Zukowsky said, I want to make it very clear that I am not attacking the messenger, but rather the message. Let there be no doubt about that.
Ms Zukowsky is here as a representative of CIDA; therefore, it is my understanding that she conveyed this morning CIDA's official position on the elimination of the Public Participation Program. It was not a personal message that she was delivering, but rather CIDA's message. Therefore, I trust I can be very critical of the message while at the same time respecting the messenger a great deal.
As I listened to Ms Zukowsky, two things came to my mind: firstly, the old proverb that says that when someone wants to get rid of his dog, he claims that he has rabies; secondly, the image of a torturer trying to make his victim understand why he is abusing her.
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I find it somewhat unacceptable for someone to come here and try to make us understand something that is beyond comprehension and to argue that public awareness and education should be left to someone other than the government. Because of a number of past failures, the program is being eliminated.
On the same subject, in his 1993 report the Auditor General made the following comments about the ODA program. He spoke about muddled objectives, about programs spread too thin, bureaucracy and red tape and about the poorly defined mandate which has left CIDA somewhat at the mercy of politicians.
If the government had used the same procedure as CIDA, it would have closed the books because everything wasn't perfect. However, that didn't happen in the case of the program. The government didn't say that it would close the books because everything wasn't perfect and that it would try to correct things. We were advised that the Public Participation Program was being abolished because there had been some failures. I have a great deal of difficulty accepting that.
I would also like to comment very briefly on what some other presenters have said. They demonstrated rather clearly the importance of continuing to promote public understanding of these issues. Recently, I travelled to the UN with colleagues from the House of Commons and Senate. The following message appeared just about everywhere in the hallways: "Peace has a name and that name is development". Do we believe this message? The evidence is clear. OECD countries spend$56 billion a year on development assistance, while around the world, governments spend$800 billion annually on military operations. Do governments really believe in development?
We must continue to promote awareness among Canadians of this important question. I grasped the subtleties of Ms Beaulieu's comments. Essentially, what she is rejecting is propaganda journalism and I can understand that. However, with respect to international development, I think that in order to convince the Canadian public, we will need to convince the government. Indeed, it's not the public that needs convincing, but rather the government. Canadians will have to be given the means to convince their government that it makes no sense to spend $2 billion on development assistance and $10 billion on defence, in light of the changing geopolitical situation in the world.
If this is explained clearly to Canadians, they will understand. NGOs were once largely responsible for getting this message across. However, grants to NGOs have been cut, along with programs. Attempts have been made to silence these organizations.
Mr. Chairman, I apologize if that was not a question. It was more of a heartfelt comment.
The Chairman: That's alright. However, perhaps the witnesses would like to comment briefly on what you said. Since we are running short on time, I would ask you to please keep your comments brief.
Ms Zukowsky: I would just like to say that last year, CIDA had some rather difficult decisions to make both administratively and politically. We had to contend with a budget cut of 15%. Moreover, in view of our commitments to international financial institutions, we lacked a certain amount of flexibility. Consequently, we decided to cut partnership programs, that is programs for which I am responsible. This is the area that was targeted.
[English]
It was simply a matter of taking those parts of the programs that it was felt were not performing or that we could not prove were performing. We have been questioned on that. We have been questioned on it to the extent of somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 letters from the public. So we're certainly getting kind of good at explaining it.
But yes, there were unfortunate and bitter decisions to take. The decisions made were in fact that the public participation program would be regionalized and thematic funds, of which there were 13, were to be decentralized. The decision was made to recentralize them in the hopes of saving money. Then certain decisions were made in terms of international NGOs that did not have headquarters in Canada. Those were the decisions taken.
The Chairman: I wonder if I could just ask a quick follow-up of either Mr. Posterski orMs Sutherns. I remember World Vision coming to my office in Toronto. We discussed this issue, and they were very concerned about it. Would you say that in the year that has taken place, you fear that the sensitization of the Canadian public with respect to foreign affairs, particularly development issues, has been less because of the cancellation of this program?
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Maybe all the panellists could very quickly tell the members of the committee of their experience as a result of the ending of this program, because that's the type of thing we'd like to try to understand.
Ms Sutherns: I appreciate that opportunity. There is some irony to this for World Vision, I must confess, because our development education efforts have never been government funded until after the cuts, which is a very strange thing, because it's very important to know -
The Chairman: The world is full of wonderful paradoxes, but maybe you could explain how you did that.
Ms Sutherns: Indeed. Not the least of those paradoxes is having this kind of forum right on the heels of announcements that our ODA budget is going to reach its lowest levels in thirty years, so there seem to be some real ironies and paradoxes facing us.
Our experience with the cuts has been primarily at the level of, as we said, grassroots networks and distribution channels. That's because although our development education efforts personally have not been affected because we were not government funded, certainly our links, the distribution channels, and the grassroots efforts that have happened right across this country have been dramatically affected by these decisions.
As Janet mentioned earlier, what little focus there is left on development education is focused very heavily on the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle. When you go beyond that, it has been severely affected by these decisions.
So I would like to support the intervention made by the gentleman over here, because certainly the choices this government is making around issues of defence spending and issues of ODA spending seem to stand in the face of an interest in building public support for this issue.
The Chairman: Thank you. Do any of the others wish to comment?
Mr. Wulff: I have two comments. First, I think the impact has been significant, in fact severe. A number of organizations have closed. Other organizations have had to cut back programs. I can't think of a single group that was funded by the public participation program that hasn't had to cut back on the level of work it was doing.
I actually find it quite ironic, in that at a time when CIDA is increasingly putting pressure on non-governmental organizations to demonstrate professional expertise in terms of the work we're doing overseas, it chose to move resources away from the part of the NGO community that had the most expertise in public sensitization. This was a fairly deliberate move. The focus was on organizations that in some cases have that expertise. But others have been saying to me that they're actually fearful of their ability to be able to do anywhere near the quality of work that was being done before.
The second point I want to address is this. Part of the government's rationale for the cuts was that in a time of declining budgets the emphasis had to go on getting the money overseas. Because of this, we find that most of the partners we deal with are saying over and over again that one of the most important responsibilities we have as northern NGOs is public education in our own countries. This is partly to keep the long-term support for aid there. Second, it's because development is about so much more than aid.
There's the feeling that Canadians do need to understand that. If our partners who in fact would be the recipients of any increased funding at the expense of education are saying that, then I think it behoves us to listen to that very carefully.
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The Chairman: Thank you. Madame Beaulieu.
Ms Beaulieu: I have just a quick answer to that. Because of the cuts, I have lost sources. There used to be people I could call when I was in a rush as a reporter to ask them to find me someone here quickly with a Quebec face, who speaks with our accent and who could talk to me about something. They used to be able to answer me. They're not there any more. Some of them are there, but there are fewer of them. They have less time. They're in business doing something else. So my coverage has suffered. But there is another good angle to it. I now have other sources, who are on the Internet. It's too early to tell how this will balance and how these people should maybe be working together now.
The Chairman: Thank you. Mr. Ladhani, very quickly.
Mr. Ladhani: Just to respond on a slightly different note, I wish there had been more Canadians participating in the Team Canada mission last January with the Prime Minister. As you know, there was a large group of more than 300 business people.
One thing became very clear. In the countries that the mission visited, India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, Canadians were being received with a lot of warmth, respect, and friendship. But there were also commercial considerations there. Big, significant deals were signed. What became very clear, Mr. Chairman, was that we were receiving all this warmth and respect not because we just arrived today in those countries. Canada has had traditional relationships with those countries over the last 30 or 40 years. That relationship has been at the development corporation level. Today we are beginning to see a transformation of those relationships into mutually beneficial economic interests, commercial and high tech.
If Canadians knew this, it would, by itself, reinforce the support for development corporations, in my view.
The Chairman: Thank you. Mr. Godfrey.
Mr. Godfrey: I'm struck by the statistics we've seen indicating that through thick and thin, Canadians are still very supportive of things like peacekeeping.
I have a suspicion, which is reinforced by the fact that in the hotel where I stayed this morning I saw some of our very own RCMP officers and members of the Montreal police force preparing to leave tomorrow for Haiti, after having some time there. I think the reaction of Canadians when they see their own people in a foreign place doing good is a powerful reinforcer of an identifier for why we have so much support for peacekeeping.
It's been my observation that non-governmental organizations in this country that are involved in the development field fall into two broad categories. One could be described as the sort thatMr. Smillie led, which is CUSO or WUSC, for example, where there is not only a Canadian base, but there is also a Canadian operational and field capacity. So the people we send over are in fact Canadians, and the reporting links are directly back.
The other model is one in which there is an international organization that's usually headquartered, by definition, somewhere else, where frequently the fund-raising efforts are in support of undoubtedly worthwhile international efforts that are not directly accountable to Canadians and where Canadians are not necessarily involved in the field.
I note the great success of World Vision Canada, and ask out of pure ignorance which model you fall into most exactly.
Ms Sutherns: Of those two, in terms of those categories, it would be more the latter. Our commitment is toward building the capacity of local, indigenous staff. So for the most part our offices overseas, which number about 101 or something like that right now, I think, are locally staffed.
Mr. Godfrey: Let me just refine the question to say that it refers to the earlier point I made to the previous panel, which is this. One of the ways in which we might be able to strengthen support - although it doesn't sound like you need a lot of strengthening, judging by the numbers - is to have that direct connection or accountability so that a specific project, village, or country is reporting back to us and we have some measure of control.
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Mr. Posterski: I'll augment Rebecca's earlier comments to say that we also are concerned about mobilizing Canadians in particular interests as they understand the global situation. An example of that is our 30-hour famine, which is an invitation for younger Canadians to give their attention to global issues and to raise money on behalf of the needs of the poor. Last year in excess of 100,000 teenaged Canadians - some a little younger - were involved in giving their time and energy to focus on international concerns. It's a mobilization of Canadians inside the country, a call to life beyond self-interest and out beyond the sort of VCR focus of life that I think is also feeding into a future concern.
Mr. Godfrey: But is there the longer-term development of accountability and knowledge about the specific projects, about the sort of thing we heard from Mr. Smillie that NOVIB was doing in Holland? Is that part of what you're up to, so that a set of donors has a specific knowledge of a specific situation, which they can follow over the years, where they can follow its development in such a long-term process?
Mr. Posterski: We have several levels of evaluation of our fieldwork that we feed back to our donor publics. Part of our commitment to people who are involved with us is to communicate what's happening in the field. For example, a current movement is that instead of... Organizations grow up and development changes, so we've probably moved from a child focus to family focus to a community focus to communities of communities working in larger units now.
The communication of the end result is sent back to our donor partners so that we somehow don't just say ``Thank you for your money'', but ``Here in fact is how the world is also changing.''
Mr. Godfrey: Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Flis, sir, you were next, but we really only have about 30 seconds because there is an important announcement to be made by the department before we break. Do you want to...?
Mr. Flis: I'll take the 30 seconds, then, just to make a statement, following Mr. Paré's intervention.
I think we fall into the trap that many Canadians do when you ask where we can cut so we can generate more revenues for aid. The first place that Canadians think about is defence. I want to remind this committee and the public that over the last three budgets defence took the biggest cuts. We've cut not only to the bone in defence, we've cut into the bone. Canada is a very important member of certain alliances. NATO is one of them. Look at what NATO is doing in Bosnia towards peacekeeping and development. Before we think of where we can generate additional revenues, let's put our creative hats on and let's think of areas other than just defence.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Flis. It was a very important point.
Mr. LeBlanc, sir, you had two announcements I believe you'd like to make before we break to hear our next speaker, Madame Labelle.
Mr. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands - Canso): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
First I'd like to inform the committee, in view of the interest it has already expressed in the state of human rights in Nigeria, that the Minister of Foreign Affairs will be travelling to London next week to a meeting of the Commonwealth ministerial action group, which is following up on the New Zealand initiatives of last fall to increase the pressure on Nigeria to encourage it to move toward democratic development and to eliminate the human rights abuses in that country.
I bring this up first of all to inform the committee and also to say that if the committee deemed it appropriate to renew the very supportive recommendation or motion made in December when you discussed this question, I think that would be very helpful to our government's efforts at that forum.
The Chairman: As I recall, that motion specifically urged the government to examine inter alia the question of sanctions or any other form of pressure that should be brought on the Nigerian government in order to restore democracy and human rights in Nigeria.
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We will of course be hearing from Shell and from other representatives of the Nigerian community on June 18. We had hoped to have that hearing prior to the minister going, but I think it might be appropriate if the members of the committee believe that we could, as it were, convey to the minister our continued interest in this subject and our continued support of our original position.
I think that might be helpful to the minister and, when he goes to London, helpful to an understanding that this committee is strongly of the belief we need to keep the pressure on Nigeria to regularize the situation there, which, I understand, is the purpose of your motion.
[Translation]
Mr. Paré, Mrs. Debien, are you agreed?
Mrs. Debien: I must admit, Mr. Chairman, that we...
The Chairman: Yes. Very briefly, I would remind you that in December we passed a resolution expressing this committee's concern for the situation in Nigeria. We called upon the government to act on an international level to ensure that the problems in that country were resolved. Mr. LeBlanc asked if the committee could restate its December resolution so that the minister can announce this decision sometime next week. It would confirm that parliamentarians support the government's action. Thank you.
Mr. Paré: I fully agree.
The Chairman: Therefore, it is unanimous.
Mr. LeBlanc: Mr. Chairman, we would also appreciate your conveying a letter to the minister as an expression of the committee's commitment. This could be helpful. Thank you.
[English]
The second point I want to raise by way of information is disturbing news that has come from the Middle East this morning. I inform the committee of this because it will obviously be in the news when we leave this room.
Regrettably, this morning Israel, in part of its campaign in Lebanon, mistakenly bombed a UN civilian refugee camp. There were apparently something like 68 deaths, including children. I understand that it was a mistake, but still it was very regrettable and the minister has conveyed his concern over the situation and his renewed calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East in the strongest possible terms. I understand that the UN Security Council is meeting in a special session to consider this matter.
I wanted to inform the committee of this, since we were in this meeting all morning and we would not have been aware that this had occurred in the Middle East. It's a very regrettable development and we will undoubtedly be hearing more about it when we leave the meeting this afternoon.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. LeBlanc. The members of the committee might want to take that under advisement. If we want to raise it later on in the day when we've had a chance to reflect on it, we can do that. Thank you very much.
I am now going to adjourn for five minutes to enable us to change the panel. We will then be hearing from Madame Huguette Labelle, our next speaker.
I advise the members of the public, our witnesses and the members of the committee that in order to work through the lunch break we have some very modest sandwiches at the back of the room if anybody would like to have something to eat.
Madame Labelle has conveyed her willingness to talk while we consume not only her words but perhaps a little bit of sustenance as well. So everybody here please feel free. You're invited to help yourself to a sandwich, but we'll start again in five minutes with Madame Labelle.
Thank you very much.
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The Chairman: Order.
Before I ask Madame Labelle to commence her remarks, I'd like to make two announcements to the committee.
The first is that before breaking we raised the issue of the resolution this committee had adopted previously in respect of Nigeria. Given the importance of this matter, it is worth reading into the record that resolution, which we adopted on Thursday, December 14 of last year. The resolution, moved by Mr. Lastewka, was:
- That, in view of the extreme urgency of the situation in Nigeria, as confirmed by evidence
received before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, on
December 14, 1995, the committee encouraged the Government of Canada to take a strong
leadership role in coordinating an enforceable oil embargo against Nigeria with the United
States of America, the European Union and other partners to stop the military terror in Nigeria
and to assist Nigeria to move towards peaceful democratic change.
Secondly, the members have conferred with one another over the brief break. In view of the unfortunate developments in the Middle East this morning and the tragic incident involving the bombing of the refugee camp, I think members of the committee deem it important to have a meeting next week where we will ask the departmental officials to come and brief us on what is happening in the Middle East and what Canada's position is and how we are trying to help with some form of peaceful solution there. We will advise the members of the committee as early as possible of when we can fix, say, a one-hour meeting to that effect.
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[Translation]
Mr. Paré has expressed his agreement. Therefore, there is unanimous consent from the committee members to proceed.
[English]
It gives me great pleasure to ask Madame Labelle, who is the president of the Canadian International Development Agency, to speak to us now.
Ms Huguette Labelle (President, Canadian International Development Agency): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First, let me thank the committee and CCIC for taking the time to spend on this very important topic today, and for taking the initiative. There's no question that this is a major issue. It's an important one. It's an important one for Canada. It's an important one for the world, as well.
This morning you had a very interesting presentation on the question of where the Canadian population stands, certainly at least in terms of opinion polls, and that we're talking of good news and bad news.
We've been tracking this issue. On the one hand, we know that about one-third of the Canadian population express strong support for international cooperation, another third are somewhat supportive, and of course the lower third are not very supportive.
It's quite paradoxical, because one of the surveys that was conducted last year - I don't know whether it was referred to this morning - found that nine out of ten Canadians still think that Canada should have an aid program. Yet of course the negative side is when we ask how it ranks when it comes to dealing with the deficit in Canada. We know that three out of four will say that the deficit is prime and that the other matter should take a second rank.
With your permission, I would like to spend little time, in order that we shall have more time for discussion, but I would like to say some words about why it is important for us and for Canadians themselves to be involved, some of the messaging aspect. I'm sure Ian Smillie spoke about that this morning as well. Then I shall raise with members of the committee what we are currently doing and what we are anticipating doing in CIDA, in order to get some reaction as to whether or not this makes sense. Where are we missing the point? What are additional areas, together with the community of partners that we work with, on which we should be more vigilant?
One of the facts is that Canada has been working with developing countries for a long time. We've got a long-term commitment. Canada is still seen as a voice of reason, one where we do not have ambitions of power over others, and one where we have played, both bilaterally and multilaterally, a very supportive role in terms of helping those who have less, also being a sort of voice of reason in that sense.
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In looking at how to help Canadians better to understand the importance of international cooperation, I agree with many who have said that the message is not as simple as saying that we need to help others who have less. While I believe that this is an important part of tomorrow's message as well as today's message, I also believe we have to look at the multiplicity of impacts that international cooperation brings to the world and to ourselves as Canadians in trying to help them understand what we're talking about.
[Translation]
Therefore, it is clear that what Canada is doing, that is ensuring a presence to help others, remains very important. As far as we are concerned, solidarity and willingness to help others are an important part of the message.
Secondly, it is also clear that we must support foreign policy because our individual, family and community safety, not to mention the security of our country and of the entire planet, also depend a great deal on our development and on that of other countries, in particular Third World nations. Someone mentioned this morning these nations are home to 80% of the world's population and that 90% of the children born today come into the world in developing countries.
[English]
A third aspect or dimension of the message is that our health is directly tied to the health of the planet, to the health of the people. This is not just on the environment side, which is a very important one, but also on direct health aspects, whether it is AIDS, the resurgence of tuberculosis, or otherwise. Also, another dimension of that multidimensional message is that the interdependence we have with others is vital, not only in helping us to assist in shaping and reshaping the world but also in shaping and reshaping our own country.
Another aspect is of course the economic benefits to Canada. We've talked about that in the past, Mr. Chairman, in terms of the jobs, both direct and indirect, and the strong network of relationships that Canada has built around the world, which remain so important in how we work with other countries, the United Nations and NATO, the World Bank and others, and also how we work bilaterally with other countries.
[Translation]
If we look at CIDA's current programming, we note that it is focused on three different areas. Firstly, there is a belief that the more Canadians participate in international cooperation, the better informed they will be and the better they will understand the issues discussed. It is important to realize that when we deliver aid programs, we work with Canadian partners and therefore with thousands of Canadians with families and neighbours. When these people return to Canada, they should be encouraged to share their experience with other Canadians.
Secondly, we are also trying to get young people to participate, to live the development experience. They are not always sent to work in developing countries, but they may be allowed to spend brief periods of time there if they are well trained. Many Canadian institutions work closely with us on programs of this nature and past results have been very satisfactory. We recommend that such programs be maintained.
Earlier, Carole Beaulieu from L'Actualité spoke about professional associations and journalists. Like her, I too am convinced that we must continue to support our Canadian correspondents, particularly the young journalists who are just starting out, so that they can gain some experience in the developing world, experience which will serve them well later on in their career.
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[English]
A fourth aspect of what we are trying to do is to bring international cooperation and its story to Canadians, via television, video, film, newspapers and so on.
We have reformed our development information program this year. Instead of using the resources to go to our partners, we have invited the partners to come to us in an open situation and have received a tremendous response. I think we have had a better choice than we would have had otherwise, because we could build on the creativity of many people who came to us. Out of the 108 proposals, 20 were selected.
We've also, in the last year, used different ways of reaching people through print and have developed inserts for homemakers, Madame au foyer, Maclean's, L'Actualité, The Financial Post and the Journal of Commerce soon to come. This has been to try to get either the people of developing countries or our partners - and it is done with our partners - to bring their success and their stories to the Canadian people in their home through this sort of approach.
An example is when we worked with the Canadian Public Health Association in sponsoring a series of messages for parents and children in a very popular magazine, Today's Parent, which has a circulation of 800,000 - very high. We are trying to find ways that are better and more alive in order to bring to Canadians what is played in these many countries around the world where we all are together.
We also, inspired to a great extent by this committee, have been turning our attention more to the members of Parliament. As you know, we now do a very brief monthly update called Development. We also have now developed a pocket-sized information card that we want to give to parliamentarians so that when people question them about what Canada is doing, they'll have some essential facts to help them. Of course we've provided a number of members of Parliament with information for their householders circulation as well, at their request.
We've also started with journalists this year to produce what we call CIDA Update, just to announce in advance some of the events in international cooperation that are coming. We're being told that this is helpful. Of course we're continuing to look for suggestions on that front. We have published much more widely the policy documents that we've prepared, although this is usually not as user friendly in terms of the general population but is more for the people who work in the field.
We supported, as have many others, the Heritage Minutes.
[Translation]
In a similar vein, we have sponsored several exhibits, one in particular on water, in which over 200,000 people have taken part. An exhibit entitled Trois pays dans une valise drew 800,000 visitors to a Quebec museum even before it went on national tour. Programs such as Le match de la vie and La course destination monde are geared to young people and we continue to bank on initiatives of this nature.
This year, we realized, perhaps more clearly than before, that comparable English programs were non existent. We have to take a look at what we are doing right now, because these two programs attract a Francophone viewing audience of approximately 850,000 people.
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We were assisted in our efforts by many partners, but the important step was to get the idea off the ground and then to build on it.
We prepared a series of six radio reports on women in development and this series was picked up by 380 radio stations with a combined listening audience of nearly 200,000 people.
These are just some of the ways we went about promoting Canadians' understanding of development. While the list is by no means comprehensive, these examples will give you some idea of the work we do.
[English]
In terms of where to go, I think it would be very interesting to look at the results of today's discussion. But I have a few comments for my part, Mr. Chairman. One is certainly that we and CIDA need to work more closely with our Canadian partners to try to prevent mixed messages, to be able to be complementary to each other and helpful to each other. I think mixed messages are dissonant in terms of the population and leave them with more questions than answers.
At one time this committee raised the fact that CIDA had abandoned its speakers bureau and members felt it was a good initiative. We are now reviving it. We'll be using it quite widely to reach out to Canadians wherever they are in the country. We'll want to do so again with our Canadian partners.
I just want to say a word or two on electronics. CIDA now has a web site on Internet. We see a lot of potential here to share our development experience and hopefully to get the people we work with in developing countries to share their experience with us on Internet. We are also looking at using CD-ROM as ``infotainment'' as a second aspect.
We feel with what is happening with Internet in schools - the SchoolNet - there is quite an opportunity here in working with the teaching profession and with school boards to assist in having documentation that can be used and be readily helpful to the school system, for example, which would have an interest in using such information.
A lot of people have mentioned to us that we should encourage our partners more than we do. We should encourage those who are executing agencies for CIDA to keep alive the fact that these are Canadian people helping people who have less than we have and therefore to remind Canadians it is with their assistance we're doing this. But it is also to bring back to them the results of what we're doing.
The last point, Mr. Chairman, is that we have in the last 18 months undertaken quite extensive work in CIDA to change our programming to a more results-oriented approach. You will remember in talking about the Auditor General's reports a while back we talked about this. I believe firmly that in order to be able to better demonstrate to ourselves and to Canadian taxpayers what we are achieving, it is important to do this. But it has the added advantage that it is also much easier to be able to share the experience when we're dealing with results. I see this too, Mr. Chairman, as part of being able to better inform Canadians what we are doing on their behalf in working in international cooperation.
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[Translation]
I could go on longer, but I will stop now. Once again, let me say how very happy I am that the committee undertook this initiative today. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms Labelle.
[English]
Because of your statement about the electronic highway that you're now engaged in, I'd like to draw to the attention of the members of the committee, and that of the public here, that CIDA has set up computer equipment at the back of the room. For those who are interested, we'll provide a demonstration of their Internet site during the break.
That may not be something you did as a result of an inspiration of this committee, Mrs. Labelle, as you've said about some of your ideas.
Ms Labelle: Well, we have to have some inspirations ourselves. It's one whose time had come.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Mr. Paré.
Mr. Paré: Ms Labelle, in the wake of last year's cuts, you informed us that you planned to earmark $14 million for smaller NGOs involved in overseas projects. If my information is correct, this $14 million budget was not completely exhausted. It would seem that $10 million have been spent and that there are therefore $4 million remaining.
Given that the minister spoke this morning about the importance of promoting public understanding, would you possibly consider reinvesting this $4 million surplus into the Public Participation Program, considering its importance, both past and present?
Ms Labelle: Let me say two things. First of all, a portion of these $4 million is committed to small NGOs in the environment field. In March, we reviewed along with the committee proposals submitted and we agreed to set aside this sum of money until such time as the projects submitted were evaluated and decisions made.
Perhaps we will have a small amount of money left over. I must meet with Mr. Pettigrew, your new minister, to review his priorities and development issues. The question of development education will certainly be discussed as well. We must also start planning for budget cuts of 6% in 1997-1998 and for additional ones expected for 1998-1999. We have to plan not only for this year, but also for the long term. I know that Mr. Pettigrew attaches a great deal of importance - he mentioned it this morning and we have discussed this - to what we can do to help Canadians better understand what we are doing and the importance of international development.
It would perhaps be premature to say anything further about this today, but I will keep your suggestion in mind because a portion of the $4 million will not be earmarked for environment programs.
Mr. Paré: I have a brief supplemental and that will be my final question. What is CIDA's communications budget and has it been increased for this year?
Ms Labelle: We have different things. First of all, in the communications sector, we have a program called the Development Information Program. It has suffered the same fate as other CIDA programs and its budget has been reduced from - don't quote me on this - $5 million to$3.5 million.
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There have been many cuts in recent years. The communications budget is, therefore, smaller.
Let me tell you what steps we took to deal with last year's cuts. We had a great many consultants working on site. They were doing excellent work, but they were occupying our facilities and therefore our space and using our equipment. Since this sector's budget was slashed, we continued to work with these consultants, but they are no longer working on site. This has helped us trim our costs in this area.
Before I leave, I will try and provide you with the exact figure for the communications budget.
The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Labelle.
[English]
Mr. Shepherd.
Mr. Shepherd (Durham): I guess we're talking about perception here to some extent. Something that concerns me in the area of perception is some of the countries we target. Two come to mind readily; one is Grenada and the other is Turks and Caicos Islands, of all places. Both those countries don't impose an income tax on their own citizens, and through various information channels we hear there's a developing wealthy class in both of those areas. Is it reasonable for Canadian taxpayers to be asked to subsidize those kinds of aid programs when their own citizens appear not to?
Ms Labelle: The whole issue of personal income tax or value-added taxes on goods and services is one that of course did not exist in most developing countries because the people could not pay. What we see now, because they're asking us for help, is a significant number of countries establishing, improving, and modifying their capacity to raise taxes and to do so in a way that will bring the results they want.
India, for example, is a country we've been working with through our department of revenue to assist them in trying to see how they can do this best. There is no question that in a country where the state of development has achieved a reasonable level and the country is not utilizing its own resources in order to support its programs, it becomes time for us to question whether we still want to be there. I think in most instances we would be reducing significantly what we're doing in order to retarget it to the poor pockets that may remain, or we would be leaving in a definitive way. I think it's only fair for our Canadian taxpayers.
Mr. Shepherd: Once again, I have a question of perception. As I see this budget, it seems to me that as a percentage of our GDP Canada is spending something like 60% more than the United States, 30% more than Britain, and 30% more than Australia. I've just come back from the United Nations to discover that the United States isn't paying its bills there and that Canada is owed $250 million for that process.
Is the existing level this country is supporting in the area of aid reasonable, relative to our debt and deficit?
Ms Labelle: In terms of how we compare ourselves, this is something we do constantly. We have two ways of doing so, one by volume and the other as a percentage of GDP. In terms of volume, of course, Japan is way up there, the United States is second, and France, Germany, U.K., and the Netherlands are high, as is the European Union, but that's a quasi-multilateral institution. If I look at countries per se, Canada is ninth on that front, going to tenth.
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As for the percentage of GDP, those countries such as Japan that have had tremendous appreciation of their money or because of the growth they've had would of course finish by being low or at the lowest, around 21 or 22 if you look at their contribution as a percentage of GNP. Those countries that have the highest are the Nordic countries, Sweden and Norway, as well as the Netherlands. Countries such as France are doing increasingly better on that front because they have not been cutting their international cooperation until now in any kind of a significant way. Britain cut it way back and is now increasing it again.
In terms of what is right, Mr. Chairman, I think it's a very difficult question to answer. What is it that Canadians feel they want to use as part of the funds or the money they remit to government? ``What is that to me?'' is something we all have to stay very close to, but I think increasingly Canadians have a sense of the interdependence we have. They feel that if things go wrong somewhere else somehow our borders are permeable and that we're not going to be immune from it.
Mr. Shepherd: You mentioned the Auditor General. One of the comments the Auditor General also made relative to looking at Canada's debt and deficit situation was that it may well not be sustainable by Canada, that we may not be able to sustain this level of debt. In other words, he's talking about a financial collapse if we don't deal with that problem. I look at it from those perspectives and...
Ms Labelle: Mr. Chairman, international cooperation has been used in an important way for deficit reduction. By 1998-99 over 30% of the budget will have been cut in various slices starting from 1993-94, and it had been before that on top of this. So the question if this is right one way or the other is another one. There has been a substantial utilization of these resources to deal with this very important problem of deficit reduction, which I think all feel needs to be addressed.
The Chairman: Thank you, Madame Labelle. Next are Mr. Morrison, Mr. LeBlanc andMr. Flis.
Mr. Morrison: I would like to pursue Mr. Shepherd's line of questioning just a little bit yet.
On one of your previous appearances before us you reiterated that the basic mandate of CIDA is to help the poorest of the poor, and yet the largest single recipient of aid from Canada is China, which can hardly be classified as being among the poorest of the poor. They get $162 million a year. They have an economy considerably larger than ours, if I'm not mistaken. I believe they have the fastest-growing economy in the world right now.
I have this uneasy feeling that this $162 million a year is basically cumshaw to encourage the Chinese bureaucracy to trade with Canada, to grease the rails for our trading missions. I don't see that as being CIDA's mission. I think it is a perception that goes down very badly with the Canadian public.
Similarly, we are a fairly major donor to Indonesia, another country that from the point of view of natural resources is one of the richest countries in the world. it may be mismanaged, but it sure isn't poor. Again we are trying to maintain a trade and investment position there.
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What are your views on this? Are you comfortable with this particular use of our foreign aid, or would you dispute the fact that this is what we are doing?
Ms Labelle: Thank you, Mr. Morrison. In looking at our foreign policy, you will remember that we mentioned at that time in those discussions that about 70% or so of our budget went to approximately 28 to 29 countries in terms of concentration. Then, of course, we have a large number of countries with much smaller amounts of assistance.
I think the second point was also that a significant part of our budget should go to the poorest countries. I think this is what the policy is. This is what I think Canadians expect, certainly based on the many discussions this committee has had with Canadians from across the country. Of course the range of development of countries is huge, from those that are in the bottom five economically and humanly to others that are beginning to do much better economically but that are still doing very badly on the poverty side. And of course there are those who are in transition and moving away from any requirement for assistance.
China fits very much into the group that has been doing well in terms of economic growth but that still has a huge population living on the land. They still have a tremendous food security problem for the future. Their population, although it is being contained, is increasing and is a major environmental problem.
I am comfortable with the areas we're working on with China because we are helping them to move to clean production and to cleaning their waterways so that there is safe water. We're helping them in terms of essential energy so that they have higher energy efficiency from their resources instead of having to keep building more energy plants. We're also helping them so that they have alternatives to the soft coal, which would be very terrible for the environment if used to provide their energy.
We're also working on health and education with that country. We're working on a number of fronts, but these are the big sectors. I think in a country like China the important part is to do what we're doing, which is to identify areas that hopefully will improve the quality of life and reduce the poverty level of those who are still living in very poor situations. As the country is evolving, we then begin to wind down our support, matching their capacity to share the resources they have more evenly in their population. But their development is quite recent, there's no question about that.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr. LeBlanc, you're next.
Mr. LeBlanc: Madame Labelle -
The Chairman: Excuse me. I'm sorry, Mr. LeBlanc. Mr. Morrison had a follow-up question, and we do have time, so... I didn't mean to interrupt.
Mr. Morrison: Thank you for your patience, Mr. Chairman.
Madame Labelle, I find a bit of a dichotomy in your response because you mention that this aid to China is being largely directed to the specific areas of environmental problems and making the quality of life better for the general population. Right next door to China is Mongolia, which has essentially the same problems China has. It's a desperately poor country. It's a democratic country and it's trying to recover from seventy years of neighbourly exploitation. We don't give those people one sou. There is nothing for Mongolia.
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I find this rather curious, except that from what I suspect is the pragmatic view of the Canadian government, we don't really need Mongolia. The Canadian government seems to think that we really need to bow down to China. Can you offer any further comments? Why is mighty China deserving of our assistance and neighbouring Mongolia deserving of nothing?
Ms Labelle: Mr. Chairman, it is very much a question of foreign policy as to what country one would be in, although I must say that on a yearly basis we review with our successive ministers the level of funding we have and the level of resources per country, as well as those countries that might be poorer or very poor and where our action maybe should start.
Mongolia is one that has been reviewed periodically. I think it will be a question of foreign policy as to whether it gets added to our list of countries receiving aid.
Mr. Morrison: I know where you can get $162 million.
The Chairman: On a per population basis, that would be a very attractive Mongolian proposition, Mr. Morrison.
Mr. LeBlanc.
[Translation]
Mr. LeBlanc: As you know, the theme of our forum is public understanding of international development issues. In your opening remarks, you stated that one important factor in promoting public understanding was first-hand experience of one kind or another with development. I'm thinking here in particular about a young person who has participated in a program in a Third World country or been involved in a fundraising effort for a development project in the Third World. It is also a fact that the community, or at least part of it, consists of landed immigrants from the Third World.
However, while I concur fully with this observation which appears to be a common thread running through the statements of the witnesses who appeared before the committee this morning, it presents something of a paradox, in my view, and I would be interested in hearing your comments.
In light of the fact that in recent years, the number of Canadians affected by the Third World and indeed by the world in general as a result of the various types of activities in which they are involved has increased both in absolute terms and in terms of the overall percentage of the population, do you not find it somewhat paradoxical that the more contact Canadians have with the developing world and the better informed they are, the less willing they appear to be to support development assistance? That is my first question.
My second question ties in with what has been said. Does CIDA try and distinguish between support for development assistance provided by Canadians who have already had some experience with the developing world and support from those who don't have any experience? Could such a distinction help us improve the effectiveness of our promotion efforts?
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We must try to understand what prompts Canadians to support official development assistance programs. These policies require public support. Since participation is one way of promoting awareness, this could help us when we formulate our programs. Would you care to comment on this?
Ms Labelle: As far as the situation being paradoxical, you provided an answer in your second question, namely that we must try to see if those who have had some experience abroad think differently. I will bear this suggestion in mind because it is very important to us in our efforts to gain a better understanding of the situation. In the upcoming surveys of Canadian public opinion, we should try to determine if this correlation exists.
I also believe that Canadians are well informed as a result of television, CNN and so forth. In particular, they are aware of crisis situations, such as the events taking place in Israel which you mentioned and which we discussed with the committee at noon. I also have the feeling that Canadians continue to believe that their government, through CIDA, places its resources in the hands of governments which in turn do more or less what they like. Obviously, that's not how things work. Needs, priorities and programming are determined, but then, as you know, we turn to our Canadian partners to deliver aid through very specific projects.
For all kinds of reasons, there are many lingering impressions, whether valid or not, and we must try to change them. This is not an easy task because everyone wants to know what we do and to hear from us. For the past several years, I have been meeting weekly with small groups of Canadians, 30 people or so in general, to discuss our activities. This initiative has been very successful. We have an opportunity to exchange ideas, answer questions, clarify certain points and provide material. The results have been positive, but we are only reaching small groups of people, not the public at large.
To answer your first question, according to our initial analysis, those who have some first-hand experience working abroad generally return to Canada in a very different frame of mind, with a different understanding of the import role Canada can play.
[English]
The Chairman: Mr. Flis.
Mr. Flis: I'm very impressed, Mr. Chairman, by what we heard from the NGOs and from Madame President about how much energy is going into sensitizing Canadians about our international development work. Yet somehow it's not reaching the people we want to reach. I'm wondering if CIDA or anyone has done a survey of what our secondary schools are doing as far as building international development into the curriculum.
Not everyone goes through university, but more and more Canadian students are completing secondary school. History and geography are now compulsory in grades nine and ten, etc. I've been away from education too long to know what's in their curriculum, but would it not be wise, rather than pouring additional funds...? We have the infrastructure there, and every graduate who would be sensitized to international development...
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Maybe a concrete recommendation, Mr. Chairman, could be at the end of this process, whereby this committee could write to every Minister of Education for what is in the provincial curriculum as far as international development is concerned. Or it could come through CIDA or jointly. We're devoting a very important day here. Looking at all of the talent and resources before us, this might be a concrete suggestion that could be implemented.
Ms Labelle: Mr. Chairman, I think it would be an excellent idea.
Members should also know that the Canadian Teachers' Federation, with support from CIDA in the past, has done tremendous work in developing curriculum for helping secondary and primary school students to better understand their place in the world and what is happening.
I think that sending a note of recommendation, support for the continuation of that work and its implementation, would be well received by the Teachers' Federation and the many teachers who have worked very hard in doing this work.
Mr. Flis: To close, I'd like to compliment CIDA on developing the Internet. During lunchMr. Maitland gave me a brief demonstration, and I hope you'll get more resources so we can develop that further. You already mentioned connecting that with SchoolNet. That's another important vehicle whereby our students will become a bit more sensitized to what we're trying to achieve.
The Chairman: There've been a couple of troubling remarks this morning from our NGO witnesses concerning the result of the recent reductions in the education program of CIDA and your contribution to smaller NGOs for their structural, as opposed to program, support. Those of us who are familiar with university funding or funding of any sort know that the hardest thing to get money for is the basic structure. It's easier to raise money for a program or a specific cause, but without the basic structure these programs can't be delivered. So we are on the horns of a dilemma here.
The comment that troubles me, and that I'm sure troubles other members of the committee as well, is that there is a suggestion that, as a result of the cuts, the NGOs and programs that will survive will tend to be those that are concentrated in the large metropolitan areas, particularly in what has been called the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa triangle, and that the rest of the country, which is equally important, will not be serviced and will lose its perspective on aid and aid delivery programs.
Do you have a comment on that? If this is a problem, is CIDA looking at a way in which we can address it?
Ms Labelle: This is an obvious preoccupation on many fronts in CIDA, because, first of all, a greater percentage of the population is found in this area. We look in a number of ways to see to what extent there is a fair participation of people from across the country, whether large or small. In the case of the small ones, we find them right across the country, in Ontario and Quebec as well as in both the east and the west.
The project facility of $14 million to which Mr. Paré referred was put together as a way of trying to counteract that. We are going to be at the end of our first year of operation in the summer, and we will be looking at this very closely. We are keeping an eye on it at this time.
It's a bit early to say whether the distribution - because this is peer review - will be equitable in terms of size as well as in terms of regions of the country. Within a few months we should be able to know what the impact of that particular facility has been.
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There is no question that there was a very large number of small NGOs whose work was in Canada that are not receiving funding from CIDA since the decision of last April in terms of the budget reduction. They may find it very difficult to continue their work without that support. When you're a small NGO it is very hard to be able to raise funds, as you know.
The Chairman: Madame Labelle, once again thank you very much for attending before the committee and answering our questions with your usual frankness. The members are grateful to you and for the extremely important role you play in our foreign policy.
Before we break, I'd like to announce to those present that these proceedings will be broadcast tonight on CPAC. That's the good news. The bad news, or perhaps less attractive news, is that they will start at 10:30 p.m. Therefore, if you would like to see Madame Labelle's speech on CPAC, you should catch it at around 3:30 a.m. tomorrow. So for all you insomniacs out there, I hope you have a good night's viewing.
We will adjourn now until 3:30 p.m. Thank you very much.