[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Thursday, April 18, 1996
.1545 
[English]
The Chairman: I'd like to call this afternoon's session to order. Members are perhaps a bit slow coming in. It's the first time we've seen sun in this city for at least six months, so everybody is astonished. This may be the most important thing in international development we'll see this year - some sun at last in Ottawa.
Welcome back, everyone. I'm sorry to be starting a few minutes late.
We have a very interesting panel with us this afternoon to deal with the theme of new ways of building public support for international development. We have Mr. Sanger from the North-South Institute; Betty Plewes, to whom we owe the idea of today's meeting; and Jean-Marc Fleury from IDRC. Unfortunately, Mr. François Lagarde is not well and could not be with us today, but his brief is here.
I would like to take witnesses in the order in which I announced them. As usual, perhaps you could keep your remarks to around ten minutes and then we'll leave time for questions.
We will be joined at around 4:30 by Mr. Fishkin from the University of Texas at Austin, who will come and join us and perhaps have an opportunity to make a few brief comments to the committee as well.
So once again thank you very much for coming. Mr. Sanger, sir, perhaps if you would be good enough to lead off, we'll begin.
Mr. Clyde Sanger (Director of Communications, North-South Institute): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Right at the start I'd also like to thank Betty Plewes, who I think had the original idea for this afternoon's session.
I'd like to speak as much as a working journalist, which I still am, and put views from a media viewpoint, as a member of the international development community and staff of the North-South Institute.
I submitted a paper some time ago. I think it was translated and circulated to the members, so I'm not going to summarize that. Maybe it was a slightly irreverent paper. It touched on everything from the resurrection to the goldfinger banana that IDRC has invented together with some Hondurans.
.1550
The theme of the paper was the whole question of trust. I think François Lagarde, had he been here, would also have emphasized that in terms of credibility, as well as using simple words in messages - not that the message itself is all that simple, but one you should use simple words.
This particular panel is supposed to be speaking about new means of raising awareness and that suggests new technology - Internet and television and so on. My paper, I suppose, is a bit skeptical of that. This morning Carole Beaulieu brought out the uses she finds in Internet. She told me at lunchtime about programs.
None of us knows everything in this, do we? I was learning from her about television programs in Quebec, in particular La Course Destination Monde, in which the private sector as well as CIDA and so on have helped young people to go abroad and make their films. I think there are lots of opportunities. I'm trying to be as sunny as the sky outside.
In terms of what Nazeer Ladhani called converting skeptics, I think there has to be the personal approach. There was in Gerry Schmitz's paper a reference to The Skeptic's Journey, a very interesting film made by the South Asia Partnership and others, I think, about taking poor people on a trip to India. That was the personal approach, face to face. I really think that however good technology is now, it's a means mostly for people who are already concerned to become better informed. As I said in my paper, you can have just too much information.
I want to spend my time picking up on five points that seemed to come up this morning. The first one was aid fatigue. I think in the first panel there was something of a difference between Mr. Adams and Ian Smillie as to whether or not there really was aid fatigue. I side with Ian Smillie that some of it is due to smaller organizations finding their donations down and indeed administration fatigue. We've seen CIDA go through periods of lapses of confidence and so on. There is in the Canadian public, surely, a suspicion of ineffectiveness.
I want to say just a little about evaluation at this time. When I worked in CIDA briefly, I was a special adviser to Paul Gérin-Lajoie. The word ``evaluation'' wasn't exactly a dirty word, but we shuddered a little when it came up because we were so busy in a way expanding the program at that time that nobody really had time to go back and evaluate programs.
Then I moved on to IDRC - I've been on the rounds - where there was real difficulty about evaluation. Do you evaluate a program of scientific research by the scientific objectives you set out right at the beginning because over a period of several years they may evolve? Should you do it, you with donors, or should the people in the field do it? Evaluations like that are really quite difficult. Evaluating effectiveness is really quite difficult, especially doing it over the short term.
I wrote a book about the Unitarian Service Committee. I had the chance to go back 30 years afterwards to Greece to see what was left of the efforts the USC had put in and what people had picked up from them, and 10 years later to India. I think it's that sort of timeframe we have to think about.
My second point has to do with opinion polls and some of the doubts that were expressed here. I think Madam Debien and others expressed some doubts. I certainly have doubts. On a slightly irreverent note again, Michael Adams described polls by the drunkard's definition of more for support than for illumination. I remember John Diefenbaker had his own definition as he walked his dog around Rockcliffe in the evenings.
.1555
I really was quite amazed when Michael Adams said we asked a really good question. We asked if globalization is an opportunity or a threat to Canadians. I think it's a ludicrous question. It doesn't explain what globalization is and it's far too broad and vague. It seemed to me to illustrate what was quite wrong about some opinion polls, which are really only a starting point for the rest of us, and we have to build on them. He seemed to see them as a result, which I suppose in his business they are.
The one useful point I thought he made was that Canadians are becoming engaged these days and they don't take things for granted. Mr. Wulff later talked about the atomized society that Canada is at this time, and how one had to go into different corners of Canada and talk different messages - and I agree with that.
Nazeer Ladhani followed that up by saying it is possible to reach all sectors. He then used the phrase ``systematic learning''.
Now that seemed to lead on to, although he didn't mention the name.... He had it in his paper, and indeed Ian Smillie had it in theirs. I don't know why they didn't mention his name, except that maybe none of us know how to pronounce it. I'll try: Daniel Yankelovich. Do I have it right? His book, Coming to Public Judgment, I think is a really new means. I think he has inspired a lot of new thinking in this, the systematic learning or the deliberative polling. We're going to hear a little bit more about this later when Professor Jim Fishkin speaks here.
You have an article by Maureen O'Neil about the Fishkin...her lowest gathering. My worry about the Fishkin approach, the deliberative polling, is how you replicate that beyond the 493 people who met in Austin in January.
My third point has to do with the media; and I am speaking as somebody of the working media. I do agree with Carole Beaulieu that the media is not there to increase global awareness. But I think they do a very good job. We in the North-South Institute felt that it was worth putting quite a big effort into a publication - and if I may, I'll wave it at you at this time - this anthology, which we put together of 54 different journalists in both languages. It includes Carole Beaulieu's journey through Vietnam. This is an example, an illustration, of the really good journalism, the really good insights that we get - not just from John Stackhouse - into the quality of life and the problems and the opportunities in the countries in the south.
In Janet Zukowsky's paper I think she mentioned that 21 journalists have been helped by CIDA. That's good, but there are 20 other organizations or 20 other sources of fellowship in Canada that journalists can use to go to the south.
I might point out that the media has been ahead of the Mines Action coalition on land mines. There are two articles in this, which was published eighteen months ago, about the problems of land mines in Angola and Somalia.
What is important in this, and it's come up a little bit, are stories of survival. I think that came through with what John Godfrey said about his Ethiopian village. He went back after the famine period and saw how they were building themselves up again.
It was sad to hear Mr. Morrison reflecting this image of Africa that I think he got directly from that article in the Atlantic Monthly, ``The Coming Anarchy''. He used the word ``anarchy''.
That is not Africa. We have just finished at the North-South Institute in the CIDA-Africa branch an African round table. One of the outstanding things about it is to learn just what capable, sophisticated Africans there are now. He suggested they'd all been shot. Believe me, in the last twenty years the development of human resources in Africa is one of the real hopes for the future there.
But we also had Ian Smillie talking about Sierra Leone. And the point of his story, it seemed to me, was that Sierra Leone was picking itself up off the floor, had held this election, had told the soldiers to go back to barracks, and although there were two million people displaced there they haven't given up hope. I think these are the messages to get across.
.1600
Nazeer Ladhani talked about projecting dignity. This is really important. The World Vision couple talked about sustainable development rather than relief. These are the messages that I think we need to get across.
My final point has to do with trade and the private sector. This is a session of NGOs, and the private sector do belong to the NGOs as well in one sense. But as aid from governments is declining the private sector in trade and investment are definitely taking up not just the slack but taking up a large part of the field at this time.
I took Nazeer Ladhani's remark about other people going with the Team Canada abroad. I think that's good because I think the dialogue between NGOs and the private sector in the field like that, and finding what image they are projecting, is really important.
I notice that in Madam Labelle's document, on page six - I don't think she got this far - she has a section on the private sector in which she said that it's sometimes been suggested CIDA should write into aid-related contracts the requirement that suppliers make a certain measurable effort to inform their workers in their community about the source of their employment. I believe that such companies have not only the opportunity but the responsibility to get the message out.
I think that's important, and I think the private sector has this role to do in Canada. It also has a role to project an image in the south that is more than just we're out for your contracts. There are a lot of people in the NGO community who are really concerned, and it came out in this last Team Canada trip to Asia, about trade and human rights. It got highlighted in terms of child labour because of the remarkable efforts of a 13-year-old boy from Mississauga. But there are other forms of trade and human rights, and there are other military repressions in some of those countries where Canadian companies are being allowed to invest. The one I'm closest to, because my wife works in that human rights group, is Burma. I know companies there that are going in to mine the minerals there while they have a military government not bothering to make conditions other than that they get a slice of the contract themselves in just the same way as happened in Namibia back 10 or 15 years ago.
I really do think that one of the debates that would engage people across Canada at this time is trade. But it's trade and human rights together. As Pierre Sané said the other day, it's not trade versus human rights; it's not trade today and human rights sometime later; it's human rights and where trade fits into that. I think I'll end on that note. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Sanger.
Mrs. Plewes.
Ms Betty Plewes (President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Council for International Cooperation): I'd like to thank the committee for taking the time today to look at this very timely issue. I was wondering after the presentations this morning whether in fact there really was anyone in this room who believed it wasn't important for Canadians to have a greater global understanding and awareness. I hope that we in fact all do start from that premise. We may disagree on who should pay for it, how to do it most effectively or who should do it, but I think we do start from a premise that in 1996 it's not possible for us to ignore the rest of the world. In fact, so many aspects of our lives today have a global dimension: music, art, environment, business, tourism.
I think people are experiencing, although they don't call it this, a kind of a sense of global connectedness. We sense this I think most dramatically in the area of the environment. Canadians do understand how our future in terms of the environment is tied up with people in other parts of the world. There is increasing evidence, for example, that we have already crossed three global ecosystem thresholds: the ability of the planet to regenerate ozone; the ability of the earth's vegetation to absorb carbon dioxide; and the ability of oceans to regenerate declining marine biomass. People are beginning, in their everyday lives, to understand these and understand what it means for them.
.1605
So I think this study is very timely. It's a good time for the government and CIDA to examine how to continue - not to educate the public, but, as Clyde has suggested, to start from where the public is, to expand its understanding, and help it to make the links between these myriad issues that we seem to be encountering.
This morning Michael Adams's presentation...and Clyde has mentioned the work of Daniel Yankelovich.... Our own Canadian public research network has also highlighted the desire of Canadians to be involved in public policy dialogue. It is no longer enough for politicians, elites, and academics to be making decisions. Canadians want to be involved in new ways in making policy.
Three of the speakers this morning explained how NGOs are including in their work this development education component. Public mobilization is an important part of development cooperation. There's been a lot of emphasis placed on aid, but we know that in fact relatively small and declining amounts of money and resources are not the sole solution to problems of poverty, to problems of environmental degradation.
Aid is an important component, but it should be only one component of a coherent and multifaceted policy to promote sustainable development. NGOs and government are struggling with the fact that the transfer of small amounts of money is not a satisfactory solution to global problems. In fact, people in the developing world, our partners in southern NGOs, are proposing a different kind of relationship with the north, one in which we all accept responsibility for global problems and work jointly for global solutions to poverty, the environment, drug trafficking, and many of the other issues that were brought up this morning. It's a more egalitarian relationship. It isn't one of the north giving to the south, of the north telling the south what to do; it's jointly sharing responsibility for the planet we live on.
In that light, NGOs in the south are saying to us that one area that has a tremendous impact on us is northern governments' policies, and not just their aid policies but also their trade policies, their military policies, their environmental policies. So they are asking us as Canadian NGOs to work on Canadian policy.
They're also asking us to work jointly with them on the policies of the international financial institutions - the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and others - so there's more reciprocity and more shared responsibility. This poses a number of interesting problems for northern NGOs.
We have done a pretty good job of cultivating donors. Canadians are generous and give generously to Canadian NGOs. People are prepared to open their wallets when they believe the donation is going to go to people who need it, and we've seen that on both an individual level and an organizational level.
The work overseas, however, isn't the work that we as NGOs are necessarily best equipped to do. There are many southern NGOs who can do it now, so we in North America and in Europe are being asked to engage in policy dialogue and policy change, as well as to educate the Canadian public. Our southern colleagues are saying that this task is equally important as supporting projects in the south.
NGOs increasingly realize that we have to engage people in new ways. It's not simply through donations and guilt, and many of our messages are in fact quite disempowering: poverty and inequalities are up, the environment is threatened, large forces are at play, government debt is increasing. So this threat, which someone mentioned this morning, is mobilizing to a certain extent, but it's mobilizing only if people can figure out what to do about it. If they can't figure out what to do, it becomes quite disempowering. Our challenge is to find concrete actions.
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One thing NGOs have done, which has been very successful, is to engage direct contact between people in unions - teachers, fisherfolk, social workers - in Canada and groups overseas. There are a variety of ways to do that. It doesn't always mean people travelling back and forth.
We feel that hope resides in illustrating how people can make a difference. This has been very successfully done by environmentalists, by women in the women's movements, and by anti-tobacco advocates. People will do something if they're convinced it will work.
During the past year CCIC has taken on the job of trying to re-think the way we, our members, work with the public. We've convened dozens of focus groups across the country with media, ethnocultural groups, our members, and donors, and we're finding that this image of global citizenship does have quite a lot of resonance with people. People want to connect to their own communities, but there's also a global dimension to that sense of community. So we need to find ways of helping the public to see their allegiance, not only to their own children and community but also to the planet and other people who share it with us.
One way of looking at this, which I think is becoming increasingly interesting, is that as much as we see much of our lives defined in economic terms, maybe there are some solutions in mobilizing people as citizens and consumers and investors. We see quite a lot of growth in the areas of alternative trade, ethical investment, and ethical consumerism.
A new organization called Fair TradeMark Canada is forming. This organization is working to get supermarket chains to stock a range of products that are produced under safe, democratic working conditions and produced at fair prices - oil, bananas, coffee, at a price that gives producers a working wage. These products would be identified by a ``Fair Trade'' label. In that way, shopping becomes a kind of education and a way for Canadians to express their solidarity with people in the south. The same is true for ethical investing.
We on the NGO side recognize there are many areas where we need to change and look for new ways of working. We do, however, have as part of our role some recommendations for government.
First, we think that in order to build public support you have to have something that's worth supporting, so the aid program itself must target poverty and the meeting of basic human needs. When aid is used for political and commercial purposes, people become rather skeptical. They in fact think the purpose of the aid program is to help poor people in Third World countries take more control over their lives and meet their own basic needs.
Second, and I think this is an area that needs further research, the government needs to find ways to increase public participation in making foreign policy. We had a lot of discussion around the foreign policy review, but it's not good enough to come once every four or five years. There are many ways in which Canadians want to be involved on an ongoing basis in the making of Canadian foreign policy and development assistance policy.
Telling Canadians what CIDA is doing overseas isn't enough. We need more than corporate communications. We need an array of strategies that include global education programming, research, and forums for public policy dialogue. Governments and NGOs alike need to strike a new balance between self-serving communications and communications that reflect dissenting views. Our communications should be frank and honest. It should reflect all sides of the story, and it must refrain from making extravagant claims.
I think there is now a gap in CIDA policy relating to the question of public education. This morning Janet Zukowsky outlined three criteria on which decisions were made last year. We think these three criteria are not appropriate and will not help CIDA to achieve the objectives it has set out for itself.
We feel the government should continue to collaborate and work with a variety of partners in mobilizing public opinion. Churches, unions, cooperatives, community organizations, professional associations, and schools are institutions in which people come together to question, to discuss, to test ideas, and to gain confidence about their views.
.1615
When people are asked about participation in policy discussions, they want areas in which they can think about these things, in which there is room for ambivalence, and in which there is room for testing their ideas against other people's ideas and for hearing different perspectives. Their ideas develop and grow as they have a chance to engage. So it isn't a question of simply coming and presenting your view, but it's having this opportunity for dialogue.
These institutions - what the Kettering Foundation calls mediating institutions - form a place where Canadians can refine and further develop their ideas about public policy dialogue.
Also, in the interests of working effectively in a country as large and diverse as Canada is, we have to ensure that these mechanisms and organizations have the capacity to work across the country, not just in Ontario and Quebec, but in the Atlantic region and in B.C., as well as in places in between. In fact, if you look at what has happened in other large countries such as the United States or Australia, Canada has been relatively successful in maintaining a base of core supporters throughout the country for development cooperation. This is of course in danger of slipping with the kinds of decisions that were forced on us last year with the budget.
We need to develop or bring together the expertise and skill sets that allow us to flesh out a common purpose to which Canadians can contribute in their daily lives. We need to create some facility that allows us to bring together the best practices and the most advanced theories in communication to the service of development education.
In fact, when we think about it, in the area of public education, we need the equivalent of that 60-year-old Swede in ParticipAction who galvanized Canadians to get off the sofas and also the equivalent of the blue boxes, which offer Canadians a concrete practical way they can contribute to environmental concerns in their daily lives. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Plewes.
[Translation]
Mr. Fleury, the floor is yours.
Mr. Jean-Marc Fleury (Chief of Public Affairs, International Development Research Centre): The IDRC must keep the public informed of its activities and it does this by publishing easy to read documents, by organizing forums and by participating in conferences and fairs. Given our fairly modest means, we focus on particular groups. Nevertheless, on several occasions, we have broadcast our success stories widely, thereby promoting a positive image of development.
Creating the knowledge needed for development is our business at the IDRC. In practice, we provide the scientists and the decision makers with the tools enabling them to come up with solutions to the problems in their countries. I will give you an example. Just before Easter, you probably heard about a screen impregnated with insecticide that could save the lives of millions of people, particularly children, in Africa.
Once submerged in an insecticide bath, the insecticide used to produce the shampoo that parents use to get rid of head lice that their children have caught in school, the good old mosquito screen is transformed into a wonderful anti-mosquito weapon. Judging by the number of calls we have received, this screen has generated a good deal of interest in Canada as well.
Through the IRDC, Canada has spent the past 25 years setting up international networks of expertise in development techniques and policies, creating a sort of development Internet. This network could no doubt be a wonderful tool for getting the public interested in development.
Over the past 25 years, with our support, experts in developing countries have invented all kinds of techniques, policies and new ways of dealing with the problems of underprivileged people. By investing in their ideas and in their way of doing things, we had an opportunity to see, in concrete terms, the extraordinary potential of people who are shaping their future.
Every time that we have had an opportunity to show the ideas, new approaches and inventions coming from developing countries, Canadians have been won over and thrilled. It's not by accident that the first Heritage Moment dealing with international development was about a IRDC project. I'm referring to the Moment episode recently shown on television and in movie theatres showing how Canadians invented a manual water pump, which was then perfected and is now being manufactured in developing countries. This Moment episode was produced in cooperation with CIDA.
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We have also noticed that journalists are prepared to report positive information about the efforts under way in developing countries. It's a matter of confronting their prejudices by exposing them to the ideas and achievements of the innovative people living in developing countries.
In cooperation with the Canadian Science Writers Association, the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec and the Canadian Association of Journalists, we organised workshops where journalists were given an opportunity to hear from experts from developing countries.
Our staff in Ottawa and in our regional offices has become a useful source of information for Canadians journalists travelling to countries in the southern hemisphere. The most spectacular example is the popular show Course destination monde shown on the French language CBC television network. We give the names and addresses of contact persons in the countries to be visited by the participants in the show. From time to time, these researchers we support are covered in televised reports, which go on to become award-winning stories for their authors.
For Canada, the IRDC has become a great way to exchange information with scientists from Africa, Latin America and Asia. The contribution made by its researchers to international science will continue to grow. Scientific cooperation with the South results in benefits for Canada. We have, on several occasions, presented findings to members of Parliament and journalists that are just as useful to Canada as they are to countries in the southern hemisphere. For instance, Western Canadian farmers are benefitting from improved strains of canola as a result of a collaborative effort with China, and consumers will soon be able to eat pesticide-free Goldfinger bananas. As knowledge becomes the main tool for progress, North-South collaborative efforts will increasingly become a two way street.
I have given only a few examples to show the effectiveness of the aid and how it can also be of benefit to donor countries. We can provide the politicians and other individuals with many other examples in an effort to explain the relevance of international development. Because we provide access to the ideas and original achievements of countries in the Southern hemisphere, we provide teachers with a stimulating way to present those countries. Teachers use our documents and our magazine, now on the Internet.
For several years we organized trips for Canadian teachers interested in discovering developing countries through the work done by their scientists. The IDRC Summer Institute attracted enthusiastic and dynamic teachers who paid for these two-week trip out of their own pocket. They always came back to Canada enthused over the potential of the researchers they had met. We no longer organize these trips ourselves, but soon all of the required information will be available on Schoolnet.
In addition, every year the IDRC awards a dozen bursaries to young Canadian graduates students to help them perfect their knowledge in developing countries. Canada now has 300 of these young people who have added an international component to their degree in medicine, agriculture, economics or journalism. Business and Canadian universities benefit from these new skills gained. These young people have had the opportunity to establish contacts with the researchers and thinkers in these countries which will be playing a growing role in world affairs.
As a result of the incredible expansion of electronic communication tools, and particularly the Internet network, the ideas and knowledge of countries in the Southern hemisphere are becoming accessible to young Canadians, to their parents and to their educators.
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Such information can widen the horizons of our young people and act as a springboard for the future of a dynamic relationship between youths in Canada and in developing countries.
Already, for example, Canadian school children have, as part of a science fair, worked with enthusiasm in finding solutions to the problems facing the people living in the South. The connection between Canadian school children and school children from other countries via the Internet will enable us to transform the teaching of subjects such as geography, ecology, biology, history, economics and even philosophy. By exchanging information with African, Latin American and Asian school children, Canadian youths will acquire authentic training as citizens of the world, training which is essential to humanity in the next millennium.
Indeed, it is quite possible that young Canadians could establish, with young people living in the South, the same type of creative cooperation that the IDRC enable Canadian researchers to establish with scientists and decision makers from the developing world. I have focused on young people, but in its day-to-day activities, the IDRC puts scientists from the universities and Canadian companies in contact with their counterparts in developing countries. Our academics and our researchers derive benefits from these exchanges.
We also provide contacts to Canadian entrepreneurs, particularly those in the agrifood sector who are planning to go international. By making our expertise and our network available to the private sector, we are hoping that it will become an advocate for development.
In conclusion, by helping the countries in the South generate new knowledge required for development, the IDRC has equipped Canada with a unique contact network, a type of development Internet. For many years, Canadian scientists and planners have used this network to enrich their work, and, in certain cases, to find solutions to problems here. Canadian business people are just starting to find out about this network. We are convinced that our network is a great resource that will enable Canadians to become citizens of the world and show them how sustainable development is done.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Fleury.
[English]
We have Professor Fishkin here now. I'm going to ask him, given the late hour, if he'd be good enough to join the other witnesses at the table.
While your presentation has a somewhat different theme from that of our present panellists, perhaps you could make your presentation now. Then we could deal with questions. It's the end of day, and we're trying to wrap up at about 5 p.m.
Professor Fishkin, thank you very much for coming.
Professor James Fishkin (Faculty of Ethics and American Society, University of Texas at Austin): Thank you. I have a new form of public opinion research, which is also a new and I hope constructive way to use television and public opinion polling to create a more thoughtful public dialogue. It's called ``deliberative polling''.
An ordinary poll models what the public is thinking, even though it may not be thinking very much or paying much attention. A lot of what passes for public opinion, as reported in polls, is a kind of vague impression of shrinking sound bites or headlines from a public that's not tuned in or has little reason to pay much attention.
The deliberative poll, by contrast, attempts to model what the public would think if it actually had a better chance to think about it. I have done this three times. I did it twice in Britain with the British television network Channel Four, on national television. The first was on the issue of crime, in May 1994. The second was on Britain's future in Europe, in May 1995. Each time it was broadcast for two hours in prime time, each time with results that were both, as I will explain, representative and deliberative.
I then did this with the American television network PBS with the team from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. We did this at my university, the University of Texas at Austin, in conjunction with all eleven of the nation's presidential libraries and the major presidential candidates. We had 9.5 hours of broadcast in January 1996.
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In each case, we put the entire country in one room, under conditions where it could think about the issues. One of the three issue areas we dealt with at the National Issues Convention was America's role in the world, or post-Cold-War foreign policy. We had some very interesting results.
I'll just say a word about how it works. First, we do a baseline poll of the same type you would use for any other public opinion poll, a national random sample. Then we invite the people, all of them, to come for a weekend, at our expense, to participate in a major national event. We pay them a fee and we pay all their expenses.
We also tell them, most importantly, that their voice will be heard, that they will be in a context where we will pay attention to their opinions. They will have an opportunity to engage in a serious dialogue with competing experts and competing politicians and form a considered judgment.
In each case we were able to recruit an extremely representative national random sample, very different from a self-selected sample and very different from televised town meetings or forums or any other mode of public consultation I'm aware of that has taken place anywhere in the world. In each case we know how representative the microcosm was, because we had the baseline poll, with a very high response rate, that we could compare it with. On every attitudinal and demographic issue, they matched up perfectly in each case.
In anticipation of participating in this dramatic national experiment, people would spend a lot of time thinking about the issues, reading carefully prepared briefing materials that were both public and vetted.
Indeed, one woman came up to me at the British event and said she was a spouse accompanying her husband, and she wanted to thank me, because in 30 years of marriage her husband had never read a newspaper. But from the moment he was invited to this event, he began to read every newspaper every day, and he was going to be much more interesting to live with in retirement.
The Chairman: Possibly not.
Prof. Fishkin: Possibly - depends on which newspapers. But the point is, we create an incentive for somebody to actually become an engaged citizen and think about the issues.
The result at the end of the weekend, after the small group discussions and dialogue with competing experts and competing politicians, they then fill out the same questionnaire they originally filled out in their homes before they were recruited. We could see, in each case, dramatic and statistically significant shifts of opinion.
But the result leads, I believe, to a new form of political communication, because it is what I call a poll with a human face. It has the statistical representativeness of a national random sample but the concreteness and immediacy of real people focusing on real issues as they would in a focus group or a discussion group. In each case it seems to have made good television.
Very interestingly, information clearly has an effect. In the American one, 24% of our sample, exactly like a University of Maryland poll taken a few months earlier, thought - incredibly - foreign aid was the biggest part of the United States budget. In fact, in their briefing materials they could have found that, depending on what you mean by foreign aid, it's 1% or less. They came in with the initial poll overwhelmingly wanting to get rid of foreign aid, but they came out, having received good information, wanting to maintain foreign aid at least at its present level. We think that's clearly tied to the information.
As well, because the discussion and the briefing materials and the opportunities for discussion with politicians and experts allowed them or provided them with a basis for their being attentive to America's role in the world, for their focus on America's role in the world, they came out much more willing to engage in military cooperation with other countries, to address trouble spots in other parts of the world. They became more willing to support foreign aid, both economic and military, and a very large percentage disagreed strongly with the proposition that this country would be better off if we just stayed at home and did not concern ourselves with other parts of the world. The percentage strongly disagreeing with that went up to about half the sample at the end.
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So the process of deliberation and serious discussion led to a big change of opinion as opposed to the opinions they started out with. What does this mean? We think this is a representation of what the country would come to if it became seriously engaged in the issues. Also, we found out on other issues that it very nicely predicted the course of the primary season and the campaign process.
We didn't offer it as predictive, but it actually did predict, as it turns out, the course of the primary season on the economic issues that were central to the campaign. So it may be that the deliberative poll has some predictive prospects, because in fact ADWEEK came along and wrote it up, four pages, as the world's first national focus group. Just as a focus group sometimes uncovers things that a regular public opinion poll doesn't show, this is a national focus group in the sense that it's statistically representative of the whole country. Every citizen of the United States had an equal random chance of being part of this, but it also had real people discussing the issues over a significant period of time, so they could give you more than a top-of-the-head impression or more than a non-attitude, but a real considered judgment.
If there are any questions, I'd be delighted to answer them.
The Chairman: It was a very good ten minutes. You pronounced the three difficult words that in fact brought us to this point where we are in our work, and they were ``at our expense''. At this point in life, there's the rub - to find the pocketbook that will bear that expense. But that's one of the reasons we've gathered here today. We're grateful to you for coming with us, Professor. We'll now give opportunities of questions to the panellists.
Mr. Godfrey (Don Valley West): I want to link a large subject with what was just said. It has been said by a lot of people that awareness of development is not as metabolized in the body politic as awareness of environmental issues or awareness of women's issues. Those are issues where we have got to a certain point, and I doubt we're going to go backwards.
The question is whether it is possible to use these new techniques or technologies or approaches to produce that kind of permanent state of awareness, which we would all wish for. I heard a bit of a suggestion of approval of the Yankelovich approach from Clyde Sanger. As I listened to Professor Fishkin the following questions occurred to me, and maybe you can wrap this all up for me.
Have you gone back and measured the initial group? Have they stayed engaged? That would be the first question.
Secondly, did you measure the TV audience that was watching? Did they change? Was there a representative sample of watchers and did they move anywhere?
Thirdly, depending on the answer to the second question, how would you scale up, rather than at your expense, the entire country in some kind of an exercise? You suggested that it happened in an ad hoc way during the primary process, but is there a more deliberative approach? I should say forMr. Morrison, who was absent and may not have noticed in Mr. Sanger's paper, that there was a positive reference to the Reform Party's approach to polling and involvement, which may be instructive.
But let me put this to Professor Fishkin.
Prof. Fishkin: We did go back to the British nine months later and the considered judgments of the group itself had a lot of staying power. We didn't have the resources to commission before and after polls of the public, so we don't know what effect it had. We do know that an interesting dimension of what we did is our process was entirely transparent. We invited the media to come and cover it. In fact, there were two institutes that had seminars for journalists about how to cover it, and we had, according to my lexis nexus search, 466 newspaper articles about the National Issues Convention and the discussions. So we think that had a considerable effect, but we don't really know.
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PBS does not get great ratings. It had ratings as any other MacNeil-Lehrer or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer broadcast. The British one had much higher ratings. I think Channel 4 reaches a larger audience. But we were viewing it as a prototype of a different forum of public consultation. In addition, we made the briefing materials available to newspapers, some of which published them, and citizens' groups, coordinated by the national issues forums in the U.S., had discussion groups, galvanized to tune in to the broadcast, at sites around the country with the same materials. That was done at a modest level. I think they had a total of 100 such forums. But it could be on the right issue of public consultation...something that would continue and then the tape of the broadcast could be used to galvanize further discussions. So it could be coordinated with a rather significant outreach effort in citizens' groups, schools, etc.
So it seems to me that this method has some potential, precisely because it's a poll with a human face. It's not experts or politicians speaking in the way politicians and experts normally speak, but it's the voice of the public, but under conditions where it's more informed...with all due respect.
Mr. Godfrey: There was a process invented in this country called Citizens' Forum during the Second World War that survived into the sixties and which had many of the same elements you described.
The Chairman: Madam Plewes, do you want to add something to that comment?
Ms Plewes: Yes. One of the challenges that NGOs have is to find images and messages that are as powerful as those poor starving children. I think what a variety of techniques help us to understand is what the messages are that convey these very complex, interconnected concepts to Canadians or Americans, which can then be used in other programs, in other education, and in other kinds of communication.
So although we can't necessarily replicate this with the whole country, it provides us with a basis for trying to find these new images and messages that are as powerful as some of the ones we're seeking to replace.
The Chairman: Mr. Paré.
[Translation]
Mr. Paré (Louis-Hébert): My first question is for Mr. Sanger. At the end of your presentation, you made four or five points which you thought were important. I would like to turn to point 4, namely, the link that you make between trade and the private sector. You say that, as a result of a reduction in government aid for international development, trade could become a way of providing Canadian government aid.
I must confess that I'm quite sceptical about this almost magical belief that trading with a country will cause it to transform its behaviour. I will give two specific examples which show that this is not as true as you say.
This week or last week, a gentleman representing the International Finance Corporation appeared before us. Essentially, this particular organization provides private enterprise in developing countries with funding on a basis never to exceed 25%. He said that sustainable development had become important and that he hoped to achieve this.
I asked him the following questions. Do you take sustainable human development into consideration? Could you be a preferred intervenor, in developing countries, to promote sustainable human development? Are you concerned with the protection of human rights in countries where you invest? Are you concerned about democratic development? Are you concerned about the emergence of a civil society in these countries?
.1645
With some hesitation, the representative from the International Finance Corporation said: ``We don't get involved in politics''. I am summarizing, but I think that this reflects what he said.
Therefore, let us not delude ourselves into thinking that we can rely on private enterprise to take over where government development aid has left off. We heard from witnesses representing Canadian firms, and when we asked them whether they were ready to accept this new mission of changing practices through trade, they replied: ``Absolutely not. We do business, not international development''.
If we want, as the Canadian government is hoping, that trade takes over a good part of the work done by government aid, how are we to train these private sector people who will be players on the international scene?
[English]
Mr. Sanger: Mr. Paré, I feel I didn't get my point across very well in the two minutes I had on that subject.
I really was not suggesting Canadians friends or American friends or whoever going to a country in Asia would transform the mores there. It's utterly alien to my thinking. That's paternalistic, imperialistic, whatever you like. It's also unrealistic.
What I was suggesting was that in the pattern of relationships with countries in the south now, for one reason or another, aid and the practitioners of aid are playing a smaller part and the businessmen are playing a larger part. In these circumstances I was quoting the CIDA president in saying that they had a responsibility back here in Canada to talk about the role of those countries and their role in providing employment here and there. But I was also going on to say that they themselves had a really important role, not simply to think of trade but to think of trade in the terms of human rights. So I was making different points like that.
I think I'd like to go further than that and say these businessmen are a very large part of this. It's not just happening now. I think the former ambassador for Guyana would tell you that a sugar company called Bookers was a really important factor in the development and the civilizing development - if I can use the missionary word - in Guyana. Similarly, Harry Oppenheimer, the head of Anglo-American Corporation, played a really important role in the transition to democracy in South Africa.
So there tends to be a dichotomy between NGOs and the business people. I'm trying to bridge it in this way but also bring out the responsibilities Canadian businessmen have there as they try to make contracts in Africa.
The last thing I would think is that Mr. Friedland or Ivanhoe Corporation going into Burma would change the minds of the military regime there.
To answer your question more directly, I do believe codes of conducts are possible. I think the government should play a part in a dialogue with companies to work these out. This was worked out and the government appointed administrators for the code of conduct in South Africa. John Small was the last one and an effective one. In that case, actually, it was a question of disengagement. Here I would suggest it's a process of engagement, but an engagement with social justice.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr. Morrison.
Mr. Morrison (Swift Current - Maple Creek - Assiniboia): I'd like to welcome you to Canada, Dr. Fishkin.
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I'll start off with a kind of throwaway side question that came to me while you were describing your deliberative polling.
Your work on crime has been very widely quoted here and there. I've picked up on quite a bit of it, but there was never any indication this was an unusual type of polling. You never get that when you just get a bit thrown at you. For my own benefit I just want to clarify it was deliberative polling, as you've described it, that was used.
Prof. Fishkin: In May 1994, on the issue of crime, absolutely, that was the world's deliberative poll.
Mr. Morrison: I see. When it shows up in the press or, I suppose you would say, in argumentative columns, why don't they mention that?
Prof. Fishkin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Mr. Morrison: It's not your fault.
I'm a little concerned about the deliberative polling. It sounds good, but aren't there a lot of risks in this method? It could be abused and misused by people with a political axe to grind specifically. You bring your group together and you get the results you want out of them by funneling information to them. Isn't this quite a possibility?
Prof. Fishkin: It's a concern, which is why we were so careful to make everything transparent. That is, the guarantee of the credibility is first of all the range of partners and political viewpoints represented in signing off on the briefing materials and in supervising every aspect of it.
At the National Issues Convention we had 350 journalists covering it, listening to the discussions. We published the briefing materials. Not only did we have a distinguished bipartisan review committee go over the material and certify it was accurate and that this was a reasonable initial basis for discussion, we then had journalists sitting in, watching the sessions and taking notes on them, not only the large sessions but also the small group discussions.
So everything was transparent, and indeed the coverage was excellent because the process maintained its credibility. Now if somebody wanted to do something they called a deliberative poll but had unbalanced or misleading information or had moderators who imposed their own views on the discussion or the rest, that would be something else. But that's not my process.
We've now done it three times and maintained its credibility. So if you're asking if it could be misused, yes, conventional polling can be misused. The questions can be stacked; the sample can be a bad sample; there are ways in which you could manipulate response to a conventional poll by the question ordering. Everything we've done is public and we've tried to maintain the credibility accordingly. I agree with you about the theoretical concern.
Mr. Morrison: With respect to the sample, that was another concern of mine. You do lose a certain randomness when you only take people who have the time and the ability to come and attend one of your gatherings.
On the same question, and I think I'm echoing my chairman here, getting these people together sounds horrendously expensive. In order to maintain a reasonable degree of statistical validity, how many people do you actually bring into one of these things to make it statistically valid?
Prof. Fishkin: The range we're talking about is 300, 400, 500. With 300 we got dramatic, statistically significant changes. I will say that because this was a dramatic televised event. Because we convinced people their voice would matter, they went to great lengths to come.
We wrote letters to employers to make it possible. We paid them a modest fee in each case and we paid their expenses. You could match up the demographics and the attitudes of the participants with our baseline poll and with census data, and it's extremely representative. So it was quite surprising, almost astonishingly so.
People don't like to admit it, but television turned out to be a magic attractor - not just television, but there's a hunger for some opportunity where people think their voice would matter. This spoke to that. So because the baseline poll had a very high response rate and because we can compare the baseline poll with a weekend microcosm, we can defend the representiveness of the sample.
.1655
As I say, people went to great lengths. There was a man who was in charge of snow removal in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He was in the sample. On the day he was supposed to fly down, there was a tremendous snowstorm in Wisconsin in that part of the northeast. We thought we had lost him. He couldn't come. He knew. He was called out for emergency duty to help clear the snow out of the airport. But he called and left a message for us later in the day that he was on his way. He made it eventually. So he went to a tremendous effort, as did a lot of other people as well.
I would defend the initial group as representative. I would defend the materials as balanced and open to public view. I think it's a process that has ended up taking all my time, but it has some merit for a serious, thoughtful, engaged public discussion.
Mr. Morrison: Are there results of the work that you did on foreign aid and development available in the public domain somewhere?
Prof. Fishkin: Yes, some of them are. In fact, we had a press release. We can certainly make those available.
Mr. Morrison: Could you send them perhaps to the clerk of the committee? I'd like to see some of that. Not huge bulk, but at least a -
Prof. Fishkin: Absolutely, we'd be delighted.
Mr. Morrison: Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Pagtakhan.
Mr. Pagtakhan (Winnipeg North): I have a few questions. Have you had a chance to replicate any of the same group at a point in time later? What are the results?
Prof. Fishkin: In the British case on the issue of crime, we went back nine months later. We didn't bring them back together, but we sent them the same questionnaire, plus some additional questions, nine months later. It was to see if their views nine months later were more like their last considered judgments or their original, top-of-the-head judgments.
It was some mixture in between. Perhaps it was a little more like the considered judgments, but we sent them back to their normal environments and all the people they normally talk to. What stayed was their sense of empowerment, paying attention to public affairs and the importance of that.
Now we have money, I'm glad to say, from the Pew Charitable Trust to go back and reinterview the American respondents right after the election. So we'll do that, and we'll have more data.
Mr. Pagtakhan: What's the confidence level of any results you get?
Prof. Fishkin: Depending on which study it is, it's plus or minus 4.5% to 5%. The changes that we published were all statistically significant at the .01 level.
Mr. Pagtakhan: But like my colleague on the other side, what did you determine as the view to be propounded at the point of discussion? Did it become the view at the end?
Prof. Fishkin: I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question.
Mr. Pagtakhan: Did you succeed in achieving the view that you would like to sell?
Prof. Fishkin: We weren't trying to sell a view. We were very careful to have a range of viewpoints represented. When we had experts, we always had competing experts, because we didn't want the citizens just to defer to expertise. We had the full range of candidates invited in the American case. The full range of major political parties in Britain were represented. We had competing experts on the issues.
We wanted a serious dialogue in which the citizens would identify the key questions they wanted to ask, then they would take those questions and ask them of competing experts, competing politicians, and have a dialogue. Then they would go back into small groups and discuss them.
So we did not have a set of views that we were trying sell. We were rather attempting to facilitate a balanced and more informed discussion. The idea is that this is a microcosm of the country, which can make recommendations to the entire country then on national television.
Mr. Pagtakhan: How much did you have to pay each volunteer?
Prof. Fishkin: In the British case, we paid them £50 and provided their transportation. In the American case, we paid them $300.
Mr. Pagtakhan: Was it part of your design that half of the people you paid and invited did not participate in a group discussion?
Prof. Fishkin: No.
Mr. Pagtakhan: Would it not be a good control?
Prof. Fishkin: Well, if we had money for separate control groups, that would have been fine. We did have money for a national random-sample telephone poll separate from our sample at the time of the broadcast so that we could see if opinions on the issues just changed naturally from the time of the original discussions.
.1700
Mr. Pagtakhan: Is it possible that the trips and the payment made a contribution to the change of views, not only the discussion itself?
Prof. Fishkin: We were very careful to make it clear that we had no agenda that we were trying to promote.
Mr. Pagtakhan: No, I'm not suggesting agenda promotion; I'm just looking at the point of the experimental design. In other words, it is very critical when you interpret results for you to have good quality control, and I cannot see good quality control so far. You have the variable of payment and a good trip. You go to a studio, but all of them participated in that work. I do not have a group that travelled and paid for, but did not participate in a group discussion.
Prof. Fishkin: But what is the significance of the payment?
Mr. Pagtakhan: That's what I'm questioning. Could it have played a role, either contributory or what?
We'll leave that at this point. I'd just like to direct a couple of questions to the other panel members.
The Chairman: You've gone well over your time. It's now five o'clock, and we're running over our time. One last question, then we'll have to move on.
Mr. Pagtakhan: One last question. This is on the need for government collaboration among the various agencies - I think the woman was presenting on this - such as charities, professional associations, and community organizations.
In some of my experiences in other committees, I have detected that when a church group or labour union would appear before us, another group would appear before us on the same topic being looked into by a committee. If you would look at the written briefs, they're almost identical in a number of points. What interaction has happened among them such that it would be essential to still hear them separately? I am equating this in terms of the effectiveness of the process.
Ms Plewes: Look at what CCIC did in terms of the foreign policy review. We convened a series of four major conferences on the key issues that were addressed by the committee in the review of policy. This brought together people from churches, labour unions and some environmental groups.
It was the kind of opportunity we had been hearing about, which was for people to look at questions from a variety of perspectives. So we played a role in helping people to move beyond that initial reaction to furthering and deepening their understanding. That's why, when it gets to the committee, it has already been processed to a certain degree.
Our view is that this is positive for you. You're not starting with opinions that are off the top of the head; you're starting with opinions that are considered. I know from your perspective that it sometimes looks like they're too processed, but in fact I think it is a very useful role that we NGOs play in terms of being a place where people can come together and have these debates.
Mr. Pagtakhan: Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Bergeron.
[Translation]
Mr. Bergeron (Verchères): By looking at the actions taken by the government over the past few months, we concluded that the government cuts made to public information programs about international aid were quite intentional and deliberate. Since the beginning of the 35th Legislature, we have heard certain members, particularly our Reform colleagues, say, on several occasions, that as far as their voters were concerned, the priority should not be given to development aid, but to better management of public finances, etc.
Consequently, the government has probably understood that the less interest citizens have in the issue of international development, the less pressure will be brought to bear on their members of Parliament and the less interest they will have in cutbacks that the government makes to the international aid sector.
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In some respects, we have created a vicious circle: the less we inform the people, the less pressure they will exert on us when cuts are made to international aid programs.
This morning we heard Mr. Michael Adams tell us that it was becoming increasingly more difficult for governments to earmark more money for international aid because citizens felt less and less directly concerned by the issue of international aid given as they could see no direct impact of this aid on their daily life. By cutting back information programs, we are adding to this wrong perception that people have about the direct impact of international aid on their daily lives. We are deeply convinced that international aid has an impact on the daily life of Canadians and Quebeckers.
First of all, we must understand that one out of every four jobs in Canada depends on exports. Consequently, our own prosperity depends, to a large extent, on our economic relationships with other countries.
Moreover, it must be said that the fact that people do not enjoy a decent standard of living beyond our borders may have certain consequences which we will have to bear further down the road, like it or not. I'm thinking, for example, of displaced people and the possible arrival, here, of a very large number of refugees.
We must therefore make people aware of how their daily lives will be directly affected by reductions in Canadian development aid.
We could use some very simple images to get this message across. I have here before me some data given to me by my colleagues from Louis-Hébert, data provided by UNICEF and published in a document entitled A Woman's Peace Platform for the 21st Century. The figures are as follows, and I will read them in English because they are in English.
[English]
what the world needs for child help and nutrition, $13 billion per year; for primary education,$6 billion per year; for safe water and sanitation, $9 billion per year; and for family planning,$6 billion per year. Total needs are $34 billion per year.
What the world is currently spending on golf, $40 billion per year; on wine, $85 billion per year; on beer, $160 billion per year; on cigarettes, $400 billion per year; on advertising, $250 billion per year; and on the military, $800 billion per year.
[Translation]
I made a very quick calculation. Currently, the world spends a total of $1.735 billion. We spend more on golf than we do on all of the needs combined.
I would remind you that we need to send $34 billion per year to cover all of the combined needs whereas we spend, on golf alone, $40 billion every year. We could, of course, use some of these very simple yet striking images which show how little we need to spend in order to achieve very conclusive results.
I would therefore implore you to try to do away with these convictions that we have acquired over the past two and a half years as we have watched this government in action. First of all, have you ever had the impression that the government and the Canadian International Development Agency ever tried to make up for financial investments for public information by implementing various strategies or programs that did not involve any expenditures?
.1710
Secondly, knowing that the government appears to no want to back track in terms of public information expenditures, what could it do that would serve to better educate the public without spending more money?
The Chairman: Mr. Sanger, do you wish to begin?
[English]
Mr. Sanger: I love your passion, Mr. Bergeron. It's tremendous and it's what's needed. People talk about aid fatigue and you at the end of a fatiguing day come on so strongly like that. You didn't mention arms expenditure. You talked about golf. Maybe golf is a -
The Chairman: The amount mentioned was $800 billion.
Mr. Bergeron: I mentioned $800 billion.
Mr. Sanger: You did, $800 billion. I'm sorry. In the early days of development education, I remember that Pat Mooney, who's now moved on to biodiversity, was an expert on multi-media shows in which he juxtaposed these appalling imbalances. Janet Zukowsky talked about getting back to basics. She didn't elaborate on that, but there have been means of putting over matters like this that we need to revisit. He was very effective at that time.
There is this question of whether you play the guilt thing with people. When I see young women standing outside our building, the North-South Institute, smoking at eleven in the morning, should I go up to them and say that they're some of those who are spending $400 million? You have to get people on your side, don't you? You have to walk with them to public judgment and you have to work it through, to use the phrases of the experts beside me.
Let me say I have always admired your passion for this subject, and never more than now.
The Chairman: Ms Plewes.
Ms Plewes: Yes, obviously there are things the government can do. CIDA has a budget of$2 billion. We could take the recommendation of UNDP that 2% be allocated to educating the Canadian public and that it be used effectively in the variety of ways we've talked about today. I think you, in this committee, have shown considerable leadership by having this day, but you as parliamentarians have an extremely important role to play in encouraging your various parties to speak on this issue.
We would like to see the Prime Minister give an important speech on the issue of development cooperation and Canada's role internationally, which unfortunately seems to have taken a remarkable back seat because of the very pressing problem of the economy and national unity. But we can see that the economic imperative is very strong.
In Team Canada there were 300 businessmen and one NGO. We were very happy to see there was one NGO, but maybe there could have been more. Team Canada is not just corporate Canada. Team Canada is also the environmentalists, the artists, and so on. There are a number of ongoing activities. If we could have more awareness and public participation, we could take advantage of those things that already exist.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Ms Plewes: Also, we are meeting Mr. Pettigrew on Monday. We'll be raising a number of these issues with him to see what his views are.
The Chairman: I think we really should draw to a close. We're running well over.
Mr. Bergeron.
[Translation]
Mr. Bergeron: I would simply like to make an observation.
The Chairman: A passionate observation as Mr. Sanger pointed out.
Mr. Bergeron: No, I'm going to try to make this observation in a very cold fashion. I would simply like to tell Mr. Sanger that I fully agree with him that the purpose of this presentation was not to make people feel guilty about playing golf, drinking wine, drinking beer or smoking cigarettes.
Of course, we should feel guilty about spending $800 billion per year on the military sector, but as for everything else, I simply wanted to show people that they don't have to pay a great deal to buy good wine, and yet we spend $85 billion per year on wine. I simply wanted to point out that it wouldn't cost them all that much to assist these developing countries and that we stood to gain a great deal from doing this.
The Chairman: Perhaps you could share you data with the other members of the committee. Personally, I am sceptical about your $6 billion figure for education. I would imagine that that would cost a great deal more than that.
Mr. Bergeron: These are figure provided by UNICEF, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Alright, we will take a look at the figures together later on.
.1715
[English]
I would like, on behalf of the members of the committee, to thank the participants.
Ms Plewes, again I come back to the fact that it was very much your idea to do this day. You said that Canadians want to be involved. I think those of us on this committee who participated in the foreign policy review process by travelling across this country became aware of the intense interests that Canadians - our NGOs, churches, businesses, and individuals - have in foreign policy and in development assistance, in particular. It was everywhere we went.
I think we are trying to do here what Mr. Axworthy asked us to do when he came before this committee the other day. He said that we have to be a focal point for helping Canadians understand these issues and in turn informing ourselves and creating an ongoing process for the democratization of foreign policy, if you wish to put it in that light. In a much broader sense, it's what Mr. Adams was talking to us about, which was the sense that Canadians want to be a part of this process. I think the members of this committee are anxious to do that.
This meeting was born out of a concern about budget cuts and how they affected our development assistance. I think it's going beyond that now to make us realize that as a committee and as a process we have to be conscious about finding new ways for people to participate in our process. This is not going to be easy.
For those members who are here, I think we all sense the difficulty of using what I would almost call 19th century techniques - you were there as witnesses, we are sitting at the end of this table - trying to come to grips with enormously complex social issues of a global significance. We, on our part, want to understand better and to participate better. I know that you, on your part, are anxious to help educate us, and on behalf of the committee I want to thank you for helping us come to a more holistic understanding of our problems.
Participants who came, everyone who is here with us today, we want to thank you for spending your valuable time with us. Believe me, we intend to work hard on these issues and hopefully we can evolve even better techniques. I'm a little nervous about Professor Fishkin's system, but perhaps if he's willing to pay we can all go somewhere in the winter to be a part of one of his experiments.
On that note, thank you again very much for coming.
The committee is adjourned until 9 a.m. on Tuesday. Thank you very much.