Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Jean-Louis Roy Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

1 of 5 - What is Rights & Democracy? - Duration: 4:10

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Transcript:

My name is Jean-Louis Roy and I am President of Rights & Democracy. This institution was created by the Canadian Parliament in 1988 and the mandate was extraordinarily clear: to help close the gap between the international obligations of states and their national practices in terms of democratic values and the promotion and protection of human rights. We have substantially expanded our activities in the last two or three years due to a very substantial increase in our financial resources, our parliamentary allocation, and also money that we were able to receive from various funds, public or private. We have an international mandate, with just a few activities in Canada. We work in all parts of the world. Most significantly, we work in Latin America and the Caribbean (Haiti, Colombia, Bolivia), in Africa (Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya). We work also in the Arab world; we have a very substantial program for the Maghreb, in Morocco, Mauritania and slowly moving toward Algeria. We have activities in the Middle East; we are now defining a larger program that will include Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan. We are in Asia; we work in China, Indonesia, then slowly we are going toward Malaysia in 2008. We have a very substantial program in Afghanistan.

We also work at the level of regional institutions to promote and protect human rights, with the African Commission, the Inter-American Commission, and with a network of Asian NGOs, trying to help them create or obtain the creation of regional instruments to protect human rights in Asia. I should also mention that part of our activities in those countries and regional institutions is related to our joint project with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour. We also work on thematic issues— women’s rights, Aboriginal rights—and we have some focused activities related to globalization. We just finished a long human rights impact assessment study in terms of public and private investment abroad, and we are following the work related to social rights: the right to water and the right to health.

2 of 5 - What is democracy and how does it work? - Duration: 4:14

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Transcript:

What you can bring to other countries is the Canadian experience. You cannot impose the Canadian experience or sell the Canadian experience, but show them, partly, how we have solved our own problems, and is there in our solution any elements that may help them go where they want to go, to get there more quickly and with confidence? Let us take an example, the example of what is going on in Morocco. They have changed their family law, and it is a huge change. And in changing the family law they have changed the status of women. It is an old status, built over centuries, and to change that is really quite a change in a given society. In the process, they have decided to create family tribunals. They have no experience at all with that. How do you bring kids to the point where they can discuss family matters with a judge and with psychologists and sociologists and all that? How do you bring a woman and a man, a couple, and their kids, who are part of a unit that is now dissolving, in front of a judge and not have too much damage done to each individual and the group? It is a very interesting and complex process. We have 40 years of experience in Canada. What we can do to help our Moroccan friends is to show them what we do and let them know what our shortcomings are, and what things we are still working on. We are not sure ourselves because things have changed. You know, 80 percent of the population now lives in cities in Canada. And they can look at that and see the pluses and the minuses and take what they want to take from that. That becomes joint research, in a way.

Democracy, at the end of the day, is not about us going to other countries to tell them what democracy is. It is about understanding that while they will learn a lot from us, we will also learn a lot from them. I was extremely interested to see that at the recent political convention in Canada there was again a discussion about why so few women are going into politics in our country. We have a problem: there are not enough women in politics in Canada. India decided in 1992 to change its constitution and force each party to have a third of their candidates be women. Maybe India is teaching us something.

We all have the same obstacles. We have long experience with our institutions, and we have made them change. Our civil society is quite well organized and we have the financial means. Democracy is very costly, and so is the parliamentary system and all the dialogue. You know; it is a very costly system. We have this chance to showcase our own experience for others, explain to them what we have tried to do and what we have achieved. It is for them to decide what part of it may help their own experience.

3 of 5 - What are the universal and Canadian democratic values? - Duration 2:26

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Transcript:

The basic fact is related to the universality of democratic values. Canadians do not have a special set of values; these values are universal and we adhere to them. Having said that, it is clear that each human community, each country—be it Germany, Brazil, India or South Africa—has to adapt these values to its national reality, to its history. For instance, in this country we have to take into account the Aboriginal presence, which many other countries do not need to take into account. In Canada we have to take into account our federal system; we have a federal government, and we have territories and provinces. We have very specific elements built into the relations between the provincial/territorial authorities and the federal authorities. When we decide as a country—and we have done this for half a century—to be part of the international action and cooperation to help build and sustain democracies around the world, we bring to it our own understanding of universal values and our own specific contribution in the context of universal values.

If you say we have a significant program to help education in West Africa, for example, at some point you have to show schools and you have to answer the questions, “How many more kids are in school? Are they staying in school longer? Do they have books? Do they have libraries?” Health would be the same thing. We have a huge program for health in this part of the world. “How many more people have drugs? How many new clinics are there? How many new people are trained to do medical jobs?” At some point we will have to answer these questions because, at $35 billion in a decade, Canadians will ask for clearer answers than the ones we are prepared to give today. All countries in the West that have huge foreign aid programs have to answer the same questions.

The world has changed a lot; new institutions have been created, strong institutions. Some poor countries are now becoming richer, like India, Brazil, China and Indonesia, and they are contributing to foreign aid themselves. So the world in changing a lot, but how do we adapt to this world and how do we answer the question, “Is foreign aid going to real people who need our help? Is part of it going to sustain Canadian institutions and Canadian enterprises? What is the proportion of the money that stays in Canada? What tools do we have at our disposal to know if this $800 million that we have given to this international institution under this or that program has delivered?” The British have been the first to look at the entire system. They have developed tools so they know when they put money in the World Bank, when they put money in the IMF or other institutions, they can trace their money and decide “This program has to be maintained because it is good” or “This program has to be slightly changed because the results are not there” or “This program has to be ended because it is a complete failure.”

I think at some point in Canada, we will have to go deeper into what we do to be really able to answer the question. Take the case of Afghanistan. Both governments, the former Liberal government and the current Conservative government, decided that we would have a huge program there. The Conservatives have maintained it and increased it. The question that the media are raising all the time is about just that: “You are telling us that we have to help civil society to rebuild human communities, to help women to educate themselves, find jobs, to build schools, to build health facilities, judicial clinics and all that. Can you show us the result?” That is a valid question. Of course, in the case of Afghanistan there is the security question that makes the answer extraordinarily complicated, but at some point people are just asking the right question.

5 of 5 - What happens when there is no democracy? - Duration 4:26

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Transcript:

Civil society in authoritarian states and systems is the only hope for democracy. We have seen that so many times. We are now seeing it in Burma, maybe in Cuba, in Zimbabwe. Who will change those very authoritarian regimes? The regime itself will not change it. The institutions are not strong enough to impose the rules. Democracy is about having institutions that are extraordinary strong. You are in power, then people vote, and the day after you are not in power. You go out and another group comes in, and no one is surprised. That is the way it operates for us, but for authoritarian regimes the institutions are not strong enough to organize this kind of non-violent change in human communities. Then you have women and men trying to build associations, trying to slowly build more space for debate, more space for free speech, more space for association of all sorts. The media are doing the same. The media have a way to do it that is extraordinary. That little sentence that you might read in a newspaper in Harare will not have a lot of meaning for me and you. But when for the first time you have a reference to the fact that water is not drinkable in half the country, you have a shift. You have this little sentence in a random paragraph, and then a larger text. The Chinese are doing that also.

Under those kinds of regimes, civil society organization and people who build civil society do it at their own risk. Many times, they are jailed, they are tortured, some of them are killed—it is the ultimate form of promotion of riots, in fact. And those regimes know exactly what they are doing when they say, “We do not need NGOs; we do not need civil society.” The first thing an authoritarian regime does is to cut the links from the outside, and they will be sure that inside their own country you cannot organize yourself except under their authority. They do not tolerate anything outside of that. I was in Egypt in June for a long stay, and I was again surprised to see men and women, young and old, terrified by the thought that the authorities might know they had met with us—not sure if we can go to their office because if someone reports it, they might find themselves in great trouble—you know, the kind of climate that civil society organizations face in authoritarian regimes. They have to do everything hoping that they will not be destroyed, that slowly they will gain space for freedom and for liberties.

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Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada

Last Updated:2007-02-02

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