:
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, it is my privilege today to be representing the Board of Directors, and Jacques Gauthier, as an individual, as he has gradually, in the last few months, become a central figure in this drama.
Who is Jacques Gauthier? Born in Montreal, I grew up in Paris for the first ten years of my life, and subsequently in Ottawa, where I attended the University of Ottawa Secondary School, Richmond Secondary School, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. I then spent several years in Geneva doing my PhD, followed by studies in The Hague. After that, I settled in Toronto where I have been practising international law for more than 30 years now, with a concern for international justice and human rights.
A major concern for me, in these last 30 years, has been children's rights. In Toronto, I established Justice for Children and Youth, which is now recognized as one of the most important institutions for the protection of children's rights in Canada. I took an interest in children suffering in Africa and became involved in missions organized by the Canadian Save the Children Fund; I visited the site of a number of projects being carried out in Africa dealing with these issues. I have serious concerns about refugees from Africa, and in the last ten years, I have focused on the rights of refugees from that region of the world.
I have also taken a great interest in the rights of Francophone minorities in Ontario, as chair of the Association des juristes d'expression française, and as a founder of the Official Languages Committee of the Canadian Bar Association, as well as a teacher with the Canadian Bar. I trained legal counsel in Ontario to practice the law in French at a time when there was absolutely nothing available. French-speaking lawyers had no tools and no documents to work with in that area.
I also took an interest in human rights in China. I headed a mission to China for Rights and Democracy in November, and this is an initiative that continues to be of concern to me.
For 66 days—I may write a book one day entitled Sixty-six Days as Chair of Rights and Democracy—my life revolved around the onerous responsibilities of the chairmanship, looking after my firm in Toronto and—something that has been a concern for many years now—my five women—a spouse and four daughters.
My adventure with Rights and Democracy began in February of 2008. I was appointed to the Board of Directors by the Conservative government with three other persons: Professor Tepper, Professor Payam Akhavan and Mr. Guilbeault. Of the four people who were appointed at the same time, two are considered, by those who have been opposing us for months, to be friendly directors, and Professor Tepper and myself found ourselves in the eye of the storm.
I should point out that when I joined the Board of Rights and Democracy, it was a fairly troubling period. Several months earlier, in December of 2007, a report had been issued by the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, DFAIT. That report looked at a considerable number of demands and attacks against Rights and Democracy, suggesting that the institution was poorly managed, and that there were major financial or accounting problems. When I came on board, I was told a number of times, by both Board members and members of the employee team:
[English]
we have just gone through a near-death experience.
[Translation]
The government took quite a bit of time appointing the four directors. In fact, the government took so much time appointing them that the impression was left that they would not be appointed, and that this was the end of Rights and Democracy.
To those who support the theory that we came into a healthy institution, with no issues, I can confirm that that is not true. Everyone appointed in February of 2008 was well aware of the concerns that had been reported in the newspapers for weeks and weeks. We were told that changes had to be made.
[English]
So we came in very conscious of the shortcomings and allegations and with a mandate to fight to make things right.
[Translation]
When I arrived—I was a member of the Board—the Chairman of the Board was Ms. Janice Stein, and Mr. Hubert was the President of Rights and Democracy.
Several months after my arrival, since Ms. Stein's mandate had not been renewed, she asked me to step into the position of Vice-Chairman of the Board. After some hesitation—if only I had been more clairvoyant and understood what awaited me subsequently, I might not have accepted—I did end up accepting.
[English]
As vice-chair, I had the opportunity to get to know the members of the finance committee because I was appointed to the finance committee. I had also become acting chair of the performance review committee of the president of the organization. As acting president, I was exposed to a lot of information. I had access to a lot of documentation. Keeping in mind the concerns that had been voiced in the media in the report of the inspector general, I started to ask a lot of questions.
Rémy Beauregard, it must be underlined, was appointed by this government and really started to assume his responsibilities in July 2008. I started to work with Monsieur Beauregard on a multitude of files. We met in different places, sometimes in Toronto and sometimes in Montreal. We attended functions of Rights and Democracy and broke bread on several occasions. I must say that for the initial period of four or five months, when we were together things went very well.
When I started to ask questions, I discovered that the staff, the management team around Mr. Beauregard, were very uncomfortable with the questions I was asking, for instance, about a very peculiar payment of $100,000 that had been made to one of the staff members who left the organization. The more questions I asked, the more difficulty I had in obtaining answers. In fact, it was only over the last week that I finally got to the bottom of that question.
I asked questions about the more than $800,000 that had been sent to the partner of Rights and Democracy, the high commissioner's office in Geneva. I asked questions about the discretionary funds and the contract that was used to send funds. Over the last five years, we're talking about over $1 million sent in little chunks without authorization from the board--which is part of the rules, it's structured that way--with very little information given to the board in due course.
I asked questions about many other things.
I want to underline that the difficulties with the staff began when these questions were raised by members of the finance committee, me, and the chair of the board when he arrived, Professor Aurel Braun.
I want to deal with the issue of ideology. It has often been suggested in the media that we as directors, or I as acting president, was under a mandate to transform this organization and alter the direction of the organization. The truth is, if you study the contracts that were approved by the board of directors for the projects that were authorized by me over my 66 days and by the board previous to that, you will have an enormous amount of difficulty identifying any project or contract that has not been supported by this board or this president.
The suggestion that we have been given instructions to alter the course of the direction of Rights and Democracy is not truthful. I have never received a call from the Prime Minister's Office or DFAIT asking me not to do something about a project in this organization--to this day--as a director, an administrator, or an acting president.
For those who fear that this board or the current leadership of Rights and Democracy has been mandated to totally transform this institution into something that it hasn't been over the last 20 years, I want to emphasize that's not true, as far as the programming is concerned, but it is true as far as lack of accountability and transparency.
Thank you.
:
Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
[Translation]
I would like to preface my remarks by saying that my experience with Rights and Democracy is only limited to the last 11 months, as I was appointed to the Board at the end of April, 2009.
[English]
I'm glad to be able to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you, because comments have been made by some members of Parliament and others that directly and indirectly impugn the board of Rights and Democracy by attempting to undermine the credibility of individual board members, including myself.
My name is Brad Farquhar. I'm a management consultant and an international democracy development practitioner with a wide array of lifelong experience. By the time I turned 19, I had moved 11 times, lived in three countries, and visited some 32 others, culminating in a summer spent in northeastern Zaire, as it was then called, working on a water development project between high school and university. It was a great start for a career that would take me around the world.
I spent a number of years at the start of my career working in federal and provincial politics. During that time, I became somewhat of an expert on electoral financing in Saskatchewan, and I sat on an all-party committee that made recommendations to the Saskatchewan legislative assembly on changes to the Election Act of Saskatchewan. I also completed a master's degree in election administration from Griffith University in Australia, and I am quite possibly the only Canadian to hold a degree specifically in election administration.
It was on the basis of this background that I received a telephone call in 2004 from IFES, formally known as the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, inquiring whether I would be willing to go to Tajikistan for four months over Christmas to work on a political party development project. Tajikistan was about to have its second parliamentary election in history, and the six registered political parties and their candidates needed support in learning how to campaign in an open contest. These parties included the governing People's Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Islamic Revival Party, which is the only registered Islamic party in Central Asia.
In Tajikistan I wrote a curriculum for parliamentary candidates that was taught across the country. I organized the first ever election trade fairs, which allowed the public to meet candidates from all six parties at once, and I was part of a team that organized the largest training event for election officials in Tajikistan history. In the middle of winter, we brought over 450 election-day officials from their remote mountain valleys to the capital in a massive logistical exercise. Then, on election day, I was accredited to the OSCE observer mission as an election observer.
Several months after returning to Canada, I was awarded the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal in honour of my contribution to democratic development in Tajikistan. Since then, I have worked on election finance reform projects in Jamaica and authored proposals for democracy development projects in Egypt. I co-founded the Democracy Promoters' Network, an online networking forum for Canadian democracy promoters. The University of Regina engaged me to teach a third-year political science course on elections, and I have been a panellist on international democracy assistance alongside Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor Gordon Barnhart.
In the midst of this, I have also made it a priority of my consulting practice to spend about one month of each year volunteering in developing countries with my entire family. In 2008, my wife and I worked on the development of a school and a teacher training centre in eastern Niger. In 2009, we went back to Niger with our three young children shortly after Robert Fowler and Louis Guay were kidnapped by al-Qaeda, close to the area of where we would be working. People thought we were insane to go to Niger and take our children along, but we are committed as a family to making a difference in our world and to teaching our children that the world is much larger than their comfortable, middle-class lives here in Canada. With privilege comes responsibility.
This summer we will spend a month in Mongolia, working with grassroots Mongolian entrepreneurs and NGOs on several agriculture projects, to help the people of Mongolia recover from a disastrous winter in which more than half the country's livestock died of hunger and exposure.
So why have I told you all this? I've told you this because we have been called here today in an effort by some to prove that we are nothing more than partisan stooges in some kind of conspiracy at Rights and Democracy. I know what partisanship and partisan politics look like. I spent a number of years working in that environment. I, too, ran for public office, albeit somewhat less successful than all of you. But those who claim that partisanship defines my character prove they don't know me and they don't know my motivations. Like you, I have a desire to serve and make the world a better place. So let's leave politics aside and let's look at Rights and Democracy.
Yes, there have been disagreements over a performance review and over unwise grants to some organizations in the Middle East. Disagreements take place in every organization, but at Rights and Democracy, disagreement took on a life of its own because the now late president decided to fight.
There was a deliberate campaign to divide the board and turn it on itself. The staff were politicized against certain board members by trying to convince them that the board consisted of evil envoys of the Conservative government bent on destruction. Legal means were used to pursue a resolution to the disagreement in a way that would be satisfactory to the president, but which would undermine the governance structures of the organization.
But there is something that concerns me far more than disagreements over performance reviews or grants in the Middle East. I have observed a culture at Rights and Democracy that is not predisposed to openness and accountability, even to members of the board. I have observed board members trying to do their jobs by asking questions about projects and results and being consistently met with non-answers, with bobbing and weaving, with disdainful contempt, and with delay tactics.
What I have observed at Rights and Democracy is a clear belief among staff that the organization's quasi-autonomy from the government of the day should translate into independence from the oversight of their own board. When board members' questions are met with non-information, physical blockades, and leaks to the media, it sets off alarm bells that prompt the board to ask more questions to get to the truth of the matter. When this is construed as harassment, as government interference, or as the implementation of some kind of partisan vendetta, it is an outrageous attempt to politicize something that does not deserve the label.
Rather than talk in generalities, let me share with you two examples of what I mean when I talk about accountability and transparency. This will take a few minutes, but I want to beg your indulgence, if I could.
I listened to the recording of your meeting earlier this week with the former employees and there are inconsistencies, so I want to outline for you a timeline of certain events that took place this January.
As you all know, we were shocked to learn on January 8 of Mr. Beauregard's untimely death. Later that day, the union president sent an e-mail to the staff about these events, and he said they would meet with management on Monday--that was a Friday--to discuss ways and means whereby the union could contribute to preserving the interests of Rights and Democracy.
On Monday, the now-famous letter calling for the resignation of the board leadership was sent out. Simultaneously, management retracted the main sticking point in its negotiations with the union so an agreement in principle was reached on a new collective agreement. At present, this board remains in the dark regarding the contents of the sections that were removed, which were retracted to break that logjam. The section generally deals with disciplinary measures, so we're left to speculate on what was removed.
The next day, the union president indicated to the staff that there would be a meeting to discuss a ratification vote on this new collective agreement. On Friday of that week--this is one week now after the death of the president--a new collective agreement was signed on behalf of the centre by Marie-France Cloutier, Anne-Marie Lavoie, and France-Isabelle Langlois, who are directors and deputy directors at Rights and Democracy.
The following Monday, the president of the union sent an e-mail to the staff indicating that the contract had been signed, and the next day there was a ratification vote in which the new contract was overwhelmingly approved.
Why is this important? This is important because for months and months the board had been told that the employees did not have a contract, there was an outstanding discussion, and that this was a very tough union to deal with. Suddenly, very quickly, they managed to get an agreement at a time when they needed the support of the staff. It's highly unusual.
On Tuesday, January 19--so this is the day of the ratification vote, two hours after the ratification vote--Mr. Braun received an e-mail from the management committee at the centre to inform him that they were respectfully declining his request as chair to reconvene the board meeting in Montreal later that week.
On Friday, the board met anyway in Toronto, and my colleague, Mr. Gauthier, was appointed as acting president. Dr. Braun sent a memo to the staff in which he indicated that Mr. Gauthier had been appointed as president. Less than two hours later a response was received from Marie-France Cloutier, and cc'd to the board and the staff, that she refused to implement the details of that memo, and she announced for the very first time that she was now on sick leave for three weeks. This is the only notice ever received from Madame Cloutier regarding her sick leave, and it comes five days after the date she indicated here in this committee, on Tuesday, that she had gone on sick leave. So five days later was when the board was notified. Even after she announced her sick leave, we know that she attended Mr. Beauregard's funeral, she went to Ottawa and met with officials at DFAIT, she wrote an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, and she went on a long-planned trip to Disney World.
Here's the thing, though. I have learned most of these details in the past two days. On Tuesday morning, just two days ago, the board of Rights and Democracy did not know that a new collective agreement had been agreed to, and signed, and ratified over two months ago. This board has met three times since this agreement was ratified, and no one on the management team ever brought it up. The collective agreement with a union is one of the most material contracts to an organization, and it is incomprehensible to me that the entire agreement was put together without board knowledge or consent, and that it remained hidden from view for over two months.
I had another point. I will leave that and maybe it will come up in the questions.
In summary, Mr. Chairman, in 11 months on this board, I have witnessed a method of operation at Rights and Democracy that is not consistent with good governance norms for transparency and accountability. This example that I gave, plus the other one that I'd be glad to discuss, are two examples among many, and they are the reason why the board has been consistent in its message in demanding more transparency and greater accountability. Without this, we are unable to do our jobs.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to appear.
I was appointed to the board of Rights and Democracy in November 2009. My first board meeting was January 7 and 8, 2010. The evening of the first day of that meeting the president, Rémy Beauregard, tragically died of a heart attack. Four days later, a letter, with the names of all staff appended, called on the leadership of the board, the chair, vice-chair, and chair of the finance and audit committee, to resign, citing harassment of the president.
So I had to ask myself what was going on here. The charge of harassment, I could see, was absurd on its face. None of the three accused of harassment lived in Montreal. They were busy people, and in my experience were often hard to contact. The chair, in the weeks before the meeting, was virtually incommunicado, spending most of his time in hospital with his then dying wife. She died just a few days before the board meeting.
Moreover, the sole specific complaint in the letter requesting resignations had nothing to do with harassment. The specific complaint was that the performance evaluation committee of the board treated the president unfairly, because it sent the performance evaluation of the president to the Privy Council without first having given the president a copy and an opportunity to comment. The president did get a copy of the performance review from the Privy Council through an access to information request and did have an opportunity to comment on the review before any decision was made in the Privy Council on that review. In my opinion, as an administrative law lawyer litigating the duty of fairness almost constantly for decades, there was nothing unfair in that.
Before I was appointed I was not told a whole lot. I was asked if I had any skeletons in the closet. I said, “Well, I'm a Liberal”, but that did not seem to matter. I'd been on the board before, between 1997 and 2003. I was told there was a division in the board and my experience as a past board member would be helpful. I was told there had been a dispute about three small grants to organizations in the Middle East, but that the president, when criticized about the grants, had distanced himself from them.
Was this an issue or the issue, these grants? Apparently not. I decided to test the waters myself at the January board meeting by presenting a resolution repudiating the grants. The motion passed unanimously, with the president speaking in support and saying, “We could have done our homework better.”
A staff representative, Charles Vallerand, in a letter to the Globe and Mail on January 16, indicated that the dispute the staff had with the board majority was not about policy.
On reflection, it was my view that to look for one answer to the question of what was plaguing Rights and Democracy was overly simplistic. I considered there to be a sequence of issues, each issue related to the others, a set of nested dolls. The issue of the three small Middle East grants was not an irrelevancy but rather embedded in another issue, the performance review of the president.
The performance review of the president, completed by the performance review committee and sent to the Privy Council in May 2009, had a half-page reference in the 16-page review to these three grants. So there was a small reflection of the grants in the performance review. The performance review was a lot larger issue and was the immediate cause of division within the board. The president, as he was fully entitled to do, disagreed with the performance review sent to the Privy Council. But for reasons I must confess I still do not fully understand, he brought his disagreement to the board and not to the Privy Council. The president asked the board to decide that the performance review should be withdrawn from the Privy Council, but structurally the board had no authority to deal with the performance review. The president proposed a bylaw change so that the board could deal with the performance review. That proposal, as well as his request for withdrawal, was still pending the day he died.
The performance review was itself embedded in a still larger issue: the relationship between the board and the staff. From the paper record he left behind, I can see that Beauregard's concerns were not just the content of the performance review but also its scope. He considered the performance review as commenting on matters that were in his view none of the business of the performance review committee. An over-expanded scope for the presidential performance review committee meant that for the president to obtain a positive performance review, he would have had to conform to the views of the committee on matters that in his opinion were not properly within their jurisdiction but were rather part of the president's reserve domain.
We can see that the dispute is not about personalities but a continuation of the dispute, even though many of the characters have changed. The dispute about performance review was embedded in the larger dispute itself about accountability, about whether the staff or the board decided the course of the organization. But even that issue was embedded in a much larger issue, the role of Rights and Democracy.
Rights and Democracy was established to give grants to third world NGOs that would promote rights and democracy. It was set up at arm's length from government in order to avoid giving the impression of political interference in foreign countries, which direct Canadian government granting to foreign NGOs might give. Yet the staff and management of Rights and Democracy, from my perspective, has all but abandoned that original parliamentary intent.
There are NGOs, of course, to which Rights and Democracy gives money, but none of this is simply the awarding of grants among applications. All spending today by Rights and Democracy on NGOs results from elicited requests. The organization devises the programs and finds NGO contractors to deliver them. NGOs that receive grants today from Rights and Democracy are doing what Rights and Democracy wants, on contract.
The original vision was that the third world NGOs that received grants from Rights and Democracy should be independent from the Government of Canada. This has been perverted into a notion that the staff of Rights and Democracy should be independent from its board. Yet independence of the staff from the board violates the statute of the institution that vests authority in the board over the conduct and management of the affairs of Rights and Democracy.
As well, independence of the staff on the board makes no sense. The Government of Canada should take the NGO world as it finds it and not try to manipulate it through money, but that is different from saying that a government-appointed board should leave the staff of a government-devised and wholly financed creature to do whatever it wants. It is, on the contrary, bizarre to suggest that the Government of Canada should fully fund an institution to hire people off the street to run its own political agenda in the name of human rights without its appointed board raising so much as a peep.
This was a problem I could see even when I was on the board before. Again, the catalyst was the Middle East, where there are often disagreements. Rights and Democracy had a fledgling Middle East program, which the board terminated in 1998, when I was a member of the board.
Warren Allmand then, without board approval, sent two letters to Bill Graham. One of them expressed shock at Canada's voting against one of the many anti-Israel resolutions at the then United Nations Human Rights Commission. Another was an anti-Israel diatribe condemning Israel for violating every international crime known to humanity. This time it was the Hezbollah terrorist attacks from Lebanon that generated that letter.
As a board member, I then wrote to Bill Graham, pointing out that I was a member of the board and disagreeing with what Allmand wrote. At that time, Allmand and his staff, in good grace, accepted what had happened and we moved on, but these were two trains moving on the same track toward each other on a collision course.
One could question the mission of Rights and Democracy as devised by Parliament, even as the organization stayed within the statutory vision. But it has not, by, in effect, creating programs that it is running itself with NGO delivery. We can see the notion of independence of staff on the board, not just because of what the staff have said, but also because of what the past presidents have said. We have a statement from four past presidents asking the Prime Minister to address a subversion of the independence of the organization.
Where does that leave Rights and Democracy? If this were just a matter of hot tempers, tempers could cool and time would heal. If it were just a matter of some misspoken words, apologies might remedy the rudeness. However, if the problem lies with the structure and relationship within Rights and Democracy itself, the resolution of the problem is not so simple.
Independence of a government-created and fully financed operation from a government-appointed board makes no sense. Unless and until we have a staff that have accepted that the board is responsible for the direction of the organization, the problems at Rights and Democracy will persist.
Thank you.
My name is Aurel Braun and I'm the chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. Please allow me to say a few words about myself by way of introduction. I am a professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto, where I have held the highest academic rank of a full professor for more than two decades.
My interest and expertise in human rights and democratic development go back decades, and my willingness to take on the position of chair of Rights and Democracy has also been influenced by my background. I came to this country as a young boy with my parents in the early 1960s. My parents had been victims of right-wing extremism--Nazism--and of left-wing extremism--communism.
One of my books, in fact, is about extremism and the danger that both right-wing and left-wing extremism pose to human rights and democracy. As a child growing up in a neo-Stalinist state from which my parents brought me to Canada, I could sense the perniciousness of an extreme system in which merely asking questions was deemed to be subversion. Canada, however, gave me every opportunity to grow, and whatever I have achieved, I owe to this country.
The profound sense of fairness that characterizes Canadian culture has always been an inspiration, and joining Rights and Democracy seemed to be an opportunity to give something back and express my gratitude. Sadly, however, the current situation, which you've seen in the press and elsewhere, reminds me of the great liberal writer, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm. The late Orwell must be ruefully smiling from the grave at what he is hearing.
The situation we've encountered in the past couple of months is truly Orwellian. If I had known fully what I was getting into, I would never have agreed to be chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. It was as if I'd been invited to attend a conference and was asked to get some papers in a back room, only to discover there land mines instead.
Let's begin with the obvious. You have been hearing all these months two completely incompatible versions of reality. In the situation of “he says, she says”, wise people avoid jumping to conclusions, because they do not know whom or what to believe. I urge you to believe no one, including me, before checking the documentable facts. By checking the documented evidence, a fair and objective person can know who is the arsonist and who is the firefighter.
Let's begin with what many of us can agree on. Rights and Democracy is a dysfunctional organization. Becoming a dysfunctional organization can be decades in the making. For this reason, you should not believe the words of ex-presidents any more than you should take at face value what I have to say. My view of Rights and Democracy is that it was seized by a culture of dogmatism, a rejection of accountability, and a lack of transparency.
But I wish to point to the facts. The first type of verifiable fact involves actual facts about impropriety and sponsorship. The organization has spent, as we've heard, about $3.5 million in subsidies. We don't know where all of this money has gone. We do know that far too much of it has gone to terrorist front organizations that pretend to be human rights organizations, notably Al-Haq, in certain ways a front for the terrorist organization PFLP.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to the Geneva-based office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is the secretariat of the disreputable UN Human Rights Council, an organization whose conduct has been characterized by the UN Secretary-General himself as totally unacceptable.
Thousands of dollars have gone to a Cairo conference organized with the inclusion of Hezbollah, an organization deemed terrorist under the laws of Canada and other democracies.
The second type of verifiable fact involves senior staff's disregard of due process and elementary fairness. Days after the passing of President Beauregard, the senior staff, as we heard, rushed to sign a collective agreement with their own union without even informing the board. It very much appeared that the purpose of the rushed collective agreement in January 2010 was to give unionized staff taxpayer money in exchange for the union's backing for the senior staff campaign to obscure that senior staff's long history of dogmatism and rejection of accountability.
Elementary fairness will also require the senior staff to be honest about who signed the famous letter of protest and who actually wrote it. Certainly the letter claiming unanimity was not signed by everyone on January 11, 2010. Days later, senior staff rushed around coercing employees to provide their signatures after the letter had already been written and sent. Further, elementary fairness would require the staff not to misuse the passing of the president to serve their personal agendas. It is true that the board and the president did not always agree, but it is a verifiable fact that the president took the side of the board, not the senior staff, at the all-crucial board meeting of January 7, 2010.
The third type of verifiable fact involves the disregard by the senior staff of their obligation to protect confidential information. By this I mean that staff had an obligation to guard computers so that information about Rights and Democracy's anonymous staff in war zones like Afghanistan would never leave the offices. Instead, a number of computers with sensitive information disappeared mysteriously without third-party confirmation that there was a break-in.
Furthermore, it seems that senior staff gave the widow of Mr. Beauregard his computer, with all its sensitive information, even though she had neither the right nor the clearance to receive such information.
In conclusion, please allow me to note again that dysfunctional organizations can take decades to become that way. Fair-minded people withhold judgment about who is telling the truth until they can get verifiable, documented evidence. We are here to present the facts. We have discovered the problems. We did not create them. We, as volunteers, have given our time and have made major sacrifices in order to ensure that Rights and Democracy fulfills its mandate to enhance human rights and promote democracy and that it acts in a fashion that is congruent with the good conscience of the Canadian people.
Thank you for inviting us.
:
Are you asking me, sir, to respond to that? Perhaps I could say a couple of words, and then others could join in.
This is one of the very distressing aspects of the process that has taken place. Floating out there you have ludicrous, irresponsible allegations directed against us, innuendoes that are absolutely horrific and that are totally at variance with the reality of what happened.
As chair, I have always asked people at these board meetings to treat each other with civility. I call on people to make sure they use parliamentary language and that individuals have an opportunity to speak. At this meeting, which took place on January 7, the meeting began with Mr. Beauregard being extremely concerned about his wife's health. Mr. Beauregard asked me to do something that we normally do not do at board meetings; he asked that he be allowed to leave his cellphone on. The reason was that his wife was in hospital. I immediately said to him, “Sadly, I understand all too well these kinds of problems and this kind of situation. I will absolutely make that exception. Please leave the cellphone on, and if there's anything we can do to help, we will do that.”
The meeting itself was civil. There was a disagreement over a vote about reappointing one of the members of the board who was a foreign member, but that was a normal disagreement and involved two democratic votes. The afternoon was entirely civil. There were no vicious attacks. There was no atmosphere of chaos or stress. We took vote after vote. The president and the rest of us spoke civilly to each other. The president, in fact, voted with the majority of the board on a number of these votes, including one of the last votes, and that was the vote about repudiating these three grants, with which he fully agreed.
Therefore, these accusations that have been floating about are not only totally false, they're incredibly hurtful. One needs to ask what the possible purpose is of these accusations, since they entirely misrepresent the facts.
Other members of the board who are here can also speak about the atmosphere that prevailed on that day and how that day concluded on a civil note.
Thank you.
:
A report was prepared by Mr. Robert and reviewed by the Board of Directors. However, you referred to the closure of the Geneva office. I am sure you know that this was a two-year project, with a specific start and end date—namely August of 2009. So, because the project was completed, the question was not—contrary to what is often said—whether or not the office should suddenly be closed, but rather whether a new project would be approved in order to renew that office's mandate. That was the issue.
It is important to point out, however, that in early December of 2009, there was no one left at that office, because Ms. Cynthia Gervais, who was the Director in Geneva, had suddenly resigned. There was no one there for months.
The context and circumstances surrounding that closure are important. You should also know that there was that legal structure for the Geneva office. Rights and Democracy Switzerland was completely controlled by salaried members. None of the outside directors was part of that board. It had members, rather than shareholders. There were no board members. As a result, for years, very little information was passed on.
Let's talk about costs. I had understood that this had cost close to $400,000 for two years. I learned later that it was very difficult to ascertain the actual cost because of mechanisms, that were consistent with the rules at Rights and Democracy, whereby funds could be provided for a project, because of a partnership or for any other reason.
As the Chair, in recent months, I was finally able to take a closer look at things. That is when I realized that the amount of money sent to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was not $700,000, as we believed, but more than $800,000. Furthermore, the Geneva office had received, not $400,000, but more than $500,000. So, there were concerns about flaws in accounting procedures.
It was decided that important projects that were being monitored by the Geneva office could be monitored from Montreal.
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I will attempt to answer those three questions.
The first question has to do with the organizations. Within the Middle East there is a dispute among many players, unfortunately, about the existence of the State of Israel. It's the only state in the United Nations whose very existence is under threat.
There are many states that don't recognize it and engage in a very active campaign in demonization and delegitimization in order to further their goal of the destruction of the State of Israel, including two of the three organizations--Al-Haq and Al Mezan.
I appreciate your reading from the report of Amnesty International. I myself have written a book on this issue called Aftershock: Anti-Zionism & Antisemitism, which I've brought. I invite you to read it, and you will see in detail what the concerns are and why I have trouble with these organizations.
On why the bureau was closed, I must confess that I like the answer of Jacques Gauthier, which I thought was very good and very thorough, but there's something substantive at issue here as well. That bureau was mostly helping NGOs from third world countries come to participate in the universal periodic review of the Human Rights Council--as well as to liaise with other NGOs and the human rights secretariat, but their hands-on work was that.
I have been to the universal periodic review a couple of times about Iran and China. It's a very problematic process, and I don't think it's a good use of public money. I can't get into Iran or China, but it makes little sense to get NGOs that can actually work in those countries to leave those countries to participate in the universal periodic review where they can't speak. Only governments can speak. The NGOs can only meet with governments, and most of the governments they meet with can't speak either because there's a time limit. Only 60 states out of 192 are allowed to speak, and there's a rush of violators to the microphone in order to provide immunity to the states under scrutiny. So most of the rights-promoting states don't even get to the microphone. It's just not a good use of money.
There is a third question I was going to move on to, but...
[Translation]
Do you have any other questions?
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you for appearing here today, gentlemen.
I have reviewed the impressive credentials of the four of you appearing today. I have noted as well the credentials and political background of other persons associated with the organization over the years: Mr. Broadbent, NDP; and Warren Allmand, Liberal.
Mr. Matas, you said you had run as a Liberal at one time. Mr. Farquhar has run with the Saskatchewan Party, which I think we can conclude to be on the Conservative side.
That indicates there is a broad political spectrum in your organization. It bodes well for the very important work you have been doing. I'll be looking forward to your updating your plans for the future too.
In keeping with that, Mr. Farquhar, I want to talk about some of the comments you made. You have quite a bit of experience with OSCE, as have I and others in Parliament. I think I've been on 11 different election monitoring programs--in different parts of the world too. I think it's an excellent background to develop the philosophy and theories on how to move forward to help some of the situations. There's nothing like being on the streets during the political challenge and game to determine what is right and wrong and what has to be done.
I'm very interested in your comment that you've been looking at political party development, which I would take to include policy development. One of the things that has been made very clear to me is that some of these struggling democracies have so many political parties--some have 40 or 50 political parties running in an election--that it's very difficult for them to organize policy development, what the political party should be doing.
Haiti is one example that you mentioned being involved in. There is a serious lack of understanding of how the members of Parliament should be representing the people.
Could you expand a bit on the party development, and perhaps some other initiatives that you will be looking at in the future?
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I have just a comment on one of the organizations that's been at issue here, which is the B'Tselem organization.
I understand your point, Mr. Matas, and I appreciate the depth of your feeling and point of view, but I'd just like to point out that according to their websites, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Christian Aid (UK), Commission of the European Communities, DanChurchAid Denmark, Diakonia Sweden, Development Corporation Ireland, the German development organization, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, the Ford Foundation, the Norwegian foreign ministry, as well as the Dutch organization have all determined that supporting an organization that is advocating on behalf of human rights in the West Bank and Gaza is a legitimate organization. I think you do have to think a little bit about where the balance lies and not assume the worst with respect to the motivations of an organization such as Rights and Democracy, which is engaging in support of this organization or others.
I hold no grief or candle to them one way or the other. I'm just saying that one does have to recognize that a number of other respected governments have determined that this is an organization worthy of support. If you say no, it isn't, that's of course the right of the board to do that, but I think the board has to take into account to some degree the overall policy of the Government of Canada with respect to the question of what kind of a solution we see as being essential for the future of the Middle East. I do think that's something the board is going to have to consider.
My last point, Mr. Chairman, is this. In light of Mr. Matas' testimony today, as well as Mr. Braun's, Mr. Gauthier's, and Mr. Farquhar's, I really think this committee has an obligation...not to micromanage the organization, but you're describing, first of all, a level of dysfunction, which I think is important for us to hear about and to get your views on. We also have a very clear view from Mr. Matas as to how there are profound issues about the organization itself, based on the change in circumstances.
The idea that somehow it's inappropriate for us to look at an organization that has clearly been in crisis strikes me as rather odd, since it is funded by Parliament and is responsible to Parliament. I suggest to my friend, Mr. Abbott, that perhaps we might want to rethink this question, because you are telling us that you're going to have to look at some very fundamental issues. Quite frankly, if that's what you think you have to do, I think we have an obligation as members of Parliament to know what those new directions are, and to know what the implications of those directions are.