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Emerging Democracies Forum
Managing the Twin Transitions
Opening Ceremonies
(7 of 29 pages)
Kim Campbell: Thank you very much, Ken. President Saleh, honored and distinguished
members of government and participants in this conference, I am honored to have been asked to be a co-chair with
my colleague, the former President of Bolivia. And I want to begin by again saying thank you to the government
and people of Yemen for their vision in thinking of this conference and for their extraordinary hospitality they've
offered to all of us and even more particularly with the creation of this very beautiful facility which provides
a very elegant and dignified setting for this very important opening session.
When I was contacted by Les Campbell of the National Democratic Institute in Washington to think of becoming the
co-chair of this conference, I was delighted. It was not duress that led me to accept the invitation. Notwithstanding
that we have the same name, Les Campbell and I do not share a family and, in fact, in our shared country we do
not even share a political party. Because when I was Prime Minister Les Campbell served as Chief of Staff to one
of my competitors - although he had the good taste to support a party leader who was also a woman. But when I thought
of the opportunity to join you here I think, like Les because we're both Canadians, I had this strong sense first
of all of how lucky I am to live in a mature democracy and to have all of the opportunities that comes with that.
But also as a Canadian how much my outlook is out towards the world. And many of the countries that are here have
relationships with the Canadian government, with the Canadian International Development Agency in working on the
processes of building your new and emerging democratic structures. I have some credentials as a participant of
the democratic process. First of all, I have held office at all three levels of my government in Canada. And perhaps
most importantly I have won elections and I have lost elections. And the integral part of democracy is the alternation
of power and I'm proud to have been part of that - although losing elections is not my favorite part of the democratic
process.
But one of the things that struck me, when I looked at the subjects that we are going to be examining in this very
intense meeting, and with such a wonderful group of participants is that democracy is really a process. And even
mature democracies deal with the issues that are on the agenda in this conference. For example, we are looking
at the challenge of balancing the tradeoffs between political and economic reform and some of the difficulties
that often creates for governments in setting priorities. But even in mature democracies, governments often face
the difficult challenge of doing things, of enacting policies which are unpopular, or in which the benefits are
not immediate, and where in fact it is the strength of the democratic institutions that allows the governments
to lead and to have the confidence in people to be patient and see what the results are. Issues of integrity, issues
of accountability, questions of corruption never go away because governance is about power and democratic governments
have to create the institutions and processes to protect the integrity of their government, but that is an ongoing
process.
Electoral processes - we may think that once we have a constitution, once we've designed our issues they're set
in stone, but even in an old democracy, like the United States of America, has recently begun to alter its electoral
processes by bringing in term limits - something which is unknown to my country. And so, again, we constantly evaluate
the processes by which we choose our elected members and respond to changing expectations in our publics.
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