First, let me make an observation. Among the countries of the world, in western Europe and so forth, that have been most successful in this field are countries where the coordination problems are low, are weak, and where there's a high-trust environment. These are built into longstanding institutions that we don't have in this country. In political science, we would be considered a high-conflict, low-trust country in terms of our political institutions. So we have to recognize that our institutions are a problem. They can't be changed overnight.
The weakest form of coordination is, to my mind, the kind I suggested to you in my comments about the open method of coordination. It requires buy-ins, in terms of what we're shooting for. For example, the EU set targets for employment, particularly employment levels for women? They didn't tell the individual countries how they had to get there, but everybody said yes, they were going to make the effort to get there through whatever national institutions they had available.
That requires auditing. In Canada, even the notion of auditing and producing comparable data and evidence across provinces is highly controversial. So it's very hard for us to get those, but sometimes we do. That's why I used that example. We seem to be able to cooperate around certain issues but not others.
The stronger method was the one I mentioned for the CPP, where they not only agreed on a target, but they introduced the forcing mechanism that required them to act if certain conditions weren't met. That's tougher. But in the key areas for poverty reduction, particularly labour market issues, we have no choice.