McLeod Group Blog, May 20, 2016
In his Globe and Mail column on May 12, Jeffrey Simpson took note of seven major policy consultations currently under way: Canada Post, defence, communications and culture, innovation, productivity, missing and murdered aboriginal women, Via Rail upgrades and the legalization of marijuana, all expected to report back in 2017. The very next day, Friday the 13th, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) kicked off another one: an International Assistance Review.
“See a pattern here?” Simpson asked. “Consultation. Study. Review. Next year.”
In fairness, a review of Canada’s development assistance can’t hurt. As McLeod Group readers know, we have long deprecated the slashing and manipulation of aid budgets—a venerable Canadian tradition taken to new lows by the Harper government.
Such a review should start with the purpose of Canadian foreign aid and how this might manifest itself in a joined-up department that includes trade, foreign affairs and development. Trade, not aid: remember that one? Developing countries want access to our markets the same way we want access to theirs. How should Canada deal with this challenge?
How much of our aid should we spend on development and how much on humanitarian relief? And how much on refugees coming to Canada? (Their first year in Canada is included in official development assistance figures.)
The review should also address questions of volume and delivery channels. It should focus on key issues: What role is the private sector genuinely able to play? Should NGOs continue to be treated as service delivery providers, à la Harper, or do they have a legitimate role to play as development actors in their own right? If the latter, what sort of co-financing system makes sense? And what about the multilaterals? Once vibrant UN agencies such as UNDP have also been turned into delivery boys for donor governments. Could Canada play the ‘leadership role’ that our governments so often brag about, in fixing an increasingly damaged multilateral system?
Questions like these, however, were not on the Friday the 13th agenda. The questions for discussion were organized around five programmatic themes, including ‘health and rights of women and children,’ ‘green economic growth and climate change,’ and ‘governance, pluralism, diversity and human rights.’ There were several sub-questions under each of these, and the audience, consisting of about 200 development professionals—NGO leaders and consultants—was broken into two dozen groups of eight, each with a flip chart, to come up with ideas and priorities for one of the themes. And so they did: just about everything under the sun.
There was no opportunity to discuss the wisdom of choosing these particular themes, rather than others, let alone the more fundamental questions raised above. The problem is not so much that education wasn’t mentioned, or that agriculture and food security were also absent. The problem is that the new list of priority themes was compiled at GAC prior to the consultations and appears to be a done deal, despite multiple assurances that ‘nothing is set in stone.’ So the question of agriculture simply didn’t arise. Nor did the role of the private sector or multilaterals, or the vexed question of Canada’s miserly aid spending, knee-high to that of serious donors like Norway, Sweden, Britain and Netherlands.
Trade, defence, security? Not discussed. Ditto immigration.
Green economic growth, pluralism, human rights and the rest are important, but they hardly need debate. The exercise on Friday the 13th was more like a buffet of red herrings than an opportunity to discuss how and whether Canada will rise above technique and become more serious about problems that fuel war, exacerbate climate change, stunt lives, impede progress and kill children.
Those interested in changing Canada’s development policies do not need, of course, to await a pre-scripted consultation. They can make their view known independently, including via GAC’s website. But the government must be prepared to hear what they have to say.
The Global Affairs review will continue until the end of July. There’s still time to get it out of the weeds. The question should not be about selecting from a pre-set development smorgasbord. That has been a problem for five decades: each new development minister emphasizing something new. The problem at this level is Canada’s attention deficit disorder. Reorganizing and relabelling priority themes only distracts much needed attention from more fundamental issues. If they are to prove useful, future GAC consultation events will need to focus on broader discussion topics.
At a higher and more important level, the real challenge is for Canada to up its game: to integrate poverty reduction into its overall foreign policy; to challenge other governments to do the same; to devote meaningful resources to it; and to commit to partners here and abroad who demonstrate that they too are ready and able to make a difference.