McLeod Group Blog, March 9, 2017
The federal budget will be delivered on March 22. There is much speculation about the scope the government has for various types of expenditures, given the projected size of the deficit. As Canada attempts to project a positive, engaged, helpful image on the world stage, a key step to take would be to increase our foreign aid budget.
In global rankings of aid donors, Canada is far down the listing, at 0.28% of gross national ...
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McLeod Group Blog, February 8, 2017
After the Harper government’s disastrous attempt in 2010 to win one of the temporary seats on the United Nations Security Council, the Trudeau government has decided to try again. The next opening is in 2021. Fair questions to ask at this point are: Why are we doing this, and what difference might it make for Canada?
Fifteen months into the mandate of the Liberal government, foreign policy issues have attracted considerable attention on the part of ...
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McLeod Group Blog, January 30, 2017
The organizers expected about 800 people to show up for the Ottawa Women’s March on Saturday, January 21st. Instead, between 6,000 and 8,000 people converged on the Human Rights Monument –women, men, and children, many wearing versions of the now iconic pink pussy hat and carrying clever signs playing on Trump’s vulgar comments about how to treat women. In cities and towns across Canada, people came for many different reasons, but there was a clear ...
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McLeod Group Blog, January 23, 2017
Preparation for the incoming Trump administration is, understandably, a high priority for Canada. In this, the Canadian government needs to think beyond immediate self-interest, and consider not just the long game, but the fact that we are not alone in checking the lifeboats, the davits and the life preservers.
In advance of the inauguration, the Trudeau government has done some hasty redecorating and furniture rearrangement. Multilingual former journalist and author Chrystia Freeland, now a tested deal-maker, ...
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Guest Blog by James Milner and Kevin Dunbar, January 11, 2017
Events in Europe and elsewhere over the past year have again highlighted the many deficiencies of the “global refugee regime.” Established in the aftermath of World War II, this regime has two core functions: to ensure protection for refugees and to find a solution to this plight.
By any objective measure, the global refugee regime is not working – and there have been growing demands from the public and politicians of ...
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McLeod Group Blog by Ian Smillie, January 4, 2017
In a recent New York Review of Books article, William Easterly argues that by conflating the ‘war on terror’ with the ‘war on poverty’, Western donor governments have made a big mistake.
Easterly, Professor of Economics at New York University and author of several powerful critiques of foreign aid (The White Man’s Burden, The Tyranny of Experts) says that Western donors, making a correlation between poverty and terrorism—for which there is little ...
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McLeod Group Blog by Stephen Brown, December 19, 2016
After completing its large-scale consultations as part of its International Assistance Review, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) recently published online a summary entitled “What we heard”. The review was a welcome opportunity for interested parties across Canada and around the world to express their views. GAC engaged over 15,000 people and organizations in 65 countries and received over 10,000 contributions. The task of collating all the information they received was colossal—and it ...
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McLeod Group Blog, December 13, 2016
In early November, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development issued a report titled ‘Development Cooperation for a More Stable, Inclusive and Prosperous World: A Collective Ambition.’ Unfortunately, the contents don’t quite live up to the title. The committee has missed an opportunity to make an important contribution to the process of preparing a new international assistance strategy for Canada, a process which is expected to produce a policy ...
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McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, November 29, 2016
In the early 2000s, Western donors finally recognized that they were partly to blame for foreign aid’s often disappointing results. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, adopted in 2005, was the result of that soul-searching.
The Declaration was based on five core principles, including recipient countries’ ownership of their poverty reduction strategies, donors’ alignment with this vision and harmonization among donors. A total of 138 countries (donors and recipients), 28 international ...
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McLeod Group blog by Hunter McGill, Sept. 23, 2016
The week of September 19 occasioned the usual cluster of high-level meetings in New York, as the United Nations begins its autumn sessions. Of particular importance for the international community of humanitarian organizations were the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants and the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees, hosted by President Barack Obama and co-hosted by Canada, among other countries. Both events were marked by hand-wringing, reminders of how many ...
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