May 2, 2011
The Globe’s John Ibbitson is not alone in cutting the Harper government some slack in the realm of foreign affairs when it comes to the maternal and child health “initiative”. He says that Mr. Harper “convinced the major developed nations to sign on.” (“Harper Abroad…” Oct 22.) This has now passed into the realm of urban myth, where announcements often take the place of action.
In fact the entire MCH “initiative” was little more than smoke and mirrors. The claim, trumpeted by CIDA, is that the G8 committed $7.3 billion to this important endeavour. The truth is a little different. Counted in the total is $1.75 billion worth of ongoing Canadian money long ago committed to MCH. Then came an additional $1.1 billion in “new money”. This isn’t actually new; it’s money that will be taken from somewhere else in the CIDA budget – perhaps from agriculture or education. Or maybe they will just recode existing projects, a favourite way of dealing with unanticipated political brainwaves.
Germany coughed up $100 million a year for five years, as did Japan. France came up with $80 million a year for four years, the US committed $1.36 billion over two years and the UK $150 million a year for two years. Even adding in other countries and foundations, you’d have a hard time coming up with $7.3 billion in new money, but the Harper government hasn’t tried.
The truth is that maternal and child health have been two UN Millennium Development Goals for a decade, and many donors have consistently devoted more attention to them than Canada. Germany, the US and Britain do not need to be lectured by Canada on this subject – they have always been well ahead of us in the funding sweepstakes. Their “commitments” at the G8 were like Canada’s: polite announcements to avoid embarrassment, but probably not new money; maybe there wasn’t even any serious recoding. Unless aid budgets rise, as they certainly will not in Canada under this government, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not exactly “initiative”.
But it gets worse. In addition to playing fast and loose with the numbers, the MCH “initiative” gave our government an opportunity to cut off funding for important reproductive health programs in the developing world and to cancel all funding to Match International, the only Canadian international NGO working exclusively on women’s issues.
Then, in December, the UN created a “Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health” which is supposed to propose a framework for global reporting, oversight and accountability on women’s and children’s health. It says it “will create a system to track whether donations for women’s and children’s health are made on time, resources are spent wisely and transparently, and whether the desired results are achieved.”
Nice, but the UN already had this in the Millennium Development Goals and a variety of reporting mechanisms. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this “new” commission, with Stephen Harper as one of its Chairs.
Until it produces some hard numbers and some real facts, however, the whole exercise should perhaps be listed under “embarrassment” rather than “initiative”.