McLeod Group Blog

Open letter to the New Minister of International Development

Open letter to the New Minister of International Development

November 12, 2019

Dear Minister,

Welcome to your new job as Minister of International Development! The post you have just accepted offers the chance to make a real difference for Canada and the world if you build alliances and play your cards right. As long-time observers of and participants in the aid game in Ottawa, we humbly offer you the following advice as you settle into your new job.

One of the first things you receive upon arrival in your new office will be a briefing book. Do read it carefully. It has been prepared by highly skilled, experienced and dedicated public servants who know their business well. It will tell you loads of things you need to know, and you will be expected to know most of it by heart within a very few weeks. If there is a scandal or a screw-up brewing in the development side of Global Affairs Canada, chances are that you will first get wind of it in the briefing book.

While briefing books are very useful, they are not easy documents to read. They are written in a coded politico-bureaucratic language, dense with jargon. The brewing screw-up or scandal may thus not be immediately apparent on first reading. Acronyms will abound. The briefing book authors will likely assume that you already know the difference between the G7, the G7+ and the G8, for instance. You may wish to imitate a distinguished former Norwegian minister of international development who insisted that his department spell out all acronyms except EU, NATO and UN.

If the PM asks that you take on this ministerial post and another one too, we recommend strongly that you point out that responsibility for over $4 billion in program spending on four continents, with implications for foreign policy, and relations with numerous international organizations constitutes a full-time job. If he still wants you to take on two ministerial posts, we suggest pointing out that one of the main reasons Canada failed in its last attempt to get a seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC in your briefing book) was a serious mismatch between Canada’s aid objectives and its foreign policy ambitions. Aid is a good way to win friends and influence people, but it requires the undivided attention of the minister concerned.

Your briefing book will tell you about your government’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), a policy whose principles we wholeheartedly support, along with some promising new initiatives that have followed. Your briefing book may, however, be less frank about the difficulties Global Affairs Canada has had in defining exactly what the FIAP means in programmatic terms, how deep the change really is, and how FIAP lines up with Canada’s other foreign policy objectives. 

Do ask some hard questions about the Department’s capacity to carry out FIAP, how it will be evaluated, and how FIAP is likely to be received by our overseas partners. (See UNSC, above.) You should also be aware that the much vaunted FIAP is almost totally unsupported by new financial commitments, and that everyone else in the world has noticed this inconvenient truth. Indeed, Canada’s aid budget as a share of national income is now lower than it was in the Harper years. Working in new areas requires abandoning older ones, even if they are successful.

Beware of believing your government’s own propaganda. Yes, Canada is a wonderful place, but we are an imperfect nation too. If you lecture developing countries about the virtues of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, be ready for blowback on cultural genocide and anti-black racism in Canada. Be prepared to admit that Canada has things to learn from others, even from developing countries. Sending more Canadians abroad to teach Canadian ways (called “technical assistance” in your briefing book) can be of limited value if not done sensitively and well.

Please note that your new portfolio has important links to various domestic policy files. First among these are various diaspora files. Canadians of Haitian and Ukrainian descent have been particularly adept at getting the attention of your predecessors as Minister. The other big crossover file is climate change and the environment. As your government talks the green talk, it has to learn to walk the green walk abroad as well as at home. Early indications have not always been encouraging, and serious new funding is still lacking.

Speaking of funds, do get to know the new Finance Minister, who holds the purse strings of official development assistance, the technical term for aid. (See lack of new funds for FIAP, above.) Finance is also responsible for Canada’s relations with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two key actors in international development.

Do not dream of trying to tear those two out of the Finance portfolio; it is a battle you can only lose. But we do hope you will find the time to challenge the oft-repeated Finance line that says “the World Bank is the most effective way to spend Canada’s aid dollars”. In the spirit of evidence-based policymaking, do ask Finance for some proof to support that statement. We are confident that they have none.

As your Deputy Minister hands you your briefing book, Minister, please ask for the briefing book from the 2015 transition as well. That version will likely be more frank about the high transaction costs and limited gains involved in the 2013 merger of the former Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA, i.e., what used to be your Department) with the then Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The truth is, the merger is in some senses still far from over. Development is the neglected orphan of the diplomacy-trade-development triad and the conventional wisdom in official Ottawa is that the Minister of International Development is definitely the most junior of the three Ministers in Global Affairs Canada, after Trade and Foreign Affairs.

Many observers are concerned about the impending demise of development as a discreet professional identity at GAC. Before it’s actually declared dead, as Minister, you may wish to consider some administrative measures to nurture, recognize and reward professionalism among development officers, who are responsible for delivering your policy and programming mandate.

You cannot solve all these problems overnight, but your personal and Departmental career prospects may depend on your ability to move the dial just a little bit. As you ask your officials those pointed questions about a feminist aid policy (see FIAP, above), also ask the Trade officials and the professional diplomats to what extent feminist principles have been embedded in Canada’s trade and foreign policies, and in our international financial relations (see Finance, above).

Finally, we ask that you make it a big part of your job to explain Canada’s aid program to Canadians. Our friends at the OECD-DAC (see list of acronyms in your briefing book) suggest that every donor country should set aside substantial funds to do just that. Canada used to do it, but the unit responsible for “development education” disappeared in the 1990s slash-and-burn of aid spending and was never reconstituted.

Explaining how Global Affairs spends Canadian taxpayers’ dollars is a good exercise in democratic accountability. But explaining the importance and role of Canada’s aid program to Canadians is also an investment in the future health of your file. Unlike in many other traditional donor countries, in Canada the aid program has never had a domestic constituency with political heft.

A key part of your job is making the case that Canada’s aid program is not so much about charity as international solidarity, that our aid helps find solutions to problems that inevitably cross international borders and that aid is in our long-term self-interest, properly understood. Indeed, making that case to Canadians is arguably the most important part of your job.

We wish you all the best in your new endeavours as Minister of International Development. Please let us know if we can provide further assistance. We would welcome the opportunity to meet you and discuss the points raised above.

Yours sincerely,

The McLeod Group