October 27, 2021
Dear Lt. Col. Sajjan,
Congratulations on your re-election to Parliament and on your recent appointment as Minister of International Development. We believe that you have the skills and the opportunity to resurrect Canada’s reputation as a respected partner with developing countries and multilateral institutions for effective development cooperation. There is much to do. As long-time observers of and participants in the aid and foreign policy game in Ottawa, we humbly offer you the following unsolicited advice as you settle into your new job.
You will likely have guessed that your move from Defence to International Development is widely seen as a demotion. You are correct in that guess. This Prime Minister clearly puts no great stock in international development; his governments have spent relatively less on official development assistance (that’s what aid is officially called) than did the Harper government before it. Even without the PM’s evident indifference to his $5 billion dollar aid program, the post of Minister of International Development has usually been a lightweight post in Cabinet.
But every cloud has a silver lining, and yours goes by the ugly acronym of FIAP.
The flagship policy of your new ministry is called the Feminist International Assistance Policy, or FIAP. Uncharitable wags will comment on the irony of the Prime Minister appointing as Minister in charge of FIAP someone who struggled to get on top of the almost daily deluge of sexual harassment claims in his last job. Herein lies your main challenge, but also your main opportunity.
Yes, the feminists’ expectations of you are low, but low expectations can be a good thing if you are able to deliver more than was expected. And in that struggle, you have at least four assets. (As an ex-soldier, you will understand the importance of assets in any fight!)
As a first asset, you are only the second Canadian Minister of International Development to have been born in a developing country. That should give you some street cred as you face the Canadian international development lobby. A subset of that crowd is still peddling various forms of white saviourism; a scolding from you would do them some good and raise your profile too. (And you’ll now be able to do it, since the Prime Minister recently defriended the WE crowd.)
The second important asset that you bring to the table is your widely acknowledged courage under fire. You will need that as you face the staff of Global Affairs Canada, the federal department that administers most of our aid program. GAC, as most people call it, has long been one of the principal frenemies of your former department, National Defence. Despite all the talk about whole-of-government approaches (remember your time in Afghanistan?), GAC and DND have fundamentally different cultures and roles. You can expect, for instance, that most GAC staff will be far more gender-woke than their counterparts at DND. Avid media junkies, GAC officials will have heard of the limited success you had in pushing for gender-related culture change at DND. Show a genuine interest in FIAP and a strong commitment to some other traditional GAC values like multilateralism, and you will be on your way to success. To do that, however, you will need your third asset.
Your third asset is your background as a detective in the Vancouver Police Department. You are used to sniffing around crime scenes and asking tough questions of people who often provide confused, partial or evasive answers. As we urged your predecessor to do, please do ask some tough questions about FIAP to its designers, supporters and critics. Ask how it works in practice, how different it really is from what went before, how GAC will measure its success and how our partners overseas view it. Ask your friend the Minister of Finance why this flagship policy has received virtually no new funding.
Also ask some tough questions to your GAC staff and to your friend the President of the Treasury Board about why Canada’s aid program has such a reputation for process and bureaucracy, despite its ostensible commitment to “results-based management”. The bureaucracy at GAC can be timid, but FIAP has revolutionary potential. Lead toward the latter.
Your fourth and final asset is your seat in the Triumvirate of Ministers who run GAC. Historically, the hierarchy within that triumvirate goes from Foreign Minister to Minister of International Trade (now with added responsibilities for Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development) and then International Development. Notwithstanding this disadvantage, you now have an opportunity to make an impact on Canadian foreign policy, not from over the fence in DND, but from within GAC itself. And that opportunity has a name: the Feminist Foreign Policy.
While the International Development side of GAC was quick in getting the FIAP out (around 18 months after the Liberals returned to power in 2015), the foreign policy side of GAC has been slow in getting the Feminist Foreign Policy inked and approved. Endless consultations and discussions have taken place, but there has been no official announcement yet. GAC now has a female Foreign Minister with no foreign policy experience and an International Development Minister with plenty of international experience, and a feminist policy mandate to boot. Quickly taking a public stance to push the Foreign Minister to announce her foreign policy as feminist and to align it with your FIAP… well, that would be a coup. (No pun intended for a former defence minister.)
In other words, the key to your return to the inner circle of Trudeauworld is to make this FIAP work, both at home and abroad and in alignment with an announced Feminist Foreign Policy. We wish you all the best in that endeavour.
We are, of course, at your disposal in case you would like to meet (virtually or face-to-face) to discuss any of the above.
With very best regards,
The McLeod Group