From the international development perspective, Budget 2019 is the most disappointing federal budget since the current Liberal government was elected. Foreign aid warrants a mere three paragraphs. The first repeats past commitments and the third describes how the government will report on Canadian aid, as legislated by the most recent omnibus bill. Hardly juicy stuff.

The actual news on Canadian foreign aid is limited to two sentences. The only significant content is the announcement of “an additional $700 million”. That sounds impressive.

But wait, not so fast. The funds won’t be made available until 2023-24, which is to say the last year of the next government’s mandate. Still, that is something, no?

Not so much. Dig a little deeper and you will find, buried in the fine print of a table on page 210, that $600 million of the “additional” $700 million had already been budgeted. The text of the budget document is deliberately misleading: The actual increase is only $100 million.

Imagine you asked your employer for a raise and your boss offered you only an extra 2% – and only in four years’ time to boot. It would be hard not to be offended by the peanuts on offer.

Those two sentences present these peanuts as a means to “continue Canada’s efforts as a global leader […] and to reinforce our commitment to reduce global poverty” and argue that the additional funds will “continue our leadership on the global stage”. Yes, that was two mentions of Canada being a global leader – an accolade that successive Canadian governments have loved to give themselves – in two sentences.

However, like the budgets before it, this one’s refusal to commit significant new funds to foreign aid belie those claims of leadership. While Ireland becomes the latest country to set a timetable to reach the United Nations target of spending 0.7% of its gross national income on foreign aid, Canada is content to let its aid budget languish at 0.26%. Justin Trudeau’s government is the least generous toward impoverished peoples in developing countries in over 50 years. What happened to the Liberal government’s loud claims that with its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), announced in 2017, Canada represented “a leading voice for progressive international assistance”? The FIAP was launched without commitments for new funding, and this budget fails to follow through with meaningful new resources.

Canada also compares very poorly to its OECD peers. In 2017, it ranked 16^th out of 29 member states. However accurate, “We’re #16!” does not make a good campaign slogan. Better to tell Canadians over and over again that we are leaders, and hope no one notices the truth.

The budget document boldly claims that “Canada plays a leading role in the world by […] providing assistance to some of the world’s most vulnerable citizens. The values that underpin these actions help to define who we are as Canadians, and contribute to […] Canada’s future as a leader in an increasingly interconnected world”. Again, two mentions of global leadership in as many sentences. However, if our role in the world and our national identity depend on our international assistance, Canada’s stinginess means that we are deeply deluded about both.

The post Budget 2019: Peanuts for International Development first appeared on The McLeod Group.

“How shall we behave in a world we no longer dominate?” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland recently asked, referring to liberal democracies. Beyond the famous catchphrase “Canada is back”, the Trudeau government has remained vague on the ways Canada is going to face the crisis of the international liberal order. Following Canada’s current foreign policy priorities, the ongoing diplomatic feud with Saudi Arabia provides an occasion for Canada to reaffirm a strong stance on gender equality and human rights abroad.

Last August, a tweet from Global Affairs Canada condemning the arrest of women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia sparked a major crisis in Saudi-Canada relations. The escalating dispute with Saudi Arabia serves as both a cautionary tale for coherence in Canadian foreign policy and an opportunity for human rights advocacy.

One of the stumbling blocks in positioning Canada in the shifting international order is the fact that the government frequently chooses economic interests over human rights. For example, the controversial sale of light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia has generated confusion and scepticism regarding the place of human rights in Canadian foreign policy.

Despite the highly political and selective nature of human rights advocacy in Canadian foreign policy, the Trudeau government has not backed down on its concerns about human rights in Saudi Arabia. In fact, the diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia directly affects Global Affairs Canada’s four official priorities:

1. strengthening the rules-based international order
2. advancing Canada’s feminist foreign policy
3. pursuing a progressive trade agenda
4. maintaining constructive relations with the United States.

Three factors underpin Canada’s human rights advocacy towards Saudi Arabia. First, it does little harm to Canada’s economic and geopolitical interests. As Thomas Juneau notes, “Canada-Saudi ties have never been important for either country”. Annual two-way trade totals around $3-4 billion, equivalent to about two days’ worth of Canada-US trade.

Second, the human rights narrative with Saudi Arabia is intrinsically linked to Canada’s themes for its G7 presidency, which emphasized advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Finally, with the demise of the US-led liberal order, Canada needs to demonstrate strategic leadership in renewing the multilateral system with progressive values. Considering the Canadian government desire for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2021, it is in Canada’s “national interest” to be seen as a good international citizen.

Nonetheless, “rhetoric-reality gaps” of those so-called Canadian values can also be costly for the reputation of the Canadian government. Even if the Trudeau government wishes to position itself at the forefront of the global effort on gender equality, diversity and inclusive governance, it has not always stood up for human rights abroad.

For instance, human rights and arms control groups have campaigned for an independent review of the sale and use of Canadian armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, which has undermined public confidence in the Trudeau brand. Canada could learn from Sweden’s own Saudi crisis three years ago, leading it to halt arms deals under its feminist foreign policy, along with Spain’s recent decision to do the same amid fears that weapons could be used in Yemen. Furthermore, CBC News recently revealed that Canada’s arms deal with Saudi Arabia had been scaled back, while human rights groups believe that Canada should simply walk away from the deal.

Although Canada’s history of arms sales to human rights violators has been inconsistent, the current dispute with Saudi Arabia offers political opportunities for transnational advocacy networks to pressure both governments to act according to human rights principles. Bearing in mind the silence from most of its allies, Canada has demonstrated leadership in expressing its concern about arrests of women’s rights activists, and in particular regarding the first female activist facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia.

The current situation also offers Canada the chance to improve its reputation among Canadian and international non-governmental organizations by protecting human rights defenders at risk abroad, especially women. Calling for Germany’s support amid the Saudi dispute, Foreign Minister Freeland recently said in Berlin that Canada would always stand up for human rights “even when we are told to mind our own business… and even when speaking up brings consequences”.

Considering the Trump administration’s unilateralism and disregard for human rights, as well as its close partnership with Saudi Arabia, Canada looks like an “orphan of the liberal international order”. Nonetheless, the Canadian government understands that human rights have been central to the success of the liberal international order and for its future into the 21^st century.

As Andrew Thompson warns us, “a world in which international human rights law is marginalized is one that will not be friendly to Canada”. As we are moving into an illiberal world order, the diplomatic row with Saudi Arabia illustrate the importance of being coherent in promoting human rights in a turbulent world.

Marc-André Anzueto is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa.

The post Promoting human rights in a turbulent world first appeared on The McLeod Group.

Ten years ago, the Canadian parliament unanimously passed the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, following years of intensive lobbying by Canadian civil society organizations. Prior to 2008, Canada had not had any legislation setting out the parameters for its foreign aid. On the law’s tenth anniversary and as the Trudeau government prepares its legislative agenda for its last year before seeking re-election, the time is ripe to assess and update the legislation.

The Act sets poverty reduction as the focus of Canadian official development assistance (ODA). It states that Canadian ODA may be provided “only if the competent minister is of the opinion that it contributes to poverty reduction, takes into account the perspectives of the poor and is consistent with international human rights standards”. It directs the minister to publish an annual report summarizing activities and providing statistics on aid disbursements. The Act also compels the him or her to “consult with governments, international organizations and Canadian civil society organizations at least once every two years… and take their views and recommendations into consideration”.

The most surprising thing about the ODA Accountability Act is how little of a difference it seems to have made. In the government’s opinion, all Canadian aid was already compliant with the three requirements (on poverty reduction, perspectives of the poor and human rights) and existing consultations were sufficient to conform to the Act.

The Act’s imprecise language is not helpful, as it defers to the minister’s opinion, rather than a more rigorous, evidence-based test. The government eventually issued guidance notes to help applicants for funds ensure compliance with the Act, but this is not challenging, given the government’s loose interpretation of the legal criteria.

The government’s lack of commitment to the spirit if not the letter of the Act is further illustrated by the 2014 Global Markets Action Plan. Launched by the Harper government, but still official policy under the Liberals, it seeks to “leverage development programming to advance Canada’s trade interests”, which is in direct contradiction of aid’s mandated focus on poverty reduction under the Act.

The legislation is hard to enforce. Only once, as far as we are aware, has the Act been invoked in court. A 2011 lawsuit on behalf of Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian imprisoned in Ethiopia, unsuccessfully sought to end Canadian aid to that country based on the Act’s human rights provisions. The main impact of the Act has been on how government reports on past aid (about which more below).

The fact that the Act was passed unanimously in Parliament reflects the degree to which amendments had watered it down in order to convince MPs and Senators of all stripes to vote in favour. Notably deleted at the last minute were the bill’s provisions for creating a 20-member Advisory Committee for International Development and a mechanism for people in developing countries to petition the government if they believed that Canadian aid to their country did not respect the provisions of the Act.

Another weakness of the Act lies in the reporting requirements. Early reports to Parliament, covering the international development activities and expenditures of numerous government departments, were mainly descriptions of their various projects and programs. The latest report, covering the 2016-2017 fiscal year, focuses on Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and retroactively organizes the described activities according to the six priority “action areas” of the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), which did not yet exist when those activities took place. If we rule out time travel, the adoption of this approach demonstrates the malleability of those categories.

These annual reports provide very little practical information and seem to be an exercise in formal compliance. They are not publicly announced, nor presented and debated in Parliament. They are also hard to find on the GAC website – the last five can be found here, but where are the previous ones? Independent analysts prefer to use the aid statistics compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The reports would be more useful if they contained larger-picture information on current thinking and implementation of aid policy, which could then be discussed in Parliament. In the current context, a frank discussion of the implementation of FIAP would be especially germane.

For this important piece of legislation to have more of an impact, it needs to be updated. International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau could activate the periodical formal consultations it mandates, starting with a review of how it is faring on its tenth anniversary and how it can be improved. The provisions for assessing compliance need to be tightened and the government should also create the planned advisory committee (see our previous blog on the UK model) and the mechanism for petitions from recipient countries. The revised legislation should also highlight the importance of gender equality, a key Canadian development priority since the early 1980s.

Many Canadians, while supporting development assistance, are sceptical about what Canada is doing and the impact Canadian aid is having. A reinvigorated ODA Accountability Act and better compliance would help convince them – and perhaps some key Cabinet ministers as well – that aid is money well spent.

The post The ODA Accountability Act at Ten: Time for an Update first appeared on The McLeod Group.

Corporate culture experts will tell you, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Making Global Affairs Canada fit for purpose to deliver on its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) is only partly addressed by ensuring that systems and work practices are up to date, and that staff have the necessary knowledge and skills. Any dissonance in culture among the international development, diplomacy and trade staff also needs to be articulated and addressed.

Culture tells you what is valued and rewarded in an organization. Is it gathering information and preparing policy briefs that enhance Canada’s place in the world? Is it understanding how social and economic progress takes place and being able to speed it up through the judicious use of taxpayer development cooperation funds in the health or education sector? Is it increasing mutually beneficial trade with developing countries? The experience, knowledge, and incentives required for these complementary objectives are not the same, and communicating across the cultures can be tiring and counterproductive.

For example, the three cultures work at different speeds. Development cooperation requires simple but efficient processes to move funds through the system, and needs understanding of how social, economic and technological change happens in a particular context. Diplomatic work can be both intensely pressured during a crisis and without rigid deadlines at other periods. Diplomatic work requires accurate analysis, while development cooperation requires a tolerance for risk and failure. Trade calls for competitive, assertive, quasi-private sector marketing behaviour and puts the emphasis on negotiating skill and knowledge of trade law.

Diplomacy and development cooperation differ in their approach to avoiding mistakes and learning from them. They may also give different value to field experience in a particular region and to knowing how to get things done at headquarters. The frequent rotation of personnel, inherent in the diplomatic service, is an obstacle to building in-depth thematic and geographic knowledge essential for development cooperation.

Here are three recent examples of how this culture clash plays out at Global Affairs Canada:

• A former Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) manager retired as early possible because, she said to a colleague, “I was tired of endlessly briefing and explaining to my managers who knew little and cared less about international cooperation.” Those managers were skilled in diplomacy.
• Andrew Caddell, a retired foreign policy officer, complained in the Hill Times that “Ex-CIDA folks have the advantage when it comes to promotion because they typically have more experience than their trade or foreign policy counterparts in managing staff and large budgets.”
• GAC staffers experienced in development cooperation needed to convince their trade counterparts that the most effective means of building trade in key sectors (such as natural resource management, transport or health) was not the promotion of Canadian equipment but investment in building educational, professional and personal networks that enabled counterparts to source appropriate Canadian goods and services.

These examples raise concerns about the quality of engagement and oversight at GAC, and the weight and support given to development cooperation.

Creating awareness of clashing organizational cultures is the first step to dealing with the problems they can present. When staff and leaders can name the norms and practices that are contradictory or counterproductive, they can take measures to address them. Leaders modelling and rewarding cultural behaviour appropriate to the work at hand comes next.

When the government merged development, diplomacy and trade into one department in 2013, it presented them as equal and complementary elements of Canada’s engagement with the world. Since then, it has (allegedly) integrated the supporting bureaucracy, though each area has its own minister. The current foreign minister is very trade-and-finance focussed, the recently shuffled international trade minister was very low key, and the international development minister virtually invisible except when announcing humanitarian assistance or FIAP-related funding. There is little evidence of complementarity or integration.

Most governments that have development responsibilities situated within the foreign ministry have a development cooperation directorate integrated into the ministry at the executive level, but with staff able to develop their career through in-depth knowledge and expertise in their area of work. Ireland, Norway, and the Netherlands use this model.

By contrast, GAC has decided that staff and units should be responsible for both development cooperation and diplomacy. It is time to revisit whether this is the best model. The 2012 OECD/DAC peer review of Canada noted that the attrition rate of development cooperation staff was high, and urged Canada to remedy the problem. This attrition appears to have continued, at a time when the government is proclaiming leadership in foreign aid. Is there some cognitive dissonance here?

The issue of clashing cultures requires urgent attention. GAC needs development cooperation leadership at the senior levels. It also needs to retain – and reinforce – a critical mass of development cooperation personnel with the knowledge, connections and experience to achieve development effectiveness and support realization of the Sustainable Development Goals through Canada’s FIAP.

Without this, the lofty rhetoric of the Liberal government, and its predecessor, will be just that – words. A closer examination of GAC’s cultures, and of the European models that permit both specialization and integration, can help GAC integrate its cultures successfully.

The post Is there a Culture Clash at Global Affairs Canada? first appeared on The McLeod Group.

I first met Gerry Helleiner as a young professor, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s. He was teaching a course on the role of international trade and investment in economic development – for good or ill. His teaching focused on the practical: on how and why developing economies actually worked (or didn’t work well), and what sorts of international and domestic policies facilitate or undermine development.

For many students like me, frustrated by courses in economic theory with little relation to the “real world”, never mind applicability to the developing world, this was a breath of fresh air. Not surprisingly, students flocked to his courses, inspired by his passion about the development challenge, and many went on to satisfying careers as practitioners, researchers or academics.

Now, 50 years later, Helleiner has published Toward a Better World: Memoirs of a Life in International and Development Economics. They will be fascinating to all who have been engaged in development practice, research and policy during the postwar decades. But they will also appeal to students and others contemplating careers in international affairs, and all those interested in deepening their understanding of how the developing world got to where it is today. Much of Helleiner’s account dwells on sub-Saharan Africa, the focus of his concerns and interests, where some of the most challenging problems persist to this day.

Helleiner’s career tracks the arc of development thinking, policy and practice over almost six decades. It is a testament to a man who has dedicated his life to helping create a better world, as the title of his memoirs suggests. But this is not a work of self-congratulation. Helleiner’s humility – not a strong suit among many professional economists – is evident and genuine throughout his narrative.

Early in his career Helleiner concluded that “external” development economists like him (from the North) could be of most help to developing countries in two ways. First, by helping reduce the international constraints imposed on developing countries by the rules of trade, the behaviour of foreign investors, and the policy conditionality of aid agencies and international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. Second, by building developing countries’ capacity to make policy decisions in their best interest.

Helleiner’s account illustrates how he fulfilled these aims. He was among the pioneers seeking alternatives to the much-criticized structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, particularly in Africa. He played an active role in seeking to reduce the debt burden on poor African countries. And he was active in bringing about a more balanced relationship between Tanzania and its donors. As for capacity building, he was involved in the genesis of crucially important institutions such as the African Economic Research Consortium and the African Capacity Building Foundation.

Helleiner is a consummate pragmatist who eschews dogmatism, whether of the Marxist or neoliberal variety. He describes his political orientation as that of a social democrat. As far as economic doctrines are concerned, he clearly leans toward Keynes, not the Chicago School. And while he is a stalwart advocate of the usefulness of empirical, evidence-based economic analysis as a contributor toward social progress, he fears that over the past few decades, economics has lost its way with its preoccupation with abstract modelling, econometric methodology and increasing recourse to the language of mathematics. He feels that those concerned with equity and social justice are unlikely to find in economics a discipline that is useful in addressing those concerns.

In Canada, Gerry Helleiner has enjoyed interacting with the development NGO community, as a speaker or resource person. He speaks with pride about being a founding board member, and later chair, of the North-South Institute, and laments its demise under the Harper government. His relationship with Canadian officialdom was often fraught. In one of his chapters, “Trying to Influence Canadian Foreign Policy”, he chronicles his many attempts over the years to make Canada less self-serving (or simply misguided) in its policies toward developing countries.

The memoirs conclude with a call for solidarity with the weak and vulnerable. He reminds us that considerable progress has been achieved by the world’s poor, but much remains to be done, and he appeals to his readers to keep up the struggle.

Roy Culpeper (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1975) is proud that he was the first of many doctoral students to have Gerry Helleiner as his thesis supervisor.

The post Gerry Helleiner Points the Way Toward a Better World first appeared on The McLeod Group.

As expected, Donald Trump played the role of the skunk at the G7 picnic in Charlevoix, in keeping with the pattern he has established since becoming US president. Once the media frisson of excitement has passed, what will there be to show for the major investment by Canada in organizing and hosting the 2018 G7 summit? Although the meeting did not lead to major achievements on trade and security, progress was made on gender equality, climate change and the protection of oceans.

There is no question that Canada worked hard to prepare for and host the G7 heads of government meeting. The agenda was very ambitious, but all the subjects needed G7 countries’ attention and action. The items included:

• investing in growth that works for everyone
• preparing for jobs of the future
• advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment
• working together on climate change, oceans and clean energy
• building a more peaceful and secure world.

Early signals during the lead-up to the meeting were reasonably encouraging in terms of movement toward agreement on what had to be done. Among the preparatory actions taken by Canada were the establishment of a Gender Equality Advisory Council to help Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the discussion topics.

As well, Canada hosted a joint meeting of development and finance ministers, with some central bank heads thrown in for good measure, to discuss innovative financing for development, building economic resilience against extreme weather events, and women’s economic empowerment. The government also organized a meeting of environment ministers in the lead-up to the leaders’ session, addressing the climate change, oceans and energy agenda.

What happens next? The Charlevoix communiqué has something for almost everyone, and even contains several paragraphs setting out the American position on energy and sustainable economic growth (not that this portion of the document has any meaning now that Trump has disowned it). The language in many places is typical of documents written by committees – “endorse”, “support”, “affirm”, “resolved” and so on – which doesn’t constitute firm commitments in any case.

It is worth noting that the leaders acknowledged the risks posed by rising debt levels in low-income countries, as well as the importance of increased resource mobilization to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and eliminate poverty.

But overall there is no sense that there is going to be more and different action on the large menu in the declaration. One wonders what the 12 “outreach countries”, including those representing the African Union (Rwanda), the G20 (Argentina) and ocean states (Marshall Islands) invited to the second day of the discussions, on oceans, made of the outcome of the G7 leaders’ closed-door session.

The Charlevoix Communiqué contains important language for Canada’s “feminist” development policies, including economic participation, access to education, and ending violence against girls and women. As well, the summit generated $3.8 billion (yes, billion) in commitments for an initiative to improve girls’ education, with particular emphasis on women and girls in conflict and crisis situations. This was much more than the $1.3 billion advocated by a consortium of Canadian NGOs. However, Canada’s contribution will be only $400 million over three years.

Implementing programs to realize the objectives of this fund will not be easy. As we have said before, it is essential that women and women’s organizations from the Global South play lead roles in setting priorities and allocating money. It will be hard to persuade the countries that didn’t sign up, namely Italy and the US, to join, and to encourage France, which had earlier contributed €200 million (about Cdn$300 million) to another global education initiative, to align its commitment with the Charlevoix “fund”, and then to monitor implementation to ensure the delivery of results.

From a development cooperation perspective, there was important content in the discussions, especially with regard to gender equality and the role of women. Canada deserves credit for its efforts in this regard.

Underlying the G7 meeting are two issues of concern: the American protectionist attack on an international rules-based trading system, and the risk to democratic processes and principles from populist and nativist politicians. The principles of multilateralism, inclusivity, fairness and transparency are being challenged and G6 countries must engage and counter these threats.

As for the future of the G7, given the US’s unpredictable international behaviour (to put it politely), the G6 should to move ahead with its agenda. It should also keep the door open for the US to sign up, which is entirely possible.

Now is there enough momentum for France, as the host in 2019, to build on and carry these efforts forward?

The post After Charlevoix: What next for the G7? first appeared on The McLeod Group.

Marie-Claude Bibeau, Canada’s Minister of International Development, recently invited entrepreneurs, NGOs and philanthropists to partner with Global Affairs Canada in an ambitious new initiative to propel women’s rights on a global scale. Bibeau has been pushing for new funding and new ways of delivering. She wants to move beyond traditional aid groups to gain support for her ambitious feminist international assistance policy.

To leverage the four-way partnership, Bibeau promised up to $300 million. Jess Tomlin of Match International, Jessica Houssian of Women Moving Millions, and Sophie Gupta of Yaletown Partners Investment firm will lead the initiative, along with the minister’s representatives.

Congratulations to Minister Bibeau and her department for the potentially bold breakthrough from “business as usual” for Canadian development cooperation.

The government will hold consultations this summer to seek advice on the initiative. There are important questions to be answered. And an imperative to build on experience.

The most important question is what the initiative is actually intended to do. At the announcement on May 25, Jess Tomlin cited the need to change systems for impact. She told the story of a woman philanthropist who invested in diabetes research after her husband died of the disease, only to find out that her investment holdings included products such as Coca-Cola that were at cross-purposes with her philanthropic intent, weakening the impact of her gift.

Will the initiative provide core funding for women’s rights organizations – an investment yielding social, but not financial return? Or will it invest in businesses that employ and benefit women – yielding financial returns that will be shared with women’s rights groups in perpetuity? Or what mix of the two? Women’s rights organizations need predictable, long-term core funding to do their work, rather than project funding. And it needs to be substantial, not marginal.

A number of useful examples and experiences could provide guidance. For example, BRAC in Bangladesh, the largest NGO in the world, uses a model that employs women in sophisticated value chains and uses the profits from its enterprises to fund health, education and social advancement for women – with a total budget of over half a billion dollars annually for its social enterprises. Other organizations, such as the UGC cooperatives in Maputo, Mozambique, and Lijjat Papad in India have also used the shared profit/social enterprise model. Women’s World Banking – an international organization given start-up funds by CIDA in the 1980s – guarantees loans and promotes financial technology worldwide so women can access mainstream banks.

Under any scenario, strengthening the global women’s rights movement needs to be enshrined as the primary objective. This is especially the case, given the power imbalance between the partners and the disappointing experience with international social impact investing to date.

If a foundation-type model is selected, the initiative would have to come to grips with the restrictions of the Canada Revenue Agency’s “direction and control” guidelines (see our blog on this problem).

Finally, this is not the 1960s or 1970s when it made sense to channel contributions through Canadian organizations such as IDRC or CUSO. A sophisticated ecology of women’s funds and women’s rights organizations now exists at the local, national, regional and global level. Any new Canadian initiative must fill a unique niche and strengthen the global ecology, rather than seeking to brand itself and Canada at the expense of southern organizations or efforts to build collaboration. It is crucial to involve women leaders from the South in designing and delivering this initiative.

We urge our readers to join the consultations and to put on their best creative thinking caps to help Minister Bibeau build a solid foundation for the new partnership.

The post Canada’s New Gender Equality Initiative: The Devil is in the Details first appeared on The McLeod Group.

Canada has failed to live up to a key commitment under the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). When the UN General Assembly adopted the SDGs in 2015, they included the principle of universality, whereby all countries – rich, middle-income and poor – had an obligation to create and implement their own national SDG framework. The central objective of assuring “no one is left behind” was to be respected in implementing the SDGs.

Canada’s previous Conservative government considered this obligation to report publicly undignified for a G7 country. While fine for developing countries, the government did not believe that Canada should have to account for its performance in advancing the well-being of its citizens and the status of the environment.

Each UN member committed to report at the annual UN High-Level Policy Forum (HLPF) on the status of its national framework via a “voluntary national review”, preferably made by the country’s head of government. The UN’s review sessions are more than an opportunity to compare scorecards. They are intended to promote the sharing of experience and joint action in implementing the SDGs, among and within countries, in a spirit of partnership.

Where did Canada fall behind?

A Brookings Institution study published last October indicates the scale of the challenges ahead. Its assessment of Canada’s progress in implementing the SDGs found important gaps: Data were not available for 108 of 169 SDG targets. For those indicators for which data were available, Canada was only on track for 17 of them. Most others were lagging, needing “acceleration” or “breakthrough”, with some 10% actually showing a negative trend. While Statistics Canada has been heavily involved technically in helping the UN fine-tune the SDG indicators, the department is now needed to build Canada’s own set of SDG-based national statistics.

In April, the Office of the Auditor General reported that Canada had failed to deliver on its pledged national framework, which would set out a national consensus on priority Sustainable Development Goal targets with indicators and a game plan to reach them. According to the report, Canada did not even have its basic organizational act together by the end of 2017. There were no implementation plans and no assessments made as to whether existing policies were supportive of the SDGs.

No wonder Canada avoided making presentations at the UN forum in 2016 and 2017. Canada is only now on the list for presentation this July, along with 47 other laggards. In contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made her first UN presentation back in 2016. Indeed, Germany put in place a special cabinet-level SDG coordination process, engaging federal and state governments, as well as German civil society.

In Canada, initial responsibility for a national SDG framework was left to a few federal departments, notably Global Affairs Canada and some other departments with technical interests in certain SDGs. The Auditor General’s report pointed to a missed opportunity to set up an effective whole-of-Canada structure that would have required a substantive role – beyond the federal government – for provinces, indigenous peoples and civil society. Such a structure could serve to pull together the essential consensus and experience to build a national SDG framework and then to track performance.

Canadians have been largely denied the opportunity to help frame the government’s response to the universality principle and the attainment of the SDGs at home. Moreover, there seems to have been so far no formal link between the Canadian agenda on Indigenous people and the SDGs.

A truly inclusive SDG process for Canada, one following the example of Chancellor Merkel and even German mayors, requires Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Privy Council Office to lead Canadian engagement. To be called an SDG “laggard” means Canada is seen as moving “backwards” in its multilateralism, rather than “being back”, as the current government pretends.

Canada has not merely underperformed on its formal SDG commitments. It is also exposing a serious flaw in its respect for global partnership as embodied in the universality principle. A better understanding of its own strengths and weaknesses would help Canada respond constructively to the world’s growing economic and political interdependence, especially the emerging economies of the Global South. As a middle power in this Trump era of “me first”, Canada has the opportunity to be seen by future partners as a country whose commitments can be trusted.

Canada’s self-assessment report at July’s UN policy forum (HLPF) should confirm the importance of partnerships, both domestic and international, for meeting the SDGs. Trudeau’s 2017 speech at the UN General Assembly recognized Canada’s shortfalls in implementing them. Next month, Trudeau should embrace the government’s responsibility to do its part in Canada while supporting partners in developing countries, especially the poorest.

The post Canada and the SDGs: Not Ready for Prime Time first appeared on The McLeod Group.

In June 2017, Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of International Development and La Francophonie, launched Canada’s new Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP). The policy places gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment at the heart of Canada’s approach to development assistance. What influence does this new policy have on Canada’s and particularly Québec’s civil society and their partners in the Global South? On April 18, a panel addressed this question, bringing together speakers from academia, Québec civil society and Global Affairs Canada, held at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM).

A “feminist” approach to international assistance: nice rhetoric without any clear content?

Although Canada’s new international assistance policy claims to transform the dominant development paradigm, it remains ambiguous on a large number of concepts, “whose repetition sounds more like a mantra than a policy proposal” according to anthropology professor Marie France Labrecque. Even the notion of a feminist approach, the policy’s core principle, is not clearly defined, even though it is a multidimensional concept that can have very different interpretations.

The lack of definition of key concepts reflects government officials’ lack of knowledge of feminist issues and the low priority they give them, which has worsened over the past years with the departure of Global Affairs Canada’s few remaining gender equality specialists. According to Labrecque, the government’s vagueness on what it considers a feminist approach allows development workers to present themselves as gender specialists because of the knowledge they acquired “thanks to their wife”, as some of her colleagues in the field told her.

Moreover, the new policy does not specify how social research can contribute to development assistance and provide the evidence that the government claims is the basis of aid-related decisions. The lack of research makes it difficult to situate development projects within their social context. Labrecque explained that the lack of studies on the Malian context led the project to rely on a context considered “similar” elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Under such circumstances, the government’s ability to effectively measure change and results is at best uncertain.

Not a turning point, but a great potential impact for Canadian international cooperation organizations

According to Anne Delorme, who coordinates the Comité québécois femmes et développement, the new international assistance policy is not a major turning point for Québec’s international cooperation organizations because many of them, such as the Comité pour les droits humains en Amérique latine and the Projet d’accompagnement Québec-Guatemala, have already been working with women’s rights activists and encouraging links between women’s rights defenders in the Global North and the Global South for many years.

Nonetheless, she believes that Canada’s feminist approach could have a huge impact, especially if it encourages international cooperation organizations to question their power dynamics with their Southern partners. FIAP prompted some organizations to think about how they behave towards their partners in the field, notably thinking about whom they hire, what their working conditions are and how to ensure that their basic rights are fully protected.

Between capacity building and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy for Southern partners

Many Southern women’s rights organizations welcomed FIAP with enthusiasm. These organizations often work in precarious economic conditions with a particularly high risk of burnout.  However, these partners continue to struggle to meet all the Canadian government’s bureaucratic requirements. Caroline Leclerc, Assistant Deputy Minister at Global Affairs Canada on Partnerships for Development Innovation, acknowledged the problem and made a commitment to reduce the administrative burden on Southern partners, which she considers heavy on Global Affairs Canada as well. The government has conducted consultations in recent months in order to figure out how to simplify current procedures.

Although it is still too early to know what the new international assistance policy’s impact will be on Canadian civil society organizations and their Southern partners, the UQÀM panel helped us make a partial assessment and draw up some recommendations to avoid FIAP becoming not much more than just nice rhetoric. The government needs to articulate what it considers a “feminist approach”, otherwise the concept could become meaningless and be used to describe any activity related to women. If the government really wants its international assistance policy to be feminist and effective, it must also ensure a greater role for social research in development projects, allocate more resources to develop its expertise in gender equality and reduce the administrative burden on Southern partners.

The French version of this blog was originally published in Huffington Post Québec’s Un seul monde blog, May 6, 2018. The webcast of the UQÀM panel can be viewed here.

The post Canada’s New FIAP: Impact on the Global South and International Cooperation first appeared on The McLeod Group.

When it comes to human rights in Canada, the Trudeau government should brag less and act more. All UN Member States undergo a peer review of the human rights situation in their country every five years or so, known as the Universal Periodic Review. Tomorrow, on May 11, it will be Canada’s turn to defend its record in front of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. It will be the occasion to systematically assess the human rights situation in Canada and allow other UN Member States to ask questions and make recommendations in order to improve Canada’s human rights record.

In preparation for its review, the Canadian government submitted its national report in March. The national report is usually a good indicator of a country’s commitment to fulfill its human rights obligations. But it seems that once again, the Canadian government is more interested in rhetoric than using the opportunity to conduct honest introspection and to improve the human rights situation at home.

Canada’s national report mentions a list of recent steps it has undertaken to improve human rights at home. For example, the report cites Canada’s human rights-based approach to housing, its full support of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the appointment of a Special Advisor on LGBTQ2 issues, and the new action plan to implement “gender-based analysis plus” (GBA+) across federal departments and agencies.

These are definitely positive measures. However, the report draws only a partial picture of the human rights situation in Canada by focusing almost entirely on the new policies and programs implemented by the Trudeau government, while ignoring the significant challenges the country faces in promoting and protecting human rights at home. A national Indigenous organization noted during the consultation phase that the report did not address some of the shortcomings of the forums dedicated to addressing Indigenous issues such as the Working Group of Federal Ministers and the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Indigenous Forum. It also pointed out that the government seemed to minimize its historical role in systemic discrimination against Indigenous communities.

Let’s not forget that in 2011, James Anaya, who was at the time UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, compared the living conditions on First Nations reserves to those of Third World countries. In that context, the Canadian government has nothing to brag about and should instead acknowledge its longstanding failure to meet its human rights obligations towards Indigenous people.

Canada’s national report also includes a short section entitled “Advancing respect for human rights internationally” with two paragraphs on international assistance and corporate social responsibility. In it, the Canadian government boasts about its new Feminist International Assistance Policy as the “most effective way to reduce extreme poverty and build a more peaceful, inclusive and prosperous world”. At the same time, it refuses to put its money where its mouth is. During the last review in 2013, Sierra Leone recommended that Canada increase its official development assistance, which the Harper government flatly rejected. Despite the lack of any substantial new aid funding, the Trudeau government is making the feeble argument that it “has made efforts to increase its international assistance”.

The Canadian government’s report also highlights the creation of a new Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise that will investigate allegations of human rights abuses linked to Canadian corporate activity abroad. Although it is a step in the right direction, the new institution still lacks clarity on its mandate and the powers of the office to ensure that the institution will be an effective mechanism for corporate social accountability. These are just a few of the issues that the report ignores.

The UN encourages countries to hold broad consultations at the national level before submitting their national report. Even though the Canadian government claims it consulted over 280 Indigenous and civil society organizations (CSOs), only 16 of them submitted comments on the draft report, and some of them noted the limited opportunity to provide feedback. Consultations should not be a mere pro forma exercise without any real substance (see our previous blog). The government should establish a formal consultation process to include CSOs’ inputs and could follow the example set by other countries such as Jordan and the United Kingdom.

The Canadian government needs to set up a strategy to implement the UPR recommendations it agrees with. As we have seen in the past, the government too often has no actual plan to meet its international commitments, as recently illustrated by the Auditor General’s report on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Finally, the government should use the UPR exercise not as a podium to blow its own horn about what it has done, but as a valuable opportunity to make significant further progress. More honest introspection is needed. If Canada is serious about improving its human rights record, it should begin by being upfront about the serious human rights problems at home.

The post Reviewing Canada’s Human Rights Record: Less Bragging, More Action first appeared on The McLeod Group.