McLeod Group blog, March 10, 2021

Ketty Nivyabandi was appointed Amnesty International Canada’s new Secretary General in September 2020. She agreed to share with the McLeod Group a few thoughts on her new role and her vision of Canada’s foreign policy.

The McLeod Group: Could you please introduce yourself?

Ketty Nivyabandi: I am from Burundi, in Central Eastern Africa. I was living there until 2015 when I came to Canada. I studied international relations and also minored in journalism and started working in ...

McLeod Group blog by Kirsten Van Houten and Laura Macdonald, March 4, 2021

The Canadian Council for International Co-operation, Canada’s national association of international development and humanitarian organizations, recently rebranded itself as Cooperation Canada (CC), with a new “logo, look and feel” as part in its evolution toward building “a better, fairer, and more sustainable world”. But what else has changed at CC and is it for the better?

Previously hosted by CC, Regional Working Groups ...

McLeod Group blog by Laura Macdonald, February 11, 2021

This is the last of three blogs that the McLeod Group is publishing this week on the topic of the Canadian government’s Feminist Foreign Policy, which is currently being drafted.

In recent years, governments around the world have begun to recognize that the impacts of international trade relations are gendered. Over 120 countries have signed the World Trade Organization’s Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment, which was launched ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Fiona Robinson, February 10, 2021

This is the second of three blogs that the McLeod Group is publishing this week on the topic of the Canadian government’s Feminist Foreign Policy, which is currently being drafted.

“Care” is the new buzzword. As someone who has been studying the ethics and politics of care for over two decades, I find this remarkable. Care has always been decidedly unsexy, especially in its transnational contexts. For mainstream scholars of international relations, ...

McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, February 9, 2021

This is the first of three blogs that the McLeod Group is publishing this week on the topic of the Canadian government’s Feminist Foreign Policy, which is currently being drafted.

The Canadian government is currently preparing a Feminist Foreign Policy that seeks to better coordinate its disparate efforts to promote gender equality abroad. This process constitutes a valuable opportunity to defend the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit and intersex (LGBTQ2I) ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Nicolas Moyer, December 17, 2020

In a national poll commissioned by Cooperation Canada and completed on December 2, Abacus Data found that, by a 2-to-1 margin, Canadians agree that Canada needs to help poorer countries in their recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Canadians are split on whether Canada should spend more to help those countries – 36% agree, while 34% disagree. How should organizations working in international cooperation come to grips with such wobbly support?

As ...

McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, December 2, 2020

Results-based management is alive and well at Global Affairs Canada, but with a twist. Canada’s principal dispenser of official development assistance (a.k.a. “foreign aid”) has updated its International Assistance Results Reporting Guide for Partners in a way that incorporates changes to results-based management (RBM) that Nordic donors pioneered 15 years ago. Since Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has asked for ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Gregory T. Chin, November 30, 2020

As Canada’s relations with China have sunk to a low point, some Canadian politicians are calling on Ottawa to “stand up” to China by pulling our $256 million (US$189 million) investment from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). They charge that AIIB is an “institution that is clearly being used by the government of China to expand its foreign influence in the region”, a “Continue Reading →

McLeod Group blog by Diana Rivington and Lauchlan T. Munro, November 4, 2020

Remember back in the spring when the nations of the world competed for personal protective equipment (PPE)? Canadians were shocked when US President Donald Trump tried to block the shipment of PPE to Canada. That wasn’t a one-off event. The fight to secure domestic and international sources of medical supplies has continued.

The problem, alas, is that medical supplies are an area where cooperative solutions will ...

McLeod Group guest blog by John M. Kirk, October 29, 2020 

As the cold winter looms, along with the dreaded “second wave” of COVID-19, Canadians are faced with some alarming facts. While pleased that our infection and death rates are only half those found in the United States, we are doing poorly compared with one country barely mentioned in our media: Cuba. Their death rate (adjusted to population differences) is roughly 1/25 what ours is, while Canadians are ten times more ...