April 27, 2011
For many years CIDA was a proud beacon of Canadian vision and values in international development. In the early 1990’s the Official Development Assistance budget became one of the few federal pots for discretionary funding. Canada’s use of those funds as a tool for creating a better, more secure world unraveled into a tool for the domestic policy agenda. It became a constituency builder for the party in power. With the Harper government, it got worse. He tested his anti-abortion and contraception policy out in the guise of a mother and child health initiative. Minister Oda took control of programs that used to be within the authority of CIDA country directors and Vice Presidents. Delays caused by her micro-management stretched from weeks to months and months. And choices about who got funded and who didn’t were arbitrary, not based on solid analysis and transparent policy principles.
CIDA could once be counted on to contribute to core funding of UN agencies and other international agencies. This government reduces their capacity by largely funding only specific projects instead each with expensive reporting and oversight protocols.
In 2005, donor countries and developing countries signed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness to harmonize aid delivery and to focus on countries’ own desired results. The goal was to empower countries to set their own objectives with stringent requirements for due diligence. Canada signed the Declaration and then Oda promptly ignored it.
This is serious. In many developing countries there are tens of official donors in each major area of government like education and health and sometimes hundreds when you include other organizations such as foundations, non-governmental organizations and multilateral institutions. Each one has its own strategies and reporting systems. Harper and Oda wanted Canadian flags on every Canadian funded school and road – eroding the confidence of citizens in their own government’s ability to govern and creating incentives for more roads and more schools…not faster movement of commercial goods or better educated kids.
If Harper wanted a profile for Canada, he should have built on Canada’s tradition of doing the right thing at the right level for real change regardless of recognition. He should have managed aid for development outcomes not for ribbon cutting and ersatz accountability …compliance checks on large numbers of idiosyncratic projects by mid level staff.
A responsible Canadian Government leads through partnership with others to promote innovative approaches to end poverty and promote peace. A Canadian government acts fast to move into areas of opportunity (like a democracy building agenda for Egypt.) And Canadian government is transparent about its interventions abroad what it is doing and where, reporting on what counts, not what can be easily counted or attributed to Canada only interventions.