January 21, 2014
On December 5, 2013, Canada’s International Development Minister (yes, there still is one) Christian Paradis spoke to the Montreal Board of Trade about the Harper Government’s approach to foreign aid. The speech was chock-full of myth, urban legend, half-truths and what can only be described as a bunch of whoppers.
Mr. Paradis began by saying, “I want us to be recognized as a world leader in poverty reduction and humanitarian assistance.” That may be what he wants, but it won’t happen by pulling Canada out of UN agencies, alienating NGOs and killing off the Canadian International Development Agency. You don’t become a leader by slashing the aid budget and by “harnessing” what’s left of it to promote Canadian companies abroad—about which, more later.
“Our government is placing a greater emphasis on results… and on the national needs and priorities defined by developing countries,” says Mr. Paradis. The Harper government has harped on results for so long one would think nobody else had ever thought of this before. The results mantra has become a kind of tyranny over what’s left of Canada’s aid program: a demand to see concrete “stuff” at the end of each two- or three-year project. The problem is that the real results of, say, a good education program may not be a school or anything you can take a picture of. It may be better teachers, better curricula, or better-educated students. These things can be specified and measured, but not always during the short life of a project. So the Harper government’s emphasis on immediately visible outputs has too often come at the expense of meaningful and sustainable results.
“Canada is now seen as a leader in open data, transparency and accountability,” says Mr. Paradis, taking pride in the fact that in January Canada is hosting a technical conference of the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Although Canada does have good data transparency, this has little to do with accountability. Despite the numbers, it is virtually impossible to know when or why project decisions are being made any more. Journalists must resort to Access to Information requests to obtain the most basic information, and even then it inevitably comes back so heavily redacted you might think our aid was about extraordinary renditions to Guantanamo.
Longstanding partner agencies and governments now wait on funding decisions for months, if not years, and many have had to suspend or cancel projects while they wait for answers. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) waited more than 12 months for Canada’s annual contribution recently, obviating any kind of serious planning with the money. In 2012, the erstwhile CIDA lapsed something like 20% of its budget because its minister, like others, was ordered to stall on spending. This makes a mockery of budgeting, the predictability of aid flows, effectiveness and the government’s demand for results.
In his speech, Mr. Paradis referred to the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act which requires the government to ensure that aid spending contributes to poverty reduction, takes into account the perspectives of the poor and is consistent with human rights standards. In the very next breath, however, in a kind of “yeah, but” segue, he says, “That said,” (yeah, but) “our objective is to ensure that diplomatic, trade and development resources and expertise around the world are fully leveraged.”
Leveraged for what, you might well ask. Here Mr. Paradis rambles a bit, mentioning the need to “maximize the creation of synergies”, helping people to “lift themselves out of poverty” and other platitudes. But the crux of it is to “unlock the economic potential of the developing world by building future markets for Canadian trade and investment.”
The idea sounds OK if you read it quickly, but in truth, it doesn’t make sense at any level. How on earth would “building future markets for Canadian trade and investment” actually “unlock the potential of the developing world”? This is a bit like saying that training Canadian athletes for the Sochi Olympics will unlock the potential of the Ethiopian team.
And so much for “priorities defined by developing countries.”
Mr. Paradis says he has met the leaders of several developing countries since his appointment. “They have all said to me, ‘We don’t want a handout; we want to generate incomes.’” That’s interesting, but it’s unlikely that the leader of any developing country has ever said to a Canadian development minister that s/he wants “handouts.” This line, however, common these days among politicians eager to divert aid spending into self-serving endeavours, is one of the larger urban myths about foreign aid. Whenever there actually have been foreign aid handouts, they have usually been instigated by Canada to bolster a political agenda (e.g., Canadian aid to Afghanistan, which dropped off a cliff when the Canadian military pulled up stakes), or to promote Canadian goods and services. Perhaps we can now look forward to a repeat of memorable Canadian boondoggles of the past: high-cost railway rolling stock to Senegal and Bangladesh; unserviceable fork lift trucks and a doomed wheat project and bakery for Tanzania.
Good development assistance has never been about handouts; it has always been aimed at generating incomes, or building the social and physical infrastructure needed to generate incomes. You can’t generate incomes if people are sick or uneducated or if they are refugees, or if there are no roads and no electricity.
Mr. Paradis soon cuts to the chase: the Harper government’s Global Markets Action Plan which, he says—in merging CIDA with DFAIT— “will help us benefit from opportunities for synergy between trade and development.”
“Our objective is clear,” he says, “create shared prosperity for developing countries and for Canada.” And this will be done (next sentence) “to maximize the success of Canadian trade interests in key foreign markets.” More specifically, if that’s not clear enough, Mr. Paradis says he will be looking for “emerging markets that generate specific opportunities for Canadian companies.”
He then moves on to a couple of old canards. One is that “foreign direct investment in developing countries is five times higher than official development assistance.” The second is that remittances—money sent home by diaspora communities living abroad—“are roughly three times more significant than official development aid.”
So what? More money is spent on pet food than on broccoli. How does pet food relate to broccoli? Foreign direct investment does not build schools. In fact it usually steers clear of places where schools are not turning out the kind of educated people investors need. And if it’s already so much greater than development assistance, why do we need to divert development assistance to its service? Do Canadian companies investing abroad need handouts?
As for remittances, these don’t vaccinate children. And diaspora communities—despite Mr. Paradis’ plan to “formally engage these diasporas in order to advance our foreign affairs, trade and development objectives,” should be approached with caution, sensitivity and much better understanding than is apparently available to the government.
Many people in diaspora communities came to Canada to escape from politics, not to be drawn back in by a self-serving Canadian government. Many diaspora communities are divided, and many—such as Sri Lankan Tamil-Canadians—are undoubtedly opposed to the governments of “emerging markets that generate specific opportunities for Canadian companies.”
Mr. Paradis’ biggest whopper, perhaps, is about his belief in “the vital contributions of our longstanding partners from civil society.” In actual fact, the Harper government has done incredible damage to the broader Canadian NGO scene: to environmental organizations, women’s groups, aboriginal groups, human rights groups, and certainly in the field of international development. Longstanding partnerships have been wrecked, organizations have been defunded without notice and the Canada Revenue Agency has even been sent after some of them.
Mr. Paradis talks about the need for “good governance and predictability” in developing countries. Under the ministrations of Bev Oda, Julian Fantino and Christian Paradis, good governance and predictability in Canada’s aid program have been thrown to the wind and the whole enterprise has been brought to its knees.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Paradis returns to the role of the private sector, waxing eloquent about all that it can accomplish in developing countries. “In fact,” he says, “we are convinced that partnering with the private sector is one of the best ways of reducing poverty throughout the world.”
It is important to say here that poverty reduction needs a lot more than foreign aid, no matter how good it is. And there are other things countries like Canada can do: promote open markets and trade that benefits developing countries as well as our own; ensure that Canadian companies abroad pay fair prices and wages, that they avoid corruption and more generally do no harm. It is also important to say that—like Canada–all governments promote trade and investment abroad. Canada always has and always will, and so it should. That is not the issue.
The issue is how Canada spends its foreign aid budget. By conflating Canadian investment abroad with poverty reduction, Mr. Paradis demonstrates that the Harper government has declared open season on the aid budget, which will now be “harnessed”, as the Global Markets Action Plan puts it, to the “pursuit of commercial success by Canadian companies.”
Pace Frank Scott, the Harper government’s approach to international development and poverty reduction will long be remembered wherever men honour guile, ambiguity and inactivity. Mr. Paradis is an able successor to a string of Conservative development ministers who have faithfully promoted the government’s cult of mediocrity, doing nothing useful by halves which can be done by quarters.