McLeod Group Blog, December 13, 2016
In early November, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development issued a report titled ‘Development Cooperation for a More Stable, Inclusive and Prosperous World: A Collective Ambition.’ Unfortunately, the contents don’t quite live up to the title. The committee has missed an opportunity to make an important contribution to the process of preparing a new international assistance strategy for Canada, a process which is expected to produce a policy statement early in the new year.
The committee’s specific remit was to examine the Canadian government’s countries of focus for bilateral development assistance. The report looks at this idea (that is, targeting bilateral aid to a limited number of countries) and reviews the pros and cons of focus versus no-focus approaches.
The Committee’s first recommendation boots the whole issue down the road, calling for ‘a transparent evaluation’ of countries of focus to be reflected in the forthcoming international assistance policy, without providing any indication as to whether the Committee has views in favour or against.
The Committee’s other recommendations are a mix of high-level and mundane exhortations, including Recommendation 3 calling for a new international assistance policy with strategic objectives valid for the next 15 years, consistent with the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and a call for growth in Canada’s official development assistance (ODA) spending to the international target of 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) by 2030 (Recommendation 7).
The report makes a rather plebeian recommendation (#2) for an evaluation of Global Affairs Canada’s personnel recruitment and rotation policies, and requests (Recommendation 4) that the government ensure there is a development policy research, analysis and evaluation branch within Global Affairs Canada. This branch existed in the now-extinct Canadian International Development Agency; the question now is whether there are enough qualified staff still around to make it work.
What should the report have called for? Well, it would have helped to have a recommendation calling for the government to respect the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act of 2008 which sets the criteria for Canadian foreign aid as contributing to poverty reduction; taking into account the perspectives of the poor; and being consistent with international human rights standards. The government has a number of tools at its disposal to assist developing countries, but it has only ODA to assist the poorest countries and the poorest people. The Committee should also have addressed the challenge represented by fragile and conflict-affected states, where many of the world’s poorest people live. This group of countries represents the biggest obstacle to global stability, security and sustainable development.
The committee’s Recommendation 6, calling for long-term, predictable engagement with development partners, could have referenced principles espoused in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which spoke of prioritizing needs identified by developing countries and their civil societies. As a number of witnesses told the Committee, true, long-term partnerships based on these principles are needed to realize the objectives of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
To its credit, the committee contests the government’s position that achieving the ODA-GNI target of 0.7% is ‘unrealistic’ in the current fiscal context. Faced with a much more challenging fiscal environment, the British government has not only achieved the target but has kept its aid flows at 0.7% for several years.
While the Committee’s recommendations are pertinent, overall the report leaves the impression of having put off the big issues. It is only in the penultimate sentence of the report that the Committee acknowledges that Canada is de facto committed to the objective of eradicating extreme poverty, in the context of the 2030 Agenda. At a time when the government is preparing a new development assistance strategy, it would have been helpful for the Committee to reiterate the underlying principles of Canada’s foreign aid, starting with putting poverty reduction first.