McLeod Group Blog

McLeod Group guest blog by Roy Culpeper, June 19, 2018

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 ...

McLeod Group Blog, June 15, 2018

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, ...

McLeod Group Blog, June 6, 2018

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 ...

McLeod Group Blog, June 4, 2018

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 ...

Blog by Stéphanie Bacher, May 17, 2018

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, ...

McLeod Group blog by Stéphanie Bacher, May 10, 2018

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 ...

McLeod Group blog, April 23, 2018

Outdated regulations at the Canada Revenue Agency and Treasury Board are undermining Global Affairs Canada’s goal of supporting local women’s organizations in developing countries, but easing the restrictions isn’t a government priority. What should Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau do about it?

In announcing its new Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), Global Affairs Canada (GAC) said it will “advance a more flexible, innovative and integrated approach toward achieving gender equality”. A key part of ...

McLeod Group blog by Laura Macdonald and Megan Pickup, April 19, 2018

Justin Trudeau rushed home early from the Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru on Saturday to attend what was for him a more politically relevant summit – the one between Alberta premier Rachel Notley and B.C. premier John Horgan on the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Simultaneously, the summit in Lima was also overshadowed internationally, in this case by the decision of U.S. President Donald Trump to bomb Syria in ...

McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, April 16, 2018

The preliminary aid statistics for 2017 are now out. What do they tell us about global trends and Canadian foreign aid?

Globally, official development assistance (ODA) from traditional donors has held steady. The total amount, US$147 billion, is down slightly compared to 2016, but only because the amount spent on resettling refugees in donor countries has dropped. (Accounting rules allow donor countries to count certain forms of assistance to refugees ...

McLeod Group Blog, March 21, 2018

The initial reaction to the February 27 federal budget was “two cheers for development,” with the announcement of an addition of $2 billion over the next five years to the International Assistance Envelope (see our previous blog). Now that the excitement has died down, and since the budget is as much a policy statement as a fiscal document, several questions are emerging. These questions are worth examining in light of the government’s claims of “global ...