McLeod Group guest blog by Daniel Livermore, June 22, 2023

Global Affairs Canada has taken the first important step in making GAC “fit for purpose”. After months of anticipation, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly unveiled a discussion paper, Future of Diplomacy: Transforming Global Affairs Canada, first to a group of Canadian ambassadors on June 7, then to a Senate Committee. It’s a significant document, but it covers only the machinery of government, not the more ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Leah Reimer, May 23, 2023

Two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population, live in fragile and conflict-affected states. These people are increasingly vulnerable to the changing climate. Climate change adds new stresses to areas and populations already facing high levels of fragility. For example, by interacting with economic and political contexts, climate change compounds the risks of conflict. Droughts, crop failures, floods and fires can intensify existing tensions or create ...

Guest blog by Julie St-Pierre-Gaudreault and Susan Spronk, May 15, 2023

In order to address problems in the field of international development, and particularly to achieve its feminist objectives, the Canadian government is now promoting “innovative” financing tools that mobilize money from private actors. Do these “innovative” strategies better address development crises or are they a form of neoliberalization of solidarity?

International financial needs are increasing, whether due to climate change, widespread violence against women or successive economic crises. Yet, the proportion ...

McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, April 17, 2023

Foreign aid figures for 2022 are out and they show a large increase in disbursements. But you might want to wait before popping the bubbly. Unpack the data a bit, and you won’t find much to celebrate.

The so-called good news

The OECD trumpets that official development assistance (ODA) set a record high in 2022 for the fourth year in a row, according to preliminary data. Total development assistance from ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Gloria Novovic, April 11, 2023

As the Canadian government drafts its long-awaited feminist foreign policy, it is wise to examine the implementation of its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), adopted six years ago. However, the Auditor General’s recent report is an administrative distraction from critical discussions on how we define and measure the success of a feminist policy. Oversimplifying the incoherence between feminist long-term ambitions and short-term mechanisms of international assistance, the ...

McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, March 29, 2023

The government has repeatedly promised to “increase Canada’s international development assistance every year”, including in the Minister of International Development’s most recent mandate letter. Newly released Budget 2023 repeats the commitment to annual increases, while simultaneously breaking that promise. There is not a single new cent for foreign aid or humanitarian assistance.

Worse still, the new budget has actually cut international assistance by 15% or ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Mario Renaud and Robert Letendre, March 7, 2023

Those of us who have been closely associated with Canada’s international development assistance over the past few decades have noted the catastrophic impact of the 2013 merger of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. As argued in previous blogs (here and here), the effects include the loss of expertise in international ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Cristina Rojas, December 15, 2022

The recent election of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez as president and vice-president of Colombia gave a new momentum to the peace agreement between the government of Colombia and the guerrilla group FARC-EP. The agreement, signed in 2016, aimed to end the armed conflict that produced 8.7 million victims, including 7 million internally displaced people and thousands of disappeared and kidnapped people and victims of sexual violence.

The Petro-Márquez presidential program asked ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Nigel Martin, December 5, 2022

India will host the G20 meeting for the first time in September 2023. One of the annual summit’s activities, dating back to a Canadian-inspired initiative in 2010, is an official meeting between G20 officials and civil society organizations (CSOs) from within and outside of G20 countries.

However, unlike in previous meetings where civil society selected its own representatives and chair, the Indian government has determined which CSOs from India will participate in ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Ryan Katz-Rosene, November 7, 2022

The 27^th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has just begun in Egypt. As the conference’s President-Designate, Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry, recently noted that the meeting is being held “at a critical time of cascading risks and overlapping crises”, including warfare, inflation, an ongoing pandemic and more. In short, we are facing a global Continue Reading →