McLeod Group Blog, April 1, 2015
On March 15, 2015, the armies of Chad and Niger drove Boko Haram out of the Nigerian town of Damasak where it had been wreaking havoc for more than five months. The Nigerian military, one of the largest in Africa, was not part of the operation and was nowhere to be seen.
Long ago, in answer to a question about possible Canadian support for eastern Nigeria’s secessionist Biafra, Prime Minister Trudeau replied, ‘Where’s Biafra?’ One ...
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McLeod Group Blog, March 26, 2015
What’s the first best weapon to combat terrorism?
Good jobs-lots of them.
What’s the second best weapon?
Knowledge: continuous, detailed analysis of the complex root causes of radicalization and terrorism that informs the fullest range of actions by governments.
Yes, we admit here to ‘committing sociology’ (an idiotic phrase if there ever was one). For the record, we also regularly commit anthropology, and political science, and economics, and community development, and, especially, gender analysis.
It could be that truly ...
Continue Reading →McLeod Group Blog, March 18, 2015
Every election since the beginning of time, it seems, has been about the economy. And a large part of that is about jobs. When politicians talk about jobs, they usually means jobs at home, but in today’s world, creating jobs across the street may depend on helping to create jobs across the world—not jobs that reduce Canadian opportunities, as so often has been the case, but jobs that do the opposite.
Lost in the din of ...
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The Harper government set tongues a-wagging and jaws a-dropping when it started attacking Canadian charities for accepting donations from other countries. The row began in 2012 when Joe Oliver, then Natural Resources Minister, accused ‘environmental and other radical groups’ of taking money from ‘foreign special interest groups’ in order to influence hearings about a possible tar sands-to-BC pipeline. Environment Minister Peter Kent said that ‘There has also been concern that some Canadian charitable agencies have been used to launder ...
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McLeod Group Blog, Feb. 16, 2015
‘It used to be that the best way to raise money for the developing world was to show the abject poverty that could be found there, but NGOs are finding that tactic no longer works.’ So says Nathaniel Whittemore in a thoughtful article—‘The Rise and Fall of Poverty Porn’—which talks about focusing on solutions rather than symptoms.
Is he right? Has the ‘pornography of poverty’ declined? Is it true that it doesn’t work? If you ...
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Response by Ron Schatz to a guest blog by Nipa Banerjee
February 2, 2015
On January 5, 2015, we posted a guest blog by Nipa Banerjee that was critical of Canada’s aid program in Afghanistan. Ron Schatz, who was CIDA’s Development Director at the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kandahar city from September 2007 to August 2008, has a different point of view.
I met with the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan when they came to the PRT in late ...
Continue Reading →McLeod Group Blog, January 26, 2015
What do birdwatchers in the Kitchener-Waterloo Field Naturalists Club and human rights activists in Amnesty International have in common? Well, they are Canadian charities and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) seems to have all of them in their sights for their political activities.
Shortly after the bird watchers wrote a letter to two federal cabinet ministers complaining about government-approved chemicals that damage bee colonies, they received a letter from CRA objecting to political material on the ...
Continue Reading →McLeod Group Blog, January 19, 2015
January 12 marked five years since the earthquake that devastated Haiti, killed over 230,000 citizens and rendered over three million people homeless, almost 30% of the country’s population. Since 2010, Haiti has received a great deal of media attention, been the subject of many promises of help (some of which have been honoured). It also experienced two major hurricanes in 2012 as well as an outbreak of cholera, believed to have been introduced by a ...
Continue Reading →Guest blog by Nipa Banerjee
January 5, 2015
The NATO combat mission in Afghanistan ended in December, while Canadian participation concluded a few months earlier, in March. Seven years before, in 2007, the Harper government dispatched a five-person panel to review Canada’s participation in the war. Led by former Liberal finance minister John Manley, the panel noted that Canadian aid to Afghanistan was largely unknown to both Afghans and Canadians, and proposed that CIDA create ‘signature projects’ that could be used to showcase ...
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McLeod Group Blog, December 22, 2014
According to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ In the Harper government’s brave new world, bad financial budgeting is good financial management.
That’s the only conclusions you can draw from government departments that planned and over-budgeted so badly in 2013-14 that they were able to return $7.2 billion in lapsed funds to the treasury. Treasury Board President Tony Clement calls this incredible mess ‘a sign of good ...
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