At long last, the dream of the current and past ministers of foreign affairs has come true: the Canadian International Development Agency will be “merged” with the Department of Foreign Affairs.
This is good, some will argue, because CIDA has always been a problem child, and now all of Canada’s international efforts can be housed under one roof with the kind of coherence they deserve and require.
There’s no question that CIDA has been a problem child, but the problems are of the government’s own making, after all. Bev Oda, much praised by the prime minister until she slipped up on the orange juice, was one of Canada’s longest-serving CIDA ministers, and Julian Fantino has been nothing if not a company man.
Over the past five years, CIDA has struggled with ever-changing geographic and sectoral priorities and with an unprecedented level of micro-management from the minister’s office. CIDA will likely lapse hundreds of millions of dollars this year, not least because of the backlog of projects on the minister’s desk.
CIDA has cut bilateral assistance to some of its poorest partner countries — Cambodia, Malawi, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe — while opening new programs in Colombia and Peru, middle-income countries where Canada has commercial interests and ambitions.
And while CIDA has begun to woo the mining sector with unseemly ardour, it has starved its NGO partners, driving some to the edge of bankruptcy. It didn’t do any of this because it was independent of the Foreign Affairs department or because it had a rogue minister; all of it was government policy.
How this will change by downgrading the CIDA minister to an even more junior level and giving more authority to diplomats is far from clear. Good development is not the work of diplomats any more than good diplomacy falls within the purview of development professionals. To pretend it does is like imagining that truck drivers and pilots have interchangeable jobs because they are both in the transportation business.
Muddying responsibilities will not produce the effectiveness that CIDA ministers have talked so much about, it will only make it less possible.
Development is a long-term effort. It does not lend itself to short-term, one-off projects. Its success cannot always be measured within the lifetime of the project itself. It requires consistency, predictability and professionalism.
Development assistance is not, and never was, about freebies and giveaways. Humanitarian assistance following a calamity deals with people in extremis, but this is a small part of CIDA’s budget. Historically, the rest has been built on strategic investments and long-term partnerships with like-minded governments and development professionals.
The government says it will enshrine in law the roles and responsibilities of the soon-to-be downgraded minister. This is unnecessary. Canada already has an Official Development Assistance Accountability Act that requires CIDA to focus on poverty reduction, to take into account the perspectives of the poor and to observe international human rights norms. The act was necessary because so much development assistance over the years has been diverted to commercial, strategic and political purposes, far away from the things taxpayers believe aid spending to be for.
Canada should understand development assistance the way Britain does. There, despite continuing and serious economic problems, the aid budget is set to reach 0.7 per cent of GDP, the target set for rich countries by Lester Pearson decades ago.
In Britain, it is understood that the long-term development of poor countries is of direct value to British citizens. Ending poverty reduces the risk of pandemics, pollution, illegal migration and conflicts that spill their borders, requiring costly remedial action and sapping development efforts. Effective development assistance creates other partnerships and can be good for two-way trade and investment.
Far from merging its aid and diplomacy channels, Britain has given its aid minister a full cabinet position, treating development as a distinct and major plank in its overall foreign policy, just as it does with trade and defence.
Canadian development assistance is now set for more cuts and a plunge into further ineffectiveness, less transparency and more diversion to short-term commercial and political interests. The move will tarnish Canada’s international reputation, and it will draw us farther away from solutions to poverty, problems that have and will continue to have a direct and negative effect on Canada.
Ian Smillie, the author of Freedom from Want, is an Ottawa-based writer and consultant. He wrote this for the Ottawa Citizen.
