But what is truly strange is that the astonishing global and historic context of CIDA’s deconstruction has been almost entirely missed. A week prior to Flaherty’s budget speech — which contained no mention, even, of what was up with CIDA — the United Nations in New York revealed something directly related to CIDA’s mandate and legacy, and was a very, very big deal indeed. It’s bigger than the Industrial Revolution.
It turns out that the “Third World” isn’t there anymore. The Global South has moved north. Those benighted states we’ve all grown accustomed to calling “developing countries” have been developing so much faster than Europe and North America that they’ve pretty well caught up. Released March 14, the 2013 Human Development Report concludes: “Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.”
Here’s Khalid Malik, the report’s lead author: “The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps 100 million people, but this is a story about billions of people.” Here’s just one finding from the report itself: “For the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world’s three leading economies — Brazil, China and India — is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom and the United States.”
To notice this is not to suggest that CIDA’s mandate is no longer relevant, or that the wretched of the Earth have simply vanished.
Indeed, CIDA’s minister, Julian Fantino, has pledged to maintain international aid and development funding levels, and Ottawa is also promising new legislation to enshrine poverty alleviation as a key objective of a reorganized Department of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Development.
But the world is changing in a very big way. Things are actually getting better, and in what only a few years ago we would have thought of as the most unlikely places — Bangladesh, Bhutan, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, and India. Meanwhile, in the United States and much of Europe, unemployment is on the rise and broad sections of society are buckling under the weight of “austerity” measures. It’s been like that since 2008. That’s bad news. But the good news is that the “south” is rising.
Just days after the UN Development Program released its report, Oxford University released the findings of its own study of trends in extreme poverty in 22 of the world’s poorest countries, home to roughly two billion people, or roughly one-third of humanity. Oxford’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative concludes that if these trends persist the most acute forms of poverty in half of those countries, including Bangladesh, will be eradicated within 20 years.
The world is changing, it’s changing fast, and faster than anyone anticipated. It’s changing for reasons that don’t neatly fit conventional analyses. Certainly, openness to international markets and the abandonment of central-state economic planning has helped enormously. But so have state investments in infrastructure, literacy, democratic innovation, and perhaps most importantly, the emancipation of women.
All of these developments present Canada’s Conservative government with a unique opportunity to articulate a coherent and ambitious foreign policy. Now that the “silo” of CIDA has been breached, and following on last year’s elimination of the vexatious Rights and Democracy agency, little stands in the way, institutionally, of a robust and progressive new approach to foreign policy, trade, development and aid.
The ingredients are there: Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own signature emphasis on maternal mortality and child health, a focus on the protection of religious minorities, a refusal to equivocate in the defence of Israel and the isolation of Khomeinist Iran, and an integrated approach to aid and trade — often involving contentious corporate partnerships — of the kind pioneered by Hillary Clinton during her command of the U.S. State Department.
There remains a surprising degree of goodwill that Prime Minister Harper can draw upon to secure some degree of multi-partisan consensus on what sort of “values” Canada should be projecting in the world.
Even former Liberal Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy gave his blessing to Ottawa’s CIDA move.
The government’s main weakness: Six years have passed since the prime minister pledged a specific agency to promote democratic development in the world and still no traction. The “Arab Spring” came and went, and with the exception of a useful military contribution to the NATO project in Libya, Canada has been largely irrelevant to the entire phenomenon. Even the New Democratic Party’s Paul Dewar will occasionally imply that some iteration of the Conservatives’ promised democracy-promotion agency would be a very good idea.
The problem is mainly that there are already at least two dozen agencies, programs and budget pockets of one sort or another that are ostensibly given to the purpose — Elections Canada’s overseas technical assistance, Export Development Canada’s anti-corruption program, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Glyn Berry program and so on.
There’s just no co-ordination, no hand on the tiller, and no cabinet champion. This is embarrassing, stupid, and wrong.
Ottawa should get on with it.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Terry Glavin
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