When I was chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, Conservative and Liberal members alike were adamant that Canada needed the military strength to both defend itself and contribute to maintaining international stability. But we also published reports arguing for an increased foreign aid budget. While wars sometimes have to be fought, they are incredibly costly in both blood and treasure. Which is why investing taxpayers’ dollars in ameliorating the conditions that breed conflict is so important.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many votes in foreign aid; more likely there are votes to lose. And Stephen Harper is a clever politician. He knows few Liberal or NDP supporters would come over to his Conservative party if he had increased Canada’s foreign aid budget. Conversely, core Conservative voters would be appalled at any increase, particularly in iffy economic times. Those are two good reasons why Canadians have witnessed the emaciation of Canada’s overseas development budget since Harper won his majority in 2011.
In this, Harper probably is far more clever than fellow Conservative David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister. Cameron, like Harper, is likely to face his electorate in 2015. Like Harper, he has been flagging in popularity polls recently. But unlike Harper, Cameron is not playing politics with foreign aid.
Despite the fact that Britain’s economy is in a far more precarious state than Canada’s, Cameron has increased Britain’s foreign aid budget to 0.56 per cent of his country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and committed himself to hitting the UN’s international target of 0.7 per cent a year from now.
Britain is bankrolling a $4.1-billion international initiative to alleviate malnutrition in poor countries with core funding of $600 million and $446 million set aside to match contributions from other countries.
Canada signed the initiative at last week’s G8 summit, but Harper’s little nod of approval only masks what has been Canada’s appalling performance on the foreign aid front under his government, which has managed to outslash even the tight-fisted Chrétien Liberals during Paul Martin’s deficit-fighting years.
That Harper appointed Bev Oda and Julian Fantino — two ministers with little experience in international development — to administer the aid budget was predictable. The rationale for foreign aid needs to be sold to Canadians, and these people weren’t going to dazzle anybody with their sales pitches.
That Harper would pull CIDA out of some of the poorest countries in the world — like Malawi and Niger — and shift its focus to countries Canada wants to increase trade was reprehensible for a government committed to stand on firm moral principles in its international dealings.
That Canada would announce earlier this year that it was pulling out of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification — signed on to by 194 countries — fell into the same moral quagmire. Harper’s rationale was that the convention was too bureaucratic, but the strong suspicion is that this government doesn’t want anything to do with any scientific battles against climate change.
That the government would cut the last year’s foreign aid budget by 7.5 per cent — bringing it down to 0.31 per cent of GDP — was a sad step in the wrong direction. But at least there was transparency to the move.
Then things got really ugly. Minister Fantino simply stopped approving CIDA projects coming through the pipeline. Oda had been painfully slow to approve projects. Fantino simply shut them down.
At the end of the 2012-2013 fiscal year, CIDA had lapsed approximately $800 million in spending. Traditionally, departments who lapse funds approved by Parliament are considered blunderers. But this was no blunder. It was clearly done by design, at the top.
The agency effectively took the money away from the world’s unfortunate and handed it back to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who is busily working toward the government’s promise to reduce the federal budget deficit to zero by election time. After that open budget cut of 7.5 per cent, the government sneaked behind the curtains and chopped the agency’s disbursements by another 20 per cent.
All this while it was being announced that CIDA would be folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which once had quite a reputation for dispute solving and other world-improving activities but whose primary focus is now largely confined to promoting foreign trade.
When speaking about his initiative to fight world hunger, Cameron pointed out that more than 60 per cent of the world’s malnourished children live in fragile and conflicted states. “We understand that if we invest in countries before they get broken, we might not end up spending so much on dealing with problems — whether that’s immigration or threats to our national security.”
Cameron appears to be making a commitment to bettering the world long after he has left the political scene. That’s not the stereotypical image of what politicians do. For too many of them, it’s all about today, which is where the votes — and power — reside.
How good though, that every now and then an international statesman does step forward. There will be a time, one hopes, that it will be a Canadian.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Colin Kenny
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