Part 4

Canada’s development project stumbled in the mid-1980s and never recovered. After the pinnacle of Canadian public participation and self-perception as a humanitarian nation, evident in Nassisse Solomon’s chapter on Ethiopian famine relief, compassion fatigue set in. A struggling economy and a looming national debt crisis exposed CIDA to closer scrutiny and recurring budget reductions, beginning in 1989. Aid funding fell precipitately after the election of Jean Chrétien’s Liberals in 1993, as total government spending contracted and aid was slashed more than most sectors—declining from 3 per cent of federal government tax revenues to less than 1.5 per cent.1 Among the first programs to go were CIDA’s public engagement efforts, depriving the agency of its popular support at this vulnerable juncture.

At the same time, the political economy of global aid shifted to the right. Conservative governments in London and Washington and their allies at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund championed a hardline capitalist neo-liberal agenda that imposed untested structural adjustment programs (SAP) across the Global South, reducing public spending and introducing free market liberalism.

Under president Marcel Massé and his successors, the Canadian International Development Agency embraced these reforms, aligned its aid with Ottawa’s trade priorities, and beefed up its efforts in middle-income countries. At the same time, structural adjustment overturned earlier aid exchanges like those described by Jill Campbell-Miller in her chapter, which gave India a strong influence over Canadian aid policy. The change in focus obscured the once-clear rationale for an independent aid agency, and CIDA eventually succumbed to mounting pressures to merge with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, a shotgun marriage consummated in 2013.

Part 4 is an exercise in contemporary history that contextualizes the challenges of the last three decades. All three chapters take a critical perspective, ranging from Laura Macdonald’s emphasis on Canadian business and civil society influences, to David Black’s institutional focus on CIDA’s final years, to Stephen Brown’s revisiting of themes struck half a century ago in Keith Spicer’s pioneering work on Canadian aid, A Samaritan State? Through very different analytical lenses, they come to strikingly similar conclusions that indicate a decline in Canada’s aid capacity and relevance on the global stage.

For Macdonald, Canadian aid in Latin America has always followed the contours of the northern country’s foreign politics, especially its foreign commercial policies. This has long encouraged high levels of Canadian investment in Central and South America, especially in such key sectors as mining, where Canadian investment leads the way. Ottawa’s stress on promoting trade, outlined in Stefano Tijerina’s case study of Colombia, continued in later years and throughout the region. But so too did the increasing role of civil society. As MacDonald writes, strong civil society actors have emerged both in Canada and in the region with a robust political stake in Canadian ODA. Regional aid policy, she argues, was, and is, shaped by the historic tensions between commercial stakeholders and civil society.

CIDA may have been harmed by its increased stress on business and reduced focus on civil society, an emphasis going back to the days of Hugh Keenleyside and Lewis Perinbam, and a former CIDA priority as described in chapters by Ted Cogan and Sonya de Laat. David Black’s chapter on CIDA’s institutional culture and the agency’s 2013 merger with Canada’s foreign ministry is just as historically determined. CIDA’s demise, he argues, is rooted in the 1990s, when it embraced neo-liberal policy prescriptions to win favour with the World Bank, the IMF, and key Ottawa decision makers. The shift strained CIDA’s identify as “an organization committed to poverty alleviation.” Whereas CIDA had once provided space for policy experimentation, it had abandoned that role and was no longer able to advance the case for its own preservation. It was a far cry from the pioneering days of Nik Cavell!

Stephen Brown’s closing reflections on the contemporary relevance of A Samaritan State? reprises the section’s historical motif. Spicer erred in his pious hope that aid might return gratitude and political dividends. That was neither true in Pakistan in the 1950s nor Afghanistan in the 2000s. Yet Spicer’s insistence on clarity of purpose and long-term enlightened self-interest are helpful remainders to policy makers to avoid short-term political or economic distractions. Though Canada does not emerge from this examination as a Samaritan state, many of Spicer’s thoughts still hold up well, even in a time of decline for Canada’s role in global development.

Note

1 See http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2017/05/03/a-tale-book-ended-by-2-trudeaus-canadas-foreign-aid-since-1970/.