Part 3

The flowering of UN and Colombo Plan aid was a godsend for Canadians in search of a new self-image. English Canada’s national identity tottered insecurely after the Second World War as imperial Britain retreated, leaving Canadians uncomfortably alone in North America with the US colossus and reliant on a US-led military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to retain a link with Europe. By the 1960s and 1970s, the national identity crisis was acute. A surging American cultural and economic presence north of the border and the growth of nationalist sentiment in Quebec raised deep questions about what it meant to be Canadian.

The answer, at least in part, lay in foreign affairs. Aid, alongside peacekeeping and CanLit (as Canadian literature was nicknamed), gave Canadians a renewed sense of self and an international identity as good Samaritans. Postwar aid and national identity were intrinsically linked. It was hardly coincidental that the early aid administrator, the former English colonial Nik Cavell, deliberately changed his name to don a distinctly Canadian identity. Aid official Lewis Perinbam did not need to change his name, but he too cast off his former nationality as he entered and transformed Canadian aid operations. And there were others.

The three chapters in this section explore elements of this relationship between foreign aid and national identity in Canada, teasing apart image and reality. Aid, a novel venture in unfamiliar parts of the world, was always going to be a hard sell, as Ted Cogan’s chapter explains. Aware of the ongoing need for public support, successive Canadian governments portrayed aid as quintessentially “Canadian,” a simple extension of Canada’s natural role as global peacemaker. This made aid bipartisan, a project of all political parties, helping to build a sense of national unity and consensus. If the Canadian state was promotional, its audience was internal as much as international—perhaps more so.

Sonya de Laat’s study of CIDA’s extensive photography collection also holds up a mirror to Canadian identity. CIDA’s imagery helped define (and constantly redefine) Canada as a steadfast and immutable “caring” and “helpful nation.” Striking pictures of poverty and Canadian efforts to help convinced Canadians that their country was working for good causes in other lands.

Indeed, this very self-identity as a “Samaritan State” would spur Canadian citizens into one of the greatest mass giving campaigns in the country’s history, Nassisse Solomon argues in her chapter. Images of starving children encouraged Canadians to mount a national mass relief effort for the victims of the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s. The country’s most prominent singers gathered as “Northern Lights” to make a video telling Canadians that “tears are not enough”—donations were needed more. The fundraising campaign allowed thousands to feel a direct connection to helping starving Ethiopians and to feel proud of their country for coming to the rescue.

But identity hides as much as it reveals. Federal politicians justify aid as inherently Canadian, but jostle behind the scenes for geopolitical and economic advantage. CIDA’s imagery projects an unperturbable air of national caring and concern, while its agendas shift, obscuring aspects of Canada’s ODA worthy of debate and criticism. Solomon’s chapter ends by peeking at the brutal underside of African famine relief in the 1980s, including the manipulation of famine imagery, the politics of food distribution on the ground, and the persistent negative framing of Africa. Examining Canadian aid through its imagery suggests that it has been more effective in shaping Canadian self-images than in ending poverty.