7

“Trotsky in Pinstripes”: Lewis Perinbam, CIDA, and the Non-Governmental Organizations Program, 1968–1991

Kevin Brushett

On a warm fall night in October 1991, hundreds of people arrived at La Maison du Citoyen in Hull, Quebec to say farewell to their cherished colleague Lewis Perinbam, who was leaving CIDA after more than twenty-two years of public service in the cause of international cooperation. At the “roast” celebrating his achievements Perinbam modestly reminisced on the “small part” he had played in shaping Canada’s international development assistance policy over the course of four decades. “Contrary to widely-held misconceptions,” he continued, the federal government “can be an exciting and creative place to work in if you just remember two rules. . . . Never ask any questions to which the answer may be no; and forgiveness is usually easier to obtain than permission.”1

That night, in an “Ode to Lewis,” colleagues feted his long career in the “North-South” business. They ribbed him about his vast range of contacts: “for sure it is exaggeration that Lewis knows half of every nation.” They marvelled at his ability to work the bureaucracy and the politics of development assistance: “his approach to issues was varied and deft, he bowed to the right and kept peace with the left.” And they knowingly winked at his innovative means of administration: “On working methods, there was purity of intent and much obscurity of content. Of budgetary rationale controllers saw new maps of hell.”2 But former CIDA President Marcel Massé struck a more sober note. His remarks emphasized Perinbam’s special influence on the development of Canadian aid programs by confirming his status as what Ottawa journalist Sandra Gwyn once called a “Guerilla Bureaucrat.”3 Perinbam, at least outwardly, did not look the part of a guerilla bureaucrat. He was clean-shaven, well-dressed, and did not stand on his head in the hallways of CIDA’s offices. Rather, Massé remembered him as a “Leon Trotsky in pin-stripes” whom he claimed “work[ed] by stealth altering the substance of programs and initiatives without necessarily changing their appearance.” “He got away with [so much],” Massé continued, “because he was so quiet—no one noticed his underground activities until they were fait accomplis.” Above all, Perinbam adhered to American activist Abbie Hoffman’s dictum that “the first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”4 And get away with it, he did. Between 1969, when he arrived in Ottawa to head up the fledgling NGO Division at CIDA, and 1991, when he retired as vice-president of CIDA’s Special Programs Branch, he took full advantage of support inside and outside Ottawa to revolutionize Canadian aid policy on many different fronts. What began as an innovative but relatively modest $5 million commitment to helping voluntary organizations carry out development projects in the Global South became by the time Perinbam retired a $330 million program funding hundreds of NGOs and thousands of projects. Equally important, he had turned the NGO Division into a much larger Special Programs Branch, which launched innovative programs including the Industrial Cooperation Program, Management for Change, Africa 2000, and the Youth Initiatives program.5

Since the publication of Keith Spicer’s A Samaritan State? a half-century ago, the word “revolutionary” has generally not been used alongside Canadian development assistance policy. More often than not, CIDA has been variously critiqued for its ineffectiveness, its mixed and often conflicting objectives, and its role in maintaining Canada’s economic and political hegemony vis-à-vis the peoples and nations of the Global South.6 While many of these critiques have merit, there is one field where Canada once stood out as both innovative and effective: its engagement with the voluntary sector through various NGO programs.7 As head of CIDA’s NGO Division and later the Special Programs Branch, Perinbam was directly responsible for many of these innovative programs. Aid consultant David Protheroe has referred to CIDA’s expansionary and innovative period between 1968 and 1978 as a “near golden age” when Canadian development assistance policies so “thoroughly and ubiquitously” lived up to “middle power ideal[s].”8 Though some of that shine has since worn off, Canadians’ continued commitment to humanitarian and development-focused assistance policies has been due in no small part to Perinbam’s deft management of his portfolio in these early years.

Lewis Perinbam was born in the town of Johore Bahru, in what is now Malaysia, in May 1925 to Indian immigrant parents Mary and Dr. Joseph Perinbam. Lewis left Malaysia at age nine to live with his uncle in Glasgow, Scotland, so that he could pursue his education. That education was cut short at eighteen when he received the tragic news of the brutal death of his father at the hands of Japanese occupation forces. Accused of hiding British and Chinese nationals as mental hospital patients, he was tortured by Japanese soldiers and then forced to dig his own grave before his execution. Perinbam eventually returned to Scotland to finish his studies at the University of Glasgow School of Engineering, from which he graduated in 1947. Worried that his Indian heritage would hinder his job prospects, he went to London to work for the Indian High Commission, where he eventually became involved with World University Service (WUS), a non-governmental organization established in the aftermath of the First World War to aid foreign students in need, including those fleeing Nazism in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. By the early 1950s, WUS had gained “a solid reputation for its study tours, seminars, workshops and conferences.”9 In 1953, Lewis learned of an opportunity to put the Canadian branch of WUS on a more stable footing. He jumped at the opportunity. “I had become fascinated with Canada’s history,” he recalled, “as a country rooted in different cultures and whose citizens embraced values and principles, which did not prompt them to dominate others. I was excited therefore when WUSC invited me to Canada.”10

For the rest of the 1950s, Perinbam criss-crossed the country helping to knit the various World University Service Canada (WUSC) branches into a cohesive and ambitious national organization. Though Canada’s commitment to diversity attracted him to the country, he thought that Canadians could be parochial and that they had much to learn from working in conjunction with people whose lives and circumstances were very different from their own.11 Paul Davidson, former WUSC executive director, remembered that even “at functions filled with movers and shakers,” Perinbam “could usually be found talking in a corner to an 18-year-old,” encouraging them to learn and serve abroad.12 Even so, he rarely missed an opportunity to “network,” which his wife Nancy Garrett later claimed he had invented before it was even a term. For example, it was on a 1957 WUSC trip to Ghana that Perinbam first met Pierre Trudeau; it was a relationship he assiduously cultivated, becoming one of the future prime minister’s advisors on development issues.13 Over the next half-century, Perinbam courted other world leaders, from Swedish prime minister Olof Palme to the Aga Khan and Prince Charles, as well as development experts from the World Bank to the Indian government, to build both an official and unofficial network to support a more egalitarian approach to what David Engerman calls “Development Politics.”14

Perinbam’s work at WUSC earned him enough plaudits to win him a job in 1959 as secretary general of the Canadian National Commission for UNESCO, where he continued to promote international cooperation among young people. Even in this early period, he was already writing to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker about organizing student work exchanges in the Global South. That idea eventually came to fruition in 1961 with the foundation of Canada’s “Peace Corps,” the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). Though CUSO had many founding fathers, it was Perinbam who turned the idea into reality by personally borrowing $10,000 from the Carnegie Foundation and another $3,000 from Ontario Teachers’ Federation to send the first volunteers to Ghana.15 Perinbam remained active in CUSO even though his work with UNESCO and later with the World Bank kept him largely in New York. All of his work with WUSC, UNESCO, CUSO, and the World Bank equipped him to head up CIDA’s new non-governmental organization program. In fact, Perinbam had lobbied the Diefenbaker government to support an NGO program as early as 1963. When CIDA’s first president, Maurice Strong, came calling, Lewis essentially wrote his own job description.16

Perinbam’s arrival in Ottawa in 1969 coincided with a momentous change in the Ottawa bureaucratic environment. The late 1960s represented what Sandra Gwyn has called “The Twilight of the Mandarins,” when the old guard of . . . generalists were replaced by “trendy operators” and “altruistic technocrats.” These were what Trudeau would call “new guys with new ideas.” This renewed civil service followed the self-confident and assertive tone of its new leader and, as a result, Ottawa “crackled with energy,” resembling “neither Camelot nor Athens so much as a cross between the Harvard Business School, Berkeley in the free speech era, and a utopian commune.”17

CIDA, which grew out of the External Aid Office (EAO), was one of the epicentres of this dramatic growth and change in the Ottawa bureaucracy.18 To fulfill his commitment to increase the size and scope of Canada’s international development portfolio, outgoing Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson handed the reins of Canadian aid policy development over to the young and ambitious Maurice Strong.19 Strong and his successor Paul Gérin-Lajoie leveraged increased public and political attention to development issues to staff CIDA with a degree of expertise that would allow it to speak as “the voice” on Canadian international development policy, much to the consternation to those in the Department of External Affairs who insisted that aid policy should remain subservient to Canada’s larger political and economic interests. Until Strong arrived, the EAO was considered a “career backwater” and was “seriously hampered by the fact [it did] not have personnel overseas who are thoroughly familiar with . . . field conditions overseas.”20 CIDA benefited from this expansionary period in Ottawa to recruit ten of the top fifteen graduates accepted into the government’s administrative trainee program in 1969.21

As one of Strong’s first-class recruits, Perinbam did not take long to build a small but substantial empire within CIDA. Initially, the NGO Division began with a modest budget of $5 million and a similarly modest set of objectives. As the work of Ted Cogan and Tamara Myers has outlined, the division grew out of the Centennial International Development Program and its hugely popular Miles for Millions walkathons.22 Hoping to capture this outpouring of concern for development, the NGO Division was established with four broad objectives:

1. To broadly serve Canadian interests;

2. To enable CIDA to tap non-governmental expertise;

3. To stimulate NGO developmental activities to create a multiplier effect on Canada’s overall development assistance effort; and

4. To encourage Canadians to become more involved in and aware of Canada’s international development program.23

While more than two-thirds of the original NGO budget of $5 million went to supporting CUSO and Canadian Executive Service Overseas (CESO) volunteers, by the time Perinbam became vice-president of the Special Programs Branch in 1974, their share of the NGO budget had fallen to less than half. More important, during the same time, the number of NGOs working with CIDA rose from 20 to 200, with 617 projects receiving funding. The growth of the NGO program to $31 million by 1975 faithfully represented CIDA’s philosophical approach to development by promoting social justice and stimulating self-sustaining development. By the end of the 1980s, the budget of Perinbam’s Special Programs Branch (SPB) had tripled in size. Over its two decades of existence, the SPB invested more than $2 billion in funds while attracting another $6 billion in cash, goods, and services. When Perinbam retired, Canada was dispensing more than 10 per cent of its development assistance through NGOs, twice as much as the next largest donor.24 Though most of the programs Perinbam oversaw in the SPB constituted less than 10 per cent of Canadian aid disbursements, these projects did much to help developing nations achieve important social objectives while simultaneously stimulating public support at home for international development.25 As one of his early NGO Division recruits remembered, under Perinbam it was “harder to turn down proposals than to fund them.”26 Despite this permissive approach, Margaret Catley-Carlson, CIDA president in the 1980s, noted on one of Perinbam’s annual performance reviews that the SPB operated “without any [of the] major problems of accountability [and] mismanagement . . . that have plagued other parts of the Agency.”27

Not surprisingly, Perinbam’s NGO Division quickly became known among the civil society sector as “our” department. Perinbam’s cultivation of NGO support was crucial in building what David Black’s chapter in this volume calls CIDA’s “organizational essence” as a “development organization” committed first and foremost to poverty alleviation and a more just international social, economic, and political order.28 The NGO umbrella organization, the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CICC), noted that its members thought “well of their relations with CIDA and that the relationship had been ‘positive, valuable, and beneficial.’”29 A decade later, Ian Smillie, head of CUSO, wrote Perinbam to laud their relationship as “perhaps one of the most progressive and least selfish in the world.” Writing in 1983, during a difficult period in CUSO’s history, when internal divisions between radicals and pragmatists, French and English, were tearing it apart, Smillie insisted that its survival was due in large part to the “confidence that [Perinbam] . . . had placed in . . . CUSO.”30 Though at times Canadian NGOs worried that the division was steering them “down [the] garden path strewn with government goodies and lo and behold to ‘priorities’ and ‘directives’” that were not their own, for the most part their relationship with the division was constructive and non-coercive.31

Yet, Perinbam’s relationship with his former NGO colleagues was not without its strains. From the beginning, some in the NGO community, such as CUSO returned volunteer Grant Wanzell, worried about what their “blood relationship with CIDA” might do to their independence. Would NGOs become nothing more a “junior CIDA corps” and their role diminished to mere “governmental employment and placement agenc[ies?]”32 By the mid-1970s, those concerns had worked their way up to CUSO executive director Murray Thomson, who worried that Perinbam and CIDA had become “servants of the very status quo [they were] working to change.” “Perinbam” he continued, “saw things in terms of the 1960s . . . [and although] he was always talking about innovations and new ideas . . . when we came up with . . . new and innovative ideas . . . he was more interested in his own.” Others commented that the NGO Division had begun to meddle in the projects submitted for approval, too often “behav[ing] as if they wished they were their own clients.”33 During this period, CIDA often seconded staff to various NGOs, including CUSO, while NGO volunteers and staff moved freely between their organizations, CIDA, and the CCIC, thus blurring the line between government and civil society.34 For his part, Perinbam thought that NGO leaders had become “wooly naïf[s],” and dismissed the increasingly conspiratorial nature of their criticisms.35 “There’s an assumption that the government must be against them,” he lamented. “They don’t realize that we don’t get up in the morning and say: ‘What are we going to do to the NGOs today?’”36 On more than one occasion, Perinbam warned his former NGO colleagues that “when CIDA gets knocked so does the NGO program” and the strength of “their Division” depended on the strength of CIDA itself.37

Despite these periodic tensions, Perinbam and the NGOs operated on the same wavelength when it came to the nature and purpose of development policy. Their general confidence in Perinbam’s leadership was due to a number of factors, not least of which was the fact that Perinbam embodied what political scientist Cranford Pratt called “humane internationalism,” an ethos that championed aid policy that was ethical, cooperative, and non-coercive.38 Throughout his career, Perinbam emphasized that aid must avoid becoming a new form of colonialism. As earlier chapters in this volume by David Webster and Jill Campbell-Miller note, although Canadian aid officials entered aid relationships in privileged and powerful positions vis-à-vis their counterparts in the Global South, many (but not all) of them understood that success depended on a dialogue between equals.39 For this reason, Perinbam insisted that it must be founded on the idea of “partners not patrons” engaged in a common enterprise to lift all peoples to prosperity and dignity.40 Canadians, he reminded one audience, could not become leaders in development if they allowed their relationships with the developing world to be “a vehicle for domination or exploitation under the guise of ‘partnerships,’ whether by governments, NGOs, or the private sector.”41 This notion of partnership not only influenced the NGO program but was also central to other SPB programs such as the Business and Industry Program (1978) and the Management for Change (1981) initiative, which were established to share Canadian entrepreneurial and administrative acumen with nascent enterprises in the Global South.42 Although these two programs created some anger in the NGO community because of their emphasis on the “profit motive,” Perinbam later remembered them as among the initiatives of which he was most proud.43

While Perinbam firmly believed that NGOs were the perfect means to build international partnership in development, he could be critical of the gaps in their theory and practice. Addressing the annual meeting of CARE in May 1971, Perinbam pointedly asked whether the NGO challenged their fundraisers to examine “the real causes of hunger, sickness and illiteracy,” or compared “the expenditures on war and armaments with those for . . . the war against poverty.”44 For him, NGOs that did not sufficiently reflect on their practices were “in danger of being like the rich man who tossed a penny to the beggar to relieve his own conscience . . . while avoiding the question of why there is a beggar at all.”45 Similarly, he often criticized NGOs for spending resources on their public image rather than on building links with the peoples of the Global South. The developing world, he argued on another occasion, was right to be “apprehensive and fearful [of] the waves of developmentalists . . . and so-called partners” who arrived to “rescue them from their poverty [but] who appear to have taken the place of missionaries of old.”46 In this vein, he saw the value of indigenous NGOs that could pinpoint the incompatibility between Northern theories and Southern realities.47 Looking back from the perspective of recent critiques of NGOs’ effectiveness in fighting global inequalities, Perinbam’s analyses were remarkably prescient. Nonetheless, his unwavering devotion to their overarching cause at times reflected more liberal rather than revolutionary tendencies in his own strategies and approaches to IDA and global poverty.48

The way that Perinbam and his NGO Division tapped into the expertise and zeal of returned volunteers was another factor in building trust with the NGO community. It doubtless helped that many of these new CIDA recruits came from Perinbam’s old stomping grounds at CUSO. Some were part of the initial hiring flurry in late 1969, while others, such as Dale Posgate, one of the original fifteen CUSO volunteers to serve in India, found their way to CIDA later. Historian Ruth Compton Brouwer puts the number of CIDA employees who were former CUSO volunteers at nearly 40 per cent, leading one of Perinbam’s recruits, Elizabeth McAllister, to claim that “it seemed liked everyone had worked for CUSO.” Indeed, by the early 1970s, this group had become known, both for good and for bad, as the “CUSO Mafia.”49 Sheila Batchelor, one of Perinbam’s initial recruits, remembers that “before all the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed for the establishment of the NGO Division [Perinbam] gather[ed] around him . . . a talented enthusiastic group of mainly young people whom he hand-picked to be the core of the NGO Division.” Most of us, she continued, “had grassroots overseas experience or had been involved with NGOs in some capacity. We were gung ho, full of energy, and convinced that it was our generation who would finally change the world. Above all, we were highly individualist and strong willed. There was not one shrinking violet in our midst.”50 Other notable CUSO recruits to the NGO Division included Ronald Leger, who later became involved in Inter Pares, as well as Nigel Martin, who became head of OXFAM Quebec and a director of the CCIC. Martin in particular remembered coming to Ottawa as a ”young angry product of the 1960s,” skeptical of how much he would accomplish inside the “big monster . . . aka ‘The Government.’”51

Perinbam’s managerial style attracted returned volunteers and encouraged them to carve out long careers in government. His colleagues remembered him as an “anti-bureaucrat” engaged in “disruptive innovation” who manoeuvred his way through official Ottawa.52 Under Perinbam’s guidance the NGO Division and the SPB became the emotional heart and soul of CIDA because he “ma[de] things happen, and [did] not simply administ[er] the status quo.” Other colleagues remembered him not as an ideologue but as someone who sought out people with different dreams and ideas, never simply “yes people.”53 This was particularly true when it came to choosing his replacement at the NGO Division, Romeo Maione, a long-time social activist in the Catholic Church and Quebec labour movement, and the first executive director of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP). Maione inherited Perinbam’s “drive and passion to enable others to do wonderful things.”54

Perinbam’s commitment to broadening the horizons at CIDA also applied to recruiting and supporting women. Sheila Batchelor remembered Perinbam as a “lifelong champion of women in the workplace . . . [who] provided us with an atmosphere of professional acceptance and instilled in us the confidence in our abilities which later allowed us to make our way in other much less positive work milieus.”55 Perinbam’s performance reviews consistently commented highly on his support for “affirmative action.” Indeed, under his leadership CIDA became among the first to institute a Women in Development (WID) approach to minimize the gendered implications of traditional development programming.56 It was no coincidence that MATCH International, the world’s first international development NGO run by and for women, was established with the support of the NGO Division in 1976.

The NGO program also won accolades as an efficient and effective means of delivering development assistance while simultaneously engaging Canadians’ support for CIDA’s larger program. Officials in the departments of External Affairs and Industry, Trade and Commerce (ITC), the “senior members” of the interdepartmental consultation body known as the Canadian International Development Board (CIDB), judged the NGO program to be a cost-effective means of delivering aid. They also liked that it could be more “flexible, adventurous and experimental” than official bilateral programs, which were constrained by government-to-government negotiations.57 As one diplomat noted, “All too often bilateral and multilateral aid was held hostage to the interests of governments not those of their citizens.”58 Officials praised the NGO program as “a magnificent contribution to real development at the lowest level . . . organizations receiving assistance staffed by ‘dedicated, industrious people who assist[ed] . . . their 
. . . friends . . . to a better life through better habits . . . skills . . . and greater self-respect.”59 Others noted that the program was an excellent means of providing development assistance in countries where Canada could not or did not want to mount bilateral programs, particularly nations whose human rights records were poor. For example, most Canadian aid to Haiti during the 1970s was carried out through the NGO program, because as one Canadian embassy official observed, “we don’t want the government to become involved or even to set priorities.”60 The NGO program was also important in re-establishing Canadian ties with Uganda in the aftermath of the 1973 coup.61

Nonetheless, as the NGO program grew during the 1970s, some government officials, particularly in External Affairs, became increasingly uneasy about its direction and purpose. Though most agreed that the program should be kept free from “bureaucratic red tape and excessive control,” others contended that there were “inherent dangers of maintaining this concept . . . in the face of the expected future growth”62 Some of these anxieties stemmed from “Doubting Thomases,” Perinbam claimed, who conjured up all kinds of “lurid pictures of what might happen if public funds were misused.”63 Canadian diplomats also worried that the NGO Division too often departed from “established policy” and insufficiently reviewed project proposals, leading to too many “risky ventures.”64 According to them, the idea behind the NGO program was for CIDA to keep a “low profile while at the same time helping an organization, usually Canadian, make a worthwhile contribution to development.”65 However, the expansion of the program meant that CIDA’s role was becoming “much more [blatantly] interventionist.”66 External Affairs also worried about the lack of experience among CIDA officials and the absence of project oversight by embassy and mission officials. It did not help that even within CIDA the NGO branch jealously guarded its programs and rarely consulted with their colleagues.67 Officials also disliked Perinbam’s frequent trips abroad to monitor Canadian NGO projects, which often shaded into “inappropriate” consultation with foreign leaders, development experts, and indigenous NGOs. How much he shared about official Canadian policy is unclear, but External Affairs more than once complained about documents leaked by the NGO Division.68

A perfect example of External Affairs’ growing concerns with the NGO program was the Christian Action for Development in the Caribbean (CADEC) project. In the early 1970s, the United Church of Canada, in association with the Caribbean Council of Churches, applied to CIDA for help funding community development projects in the region. By 1975, the Canadian high commissioner in the Barbados, Larry Smith, was complaining to Perinbam about CADEC projects and the overall direction of the NGO program in the region. In his sharply worded dispatch, Smith produced a litany of administrative complaints about his experiences with NGO Division–sponsored projects. But the crux of his complaint was political. Too many NGO projects were creating difficulties for Canadian missions abroad, because they were unconcerned with “the impact the[ir] work . . . ha[s] on our broader inter-governmental or inter-country relationships.” He reminded Perinbam that despite the arms-length relationship between CIDA and the NGOs, “people tend not to make the distinction between Canadian government activity and Canadian private activities.” Foremost in Smith’s mind was CADEC’s monthly newsletter, which carried articles highly critical of regional governments as well as Canadian multinational corporations operating in the region. Smith ended his missive by admonishing Perinbam’s lack of attention to program administration. “You keep assuring us,” he wrote, “that procedures were being tightened up . . . but as yet there has been little evidence of this.”69

Perinbam’s response reflected both his concern and his ability to defend the NGO program from internal pressures that would make it little more than a “door opener” to advance short-term Canadian political and economic interests in the developing world.70 First, he deflected criticism of the administrative issues to the United Church and officials in External Affairs who had not passed the requisite information up the chain of command. More importantly, he went straight to the issue that underlay External Affairs’ growing resistance to the NGO program, that organizations such as CADEC were critical of governments and established interests in the Global South. “On the one hand,” Perinbam wrote, “you state that [CADEC] is ‘doing good work, operates at the grass-roots level, encourages economic and social development, and promotes regional cooperation.’” “On the other hand,” he continued “you say that it ‘comments frequently and publicly on political matters often critically of governments.’” “The same,” he reminded Smith, “can be said of many highly respectable Canadian NGOs such as the churches, universities and unions.” Indeed, Perinbam chastised Smith for questioning the sincerity and integrity of CADEC “when its directors include people like [renowned development economist] Sir Arthur Lewis, the Archbishop of Jamaica, the Anglican Bishop of Barbados and the President of the Caribbean Development Bank.” Perinbam finished his letter to Smith claiming that he was “not here to plead for CADEC. . . . All I ask is for some clear guidance as to what you wish us to do.”71

Fears that the NGO Division was transferring control over Canadian development policy to its beneficiaries became more pointed when Perinbam put forward the proposition of directly funding indigenous organizations such as CADEC through an International NGO program rather than through Canadian-based organizations. CIDA President Paul Gérin-Lajoie and Perinbam believed that too many development projects were conceived by Canadians rather than by peoples in the developing world.72 From the start, Perinbam had always sought more “constructive evaluation[s] of Canada’s development assistance program in [both] a national and international perspective.”73 To sell the program to the naysayers on the CIDB, CIDA argued that an INGO program would “improve the effectiveness of the program by enlarging its scope and thrust.”74 Improved efficiency and transparency notwithstanding, External Affairs repeatedly asked that it be removed from CIDA’s 1975 Strategic Plan. According to External Affairs, the original rationale for the NGO program was to purchase a domestic constituency to support Canada’s existing aid programs and policies, not for foreigners to design their own. To them the INGO program represented the naïve and wooly-headed thinking so characteristic of CIDA’s early years. To cite Larry Smith again, such an approach to development was a “very crude method of subversion” based on the assumption at CIDA that “governments do not represent the people . . . [and] must therefore be circumvented.” “Even if we subscribe to such an untenable international philosophy,” he continued, “we might ask ourselves whether [Canada] would welcome a workshop on general preferences or . . . on the merits of Marxist central planning sponsored by Chile or Cuba.”75 Another commentary noted that “there’s a difference between a domestic [Local Initiatives Project] and one operated internationally by a foreign government, and as such External Affairs should be deeply opposed to CIDA sponsoring the activities of indigenous NGOs.76 In the end, Perinbam’s persistence won the day.

The final area where Perinbam sought to foster a narrative of humane internationalism was through extensive consultation with NGOs both at home and abroad. Like many in the NGO community, he believed that their “primary raison d’être was not the collection and transfer of money from private citizens, but the representation of the Third World voice in the structures that perpetuate their continuing underdevelopment.”77 For those in CIDA this was the rationale behind what would eventually become the Public Participation Program (PPP), which funded such development education programs as the annual Ten Days for World Development. To officials in External Affairs the program was supposed to provide “a dependable base of public support for the continued expansion” of the Canadian aid program by “providing a more informed but constructive tone” to political debates over the magnitude and complexity of the issues involved.78 It was not long before they believed that CIDA had created a monster. With significant CIDA funding many NGOs mounted “education” programs that strongly criticized not only Canadian aid policy but also Canada’s role in global economic relations. These criticisms reached a fever peak during the World Food Conference in Rome in 1974, when Canadian NGOs criticized the government’s approach to combating the global food crisis. Hoping to avoid another embarrassment during the 1976 UNCTAD IV meetings, Eric Bergbusch, head of the aid and development division in External Affairs, made it clear that CIDA’s support to NGOs “should be of such proportions that they can [act] in their proper function as observers” and not “mount a counter-delegation.”79 By the early 1980s, External Affairs had also come to worry about the increased human rights emphasis of groups such as the Latin American Working Group, the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa, the Taskforce on the Churches and Corporate Responsibility and GATT-Fly, which critiqued Canada’s economic policies toward economies in the Global South. Although few of these organizations received direct monies through the PPP program, they were all part of the development education network established by CUSO, Oxfam, and the Inter-Church Fund for International Development, with significant political and financial support from Perinbam’s NGO and Special Branch programs. Though Perinbam at times criticized his NGO colleagues for biting the hand that fed them, their activism more often than not strengthened CIDA’s hand vis-à-vis the more conservative stakeholders on the CIDB. As David Morrison argues in the conclusion to his history of CIDA, Perinbam’s original investment in a strong and vibrant voluntary sector had helped it resist pressures from other aid “stakeholders,” namely DEA and ITC, to make IDA serve non-development objectives.80

Conclusion

In his seminal study of Canadian development assistance, A Samaritan State?, written a half-century ago, Keith Spicer adopted a thoroughly realist approach. Humanitarian motives for development assistance, he wrote, were “a fickle and confused policy stimulant derived from personal conscience. [They are] not an objective of government.” “To talk of humanitarian ‘aims’ in Canadian foreign policy,” he continued, “is in fact to confuse policy with the ethics of individuals molding it, to mix government objectives with personal motives.”81 With this in mind, what then do we make of someone like Lewis Perinbam, who for more than two decades not only embodied the humanitarian impulse in Canadian international development assistance policy but also translated it into practice at some of the highest levels of the Canadian state and beyond? For one, as the work of both Stephen Brown and Rebecca Tiessen reminds us, institutions, including impersonal government bureaucracies, are not monolithic entities. They are composed of individuals imbued not only with motives and values but also, in Perinbam’s case, with the skill, acumen, and charisma to steer innovative policies through the forbidding channels of the state apparatus and also to shape those very processes and institutions in fundamental ways.82 Equally important, it echoes David Engerman’s call to historians of international development to “investigate rather than assume the paramountcy of the state in intergovernmental relations such as economic development” by examining the “tensions and politics within national governments” to better map and explain the “world development made.”83

Recent critiques of Canada’s development assistance policy note that its current ineffectiveness stems in part from the fact that it has long lacked a champion with sufficient power to institute strategic direction.84 Certainly that was not true of Perinbam. Indeed, as his original boss Maurice Strong wrote on his retirement, “the fact that Lewis managed to develop such a vast work within the bosom of a bureaucratic process that seldom understood and rarely welcomed the ungovernable ways of non-governmental organizations is a small miracle of immense proportions.”85 To be sure, larger state structures constrained those activities by pushing particular ideas in directions that required significant compromise. For all the praise that Perinbam received as an “anti-bureaucrat,” he also assiduously pursued alliances with the powerful in Ottawa, and elsewhere, that could advance CIDA’s agenda. For some in the NGO community, Perinbam’s management of his insider/outsider position too often leaned toward the “liberal urge within CIDA,” a term not always meant as a compliment.86 Ever the pragmatist, he was often ready to accept “half a loaf”—to echo another title from the history of Canadian development assistance—despite censure from the jealous guardians of the humane internationalist counter-consensus. But as Massé reminded his audience at Perinbam’s farewell, “the first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”87

Notes

1 Notes for Remarks by Lewis Perinbam at a “Roast” organized in his honour by his colleagues and friends, 9 October 1991, Lewis Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

2 “An ode of farewell to Lewis Perinbam, Ottawa, 9 October 1991,” Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC.

3 Sandra Gwyn, “The Twilight of the Ottawa Man,” Saturday Night, January 1971.

4 Talking Points for Marcel Masse to roast Lewis Perinbam, Hull, Quebec, 1991, Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC.

5 “Biography and Administrative History,” Perinbam Papers, LAC, http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&rec_nbr=3930960&lang=eng&rec_nbr_list=3930960,3714081,200799,100026.

6 For example, see the following classic statements: Kim Richard Nossal, “Mixed Motives Revisited: Canada’s Interest in Development Assistance,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 21, no. 1 (1988): 35–56; Jamie Swift and Brian Tomlinson, eds., Conflicts of Interest: Canada and the Third World (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991); Robert Carty, Virginia Smith, and Latin American Working Group, Perpetuating Poverty: The Political Economy of Canadian Foreign Aid (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991); Stephen Brown, ed., Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012); Cranford Pratt, ed., Canadian International Development Assistance Policies: An Appraisal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); David R. Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo, ON: Waterloo University Press, 1998).

7 Tim Brodhead and Cranford Pratt, “Paying the Piper: CIDA and Canadian NGOs,” in Pratt, Canadian International Development Assistance Policies, 87–119; and Tim Brodhead, Brent Herbert-Copley, and Anne-Marie Lambert, Bridges of Hope?: Canadian Voluntary Agencies and the Third World (Ottawa: North-South Institute, 1988). For a critique of the NGO program see Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja-Jay, Paved With Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs From Idealism to Imperialism (Halifax: Fernwood, 2012).

8 David Protheroe, “Canada’s Multilateral Aid and Diplomacy,” in Pratt, Canadian International Development Assistance Policies, 29–30.

9 WUSC-EUMC, “History,” accessed 8 December 2016 from http://wusc.ca/en/about-us/about-us-page-1.

10 Masse Notes for Remarks, Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC.

11 CUSO International West, “Nancy [Garrett] tells me about Lewis Perinbam – Podcast # 72,” http://cuso-vso.mypodcastworld.com/738/nancy-tells-me-about-lewis-perinbam-podcast-72.

12 Philip Fine, “OBITUARY: Lewis Perinbam: International education pioneer,” University World News, Issue 11, 13 January 2008, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20080110161218471.

13 Lewis occasionally accompanied Trudeau on foreign visits concerning aid issues, including the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Jamaica. He was also on the Trudeau family’s annual Christmas card list.

14 “An Ode of Farewell to Lewis Perinbam,” 9 October 1991, Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC. For the way in which international development often took place through informal networks see David Engerman, “Development Politics and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 14–19.

15 Jack Cahill, “Lewis Perinbam, Quiet Civil Servant is a man of imagination and daring,” Toronto Star, 19 February 1984, F5.

16 Richard Harmston, email correspondence, 1 February 2017.

17 Richard Gwyn, Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1980), 95. Although the nature of the civil service changed during these years by attracting significant numbers of francophones and women, the culture of the “new mandarinate” remained thoroughly white male and anglophone into the 1980s. Perinbam would later chair the Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service. See Lewis Perinbam, Embracing Change in the Federal Public Service (Ottawa: Treasury Board, 2000).

18 The EAO began with approximately 40 employees in the early 1960s, grew to 492 in 1970 as CIDA, and then to 1020 by 1976. Public Service Commission of Canada, Annual Reports, 1962–1977.

19 According to David Morrison, Strong accepted Pearson’s offer of leading a revamped EAO only if it had significant input on policy development. Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 59–61.

20 Minutes of Informal Discussions concerning the External Aid Board, 12 October 1966, RG 25, vol. 11784, file 38-1-CIDA, LAC; Martin Desmules, « Histoire du volontariat international au Québec : Le cas du service universitaire canadien outre-mer – SUCO » (Maitrise en histoire, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2009), 18.

21 Ruth Compton Brouwer, Canada’s Global Villagers: CUSO in Development, 1961–86 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 188; Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 64.

22 Ted Cogan, “Selling Foreign Aid in the 1960s: Public Opinion, Civil Society and the Demise of SHARE CANADA,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Brock University, 2014; Tamara Myers, “Local Action and Global Imagining: Youth, International Development, and the Walkathon Phenomenon in Sixties’ and Seventies’ Canada,” Diplomatic History 38 (2014): 282–93.

23 Original Mandate of the NGO Division, CCIC Papers, vol. 11, file: CCIC-CIDA Consultation, 22–28 November 1976, LAC.

24 Brodhead and Pratt, “Paying the Piper,” 95.

25 Though CIDA was sometimes criticized for its wasteful and ineffective programs, particularly on the bilateral side, Canadian popular support for international development as a whole remained fairly positive between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. See Alain Noel, Jean-Philippe Therrien, and Sebastien Dallaire, “Divided over Internationalism: The Canadian Public and Development Assistance,” Canadian Public Policy 30, no. 1 (2004): 29–46; and Ian Smillie, “Canada,” in Ian Smillie and Henny Helmich (in collaboration with Tony German and Judith Randel), eds., Public Attitudes and International Development Co-operation (Paris: OECD, 1998).

26 Anne Sutherland in The Lewis Perinbam Memory Book, Perinbam Papers, vol. 20, file 21, LAC.

27 Performance Review and Appraisal, March 1988, Perinbam Papers, vol. 4, file 16, LAC.

28 See David Black, chapter 12 of this volume. On organizational essences see Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Philippe Lagassé, “Canada and the Bureaucratic Politics of State Fragility,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 659–78

29 CCIC Brief to the Standing Committee on External Affairs & National Defence, 29 April 1975, Oxfam Canada Papers, vol. 85, file 37, LAC, 2; Richard Harmston, email correspondence, 1 February 2017.

30 Ian Smillie to Perinbam, 29 July 1983, Perinbam Papers, vol. 3, file 36, LAC.

31 CCIC-CIDA Consultation October 1976, Part II, Kenrie Marshall to Romeo Maione, 17 August 1976, CCIC Papers, vol. 10, file: NGO-CIDA Consultation 5–7 October 1976, LAC; Brodhead and Pratt, “Paying the Piper”; Brodhead, Herbert-Copley, and Lambert, Bridges of Hope?.

32 Grant Wanzel, Annual Report of the Interim Chairman of the CUSO/SUCO Returned Volunteers Network, Part Two – A Critical Analysis of CUSO/SUCO 1968/69, CUSO Papers, vol. 43, file 11, LAC.

33 Ian Smillie, The Land of Lost Content : A History of CUSO (Toronto: Deneau, 1985), 272.

34 Richard Harmston, email correspondence, 1 February 2017.

35 Smillie, Land of Lost Content, 103.

36 Ibid., 266.

37 Notes for Remarks by Lewis Perinbam, CIDA/NGO Consultation, 5 October 1976, CCIC Papers, vol. 10, LAC; MG 28 I367, vol. 10, file: NGO-CIDA Consultation, 5–7 October 1976, LAC.

38 See, in particular, Cranford Pratt, “Humane Internationalism and Canadian Development Assistance Policies,” in Pratt, Canadian International Development Assistance Policies, 334–70.

39 See chapters 1 and 2 in this volume by Jill Campbell-Miller and David Webster.

40 “Partnership in Development: The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations,” Address to WUSC, 3 September 1969, Perinbam Papers, vol. 9, file 3, LAC.

41 Lewis Perinbam, “Developing countries need real partners, not crippling patronage,” Canadian Speeches 11, no. 7 (November 1997): 26–37.

42 Notes on an Address “Quest for Justice” to the CUSO Annual General Meeting, 2 December 1972, Carleton University, Perinbam Papers, vol. 9, file 4, LAC; Notes for an Address on “The Third World: Threat or Promise” to the First Global Conference on the Future, 22 July 1980, Harbour Castle Hilton Hotel, Toronto; Perinbam, “Developing countries need real partners.”

43 CUSO International West, “Nancy [Garrett] tells me about Lewis Perinbam – Podcast # 72”; and Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 128–29, 171–72.

44 “The Role of the Voluntary Agency in International Development,” to the World Conference of CARE on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary, 13 May 1971, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., Perinbam Papers, vol. 9, file 4, LAC.

45 “The Role of the Voluntary Agency in International Development,” Perinbam Papers, vol. 9, file 4, LAC.

46 Notes for the Consultation with Non-Governmental Agencies and Groups, 19 April 1972, Perinbam Papers, vol. 9, file 4, LAC; Perinbam, “NGOs Lead the Way to International Equality,” Canadian Speeches 16, no. 1 (March/April 2002).

47 Address on “Changing Times and Changing Challenges for NGOs” to the Caribbean and Latin America Regional Conference, Kingston, Jamaica, 1 November 1990, Perinbam Papers, vol. 10, file 6, LAC.

48 For a recent critique of limits of NGO and CSO action that echoes Perinbam’s concerns see Nicola Banks and David Hulme, “The Role of NGOs and Civil Society in Development and Poverty Reduction,” Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester Working Paper, 2012, http://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/gdi/publications/workingpapers/bwpi/bwpi-wp-17112.pdf. See also Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 195–219; and Barry-Shaw and Oja-Jay, Paved With Good Intentions.

49 Brouwer, Canada’s Global Villagers, 187–88.

50 Lewis Perinbam Memory Book, Perinbam Papers, vol. 20, file 21, LAC.

51 Ibid.

52 Richard Beattie in Lewis Perinbam Memory Book, Perinbam Papers, vol. 20, file 21, LAC. The phrase “disruptive innovation” comes from Nigel Martin, cited in Richard Harmston, email correspondence, 1 February 2017.

53 Ronald Leger in Lewis Perinbam Memory Book, Perinbam Papers, vol. 20, file 21, LAC.

54 Richard Harmston, email correspondence, 1 February 2017.

55 Sheila Batchelor in Lewis Perinbam Memory Book, Perinbam Papers, vol. 20, file 21, LAC.

56 Rebecca Tiessen, “Gender Equality and the ‘Two CIDAs’: Successes and Setbacks, 1976–2013,” in Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer, and David Black, eds., Rethinking Canadian Aid (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2014), 195–210.

57 Meeting of the CIDB, 7 March and 19 March 1973, RG 25, vol. 11788, file 38-1-CIDA-ALLOC, LAC.

58 Peter Hoffman to Romeo Maione re Trip to South America, 1 November 1978, RG 25, vol. 11796, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

59 W. J. Burnett to W. J. Jenkins, 14 March 1974, RG 25, vol. 11785, file 38-1-CIDA, LAC; Memorandum to the Interdepartmental Committee on Development Assistance, 24 March 1972, RG 25, vol. 11788, file 38-1-CIDA-ALLOC, LAC.

60 L. A. H. Smith to Barry Steers, 20 October 1971, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

61 Canadian High Commission in Nairobi to CIDA, 2 November 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

62 Interdepartmental Committee on Development Assistance, Summary of Discussion, 5 September 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

63 Notes for Remarks by Lewis Perinbam, 5 October 1976, CCIC Papers, vol. 10, file: NGO-CIDA Consultation 5–7 October 1976, LAC.

64 Interdepartmental Committee on Development Assistance, Summary of Discussion, 5 September 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

65 Memorandum to ECD, 7 February 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

66 Aubrey Morantz, Checklist of Issues in Our Relationship with CIDA, 13 August 1973, RG 25, vol. 11791, file 38-1-CIDA-EA, LAC.

67 Memorandum to ECD, 7 February 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

68 Jacques Roy to Perinbam, 19 February 1980, RG 25, vol. 11791, file 38-1-CIDA-EA, LAC.

69 L. A. H. Smith to Perinbam, 4 February 1975, RG 25, vol. 11795, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

70 Robert Carty, “Giving For Gain: Foreign Aid and CIDA,” in Ties that Bind: Canada and the Third World, ed. Richard Swift and Robert Clarke (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1982), 162.

71 Perinbam to L. A. H. Smith, 11 March 1975, RG 25, vol. 11795, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

72 Paul Gérin-Lajoie, “Rediscovering a Sense of Adventure,” Address to the Annual Meeting of the CCIC, 9 June 1972, UCCA Papers, vol. 83.018, file 4-4, LAC.

73 Memorandum to the Minister, 20 October 1971, RG 25, vol. 11784, file 38-1-CIDA, LAC.

74 Paul Gérin-Lajoie, Memorandum for the Minister, 2 November 1973, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

75 L. A. H. Smith, Memorandum on CIDA Initiative in Non-Governmental Organizations Programme, 16 June 1972, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

76 Klaus Goldschlag, Memorandum on the CIDA Initiative in Non-Governmental Organizations Programme, 26 June 1972, RG 25, vol. 11794, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC. The Local Initiatives Program was a 1970s federal program run by Manpower and Immigration ostensibly to address seasonal unemployment through programs that might also provide “community betterment.” Many of these projects, however, became centres of opposition to federal government programs such as urban renewal. See J. M. Keck, “Making Work: Federal Job Creation Policy In The 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1995).

77 B. Ward to M. Lapointe, 17 February 1976, CCIC Papers, vol. 11, file: NGO-CIDA Relations, LAC.

78 Draft Report, n.d., Andrew Brewin Papers, vol. 81, file 4: Development Parliamentary Sub-Committee on International Development 1969–70, LAC.

79 E. J. Bergbusch to Roger Wilson, 16 March 1976, RG 25, vol. 11795, file 38-1-CIDA-NGO, LAC.

80 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 451.

81 Keith Spicer, A Samaritan State? External Aid in Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 11.

82 Stephen Brown, “Canada’s Foreign Aid before and after CIDA: Not a Samaritan state,” International Journal 68, no. 3 (2013): 501–12; and Tiessen, “Gender Equality and the Two CIDAs.”

83 Engerman, “Development Politics and the Cold War,” 18. Emphasis mine.

84 Adam Chapnick, “Canada’s Aid Program: Still Struggling After Sixty Years,” Behind the Headlines 65, no. 3 (May 2008): 11.

85 Maurice Strong, “Message for the Lewis Perinbam Dinner,” 9 October 1991, Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC.

86 Some Hypotheses on CIDA Bilateral Funding of NGOs, September 1977, CCIC Papers, vol. 11, file: CIDA-NGO Relations, 1976-82, LAC. See also Barry-Shaw and Oja-Jay, Paved With Good Intentions.

87 See Clive Sanger, Half a Loaf: Canada’s Semi Role Among Developing Countries (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969). Talking Points for Marcel Masse, Perinbam Papers, vol. 6, file 24, LAC.