Part 1

Today, foreign aid and official development assistance (ODA) are solid features of the landscape of international relations. Most developed countries—and a growing number of less developed countries—have a ministry or agency devoted to development assistance, surrounded by networks of advocates and civil society partners. The United Nations (UN) employs a top-level body devoted solely to humanitarian relief, with a budget of US$240 million, alongside a UN Development Programme with a budget of US$5 billion.1 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone spends just over $3 billion annually on development assistance.2 Contemporary foreign aid is big business.

All this marks a major departure from aid’s tentative and low-budget beginnings. Vast sums flowed for European postwar reconstruction, and global governments would soon come to see the need for similar, if smaller, efforts in the Global South. Yet when the UN launched its program to deliver technical assistance to the world’s most underdeveloped countries in 1946, it was entering largely uncharted territory. Canadian diplomats and cabinet ministers were understandably nervous about this new global challenge, but they signed on to the expanded UN program soon after its formation in 1949, as well as a larger Commonwealth aid program mandated to deliver both technical and capital assistance, the Colombo Plan, in early 1951. In New York and Ottawa questions abounded: What were the purposes of aid? Who would give it? Who would get it? How would it be distributed? Were strings attached? Understanding, debating, and gradually answering these questions would preoccupy the first generation of Canadian aid policy makers. Indeed, similar questions remain at the heart of contemporary considerations about aid.

The answers reached in the 1950s were worked out through dialogue and experience. Pioneering aid bureaucrats operated experimentally, with a wide degree of freedom of action. In 1950, there were few precedents or rules, no bureaucratic structures or standard operating procedures. Instead, as our first three chapters show, policy makers in Canada, at the UN, and in the Global South shaped their new work through discussion and a messy process of trial and error that we are only beginning to understand as the archival record is unearthed and absorbed.

The messy and innovative 1950s are described in three chapters that draw on newly accessed archival sources in Ottawa, New York, and New Delhi. Chapter 1 examines the bilateral aid relationship between Canada and its major aid partner, India. India was the top recipient of Colombo Plan funds, and Canada in the early years was one of the plan’s three largest donors, along with the United States and the United Kingdom.3 Canada and India aimed in this period to develop a “special relationship,” with aid cooperation a key pillar. As Jill Campbell-Miller explains, Indian priorities changed Canadian intentions and shaped the development of Canada’s overall aid policy in this “golden” decade. Canada was not simply a donor setting the terms of its gift: its aid was affected by the recipient government, and that in turn shaped Canadian policy toward South and Southeast Asia as a whole.

The effects can be seen in Canada’s emerging aid bureaucracy, outlined in Chapter 2. Similarly, the precise nature and form of Canada’s aid owed much to its first three administrators, Tom Brook, Nik Cavell, and Orville Ault. Decisions about how Canadian aid was administered and who did that work shaped a bureaucratic culture—freewheeling, independent, and ambitious—that had long-term consequences for Canada’s aid project in the decades that followed. The swashbuckling figure of R. G. “Nik” Cavell symbolized this decade of experimentation, as Cavell preached the gospel of aid in Canada and trotted around Asia trying to put it into practice. Cavell’s stops in India (where he had previous experience in British imperial days) and elsewhere forced recipient priorities onto Ottawa’s agenda.

In contrast to the first two chapters and their stress on the way Canadian aid policy was formed within the Commonwealth, Chapter 3 shows Canada moving within circles centred on the United Nations, another key arena for postwar Canadian foreign policy. Canada saw its goals increasingly well-served by the channel of UN technical assistance, directed by Canadian official Hugh Keenleyside. His forceful style and social democratic beliefs helped shape the UN’s approach to technical assistance, giving it a working ideology distinct from that favoured by its dominant capitalist American and communist Soviet sponsors and one likely to appeal to Canadian sensitivities. As David Webster outlines, UN aid priorities would affect aspects of Canadian aid policy and reinforce public support for aid within Canadian civil society.

The 1950s were formative in many ways. Among those, as these chapters illustrate, was a dynamic interplay between donor and recipient that aimed to transform the relationship into one of partnership, not just giving and receiving. Even as Canadian aid was formed within UN and Commonwealth contexts, it was also affected by Southern calls for a different type of development. This in turn affected Canada’s overall relations with the Global South.

Notes

1 See http://www.unocha.org/about-us/funding; http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/funding/funding-channels.html.

2 See https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/sep/13/bill-gates-foundation-dont-expect-pick-up-the-bill-for-sweeping-aid-cuts-trump.

3 Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004), 82.