Excellent article in The Walrus on Canada’s rather lackluster international performance. Quite a large section is dedicated to questions around Canada’s aid budget and its rather particular disbursement with competing interests between reducing poverty and investing in long-term regional trade.
The second defining feature of Canada, its multiculturalism, may be contributing to one of the most frequently criticized aspects of our foreign policy: our fragmented approach to development assistance. Influenced in part by the need to placate various diaspora and interest groups, Canada has developed one of the world’s most dispersed aid budgets. To illustrate, compare Canada and the Netherlands, each of which gave about 2 percent of the world’s direct aid in 2008. While the Netherlands donated to sixty-five countries, Canada spread its contribution among more than a hundred recipients. Such a spread makes it difficult to develop local knowledge and contacts, and so to use aid dollars effectively. Small-scale programming also places a heavy coordination and cost burden on the very countries we are trying to help, and increases the costs and management requirements for Canada. And the contribution we make is often so tiny that it cannot make a difference in even the poorest countries. Take Angola, which received 0.1 percent of its aid from Canada in 2008, essentially little more than a rounding error from both countries’ perspectives. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that during that year, sixty-seven of Canada’s 109 aid relationships were similarly futile — a greater number and higher ratio of “non-significant” relationships than for any other member.