Sudanese families displaced from El-Fasher reach out as aid workers distribute food supplies at the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, in Sudan's Northern State, on Nov. 16.Marwan Ali/The Associated Press
Themrise Khan has spent more than 30 years working in the foreign assistance and humanitarian aid sectors.
The recent federal budget clearly shows that Prime Minister Mark Carney doesn’t have a soft spot for foreign aid or gender equality.
But here’s the thing. I’m from a country that has been at the receiving end of foreign aid since the 1950s. I’ve worked three decades in the sector there, and Mr. Carney has a point – albeit irritably made.
Canadian foreign aid, which is facing a $2.7-billion cut over three years, has always been an anomaly. Neither charity nor investment, it was originally created to rebuild a postwar Europe and support post-colonial countries. It has since morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry, funded by the United Nations contribution rule of 0.7 per cent of gross national income. The fact that many countries, including Canada, haven’t ever managed to contribute that, makes the sector even murkier.
Foreign aid has led to a world of contradictions, power imbalances and geopolitical manoeuvring. It has created the dependency of low-income nations on the West – identified since the 1970s – who rely on foreign aid to supplement weak social-service provision. It has created an aid industrial complex of non-governmental organizations, humanitarian aid and multilateral agencies, all of which sit in the West and dominate the flow of funds. A decrease in foreign aid is as much a decrease in their existence as it is for the causes they represent.
And then there is the Trudeau government’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), now no longer a policy for this Liberal government. As much as equality of all genders is imperative for human development, the FIAP was itself an anomaly wherein “feminism,” which is interpreted differently across multiple contexts, was largely defined by Canada, if at all. One can debate the success of the FIAP over the past decade, but foreign aid cannot be packaged around one issue, be it feminism, climate, or even defence. It defeats the purpose of human development.
What Canada’s budget cuts have loosely demonstrated is that foreign aid in any form has never actually listened to the needs of its recipients: the people of the Global South. It is assumed that the world’s poor need our help and that foreign aid is the most appropriate tool. But who actually made this decision? Indeed, after the decimation of USAID by the Trump administration earlier this year, many Global South development practitioners see this as a way to achieve self-reliance in finally deciding what matters to them. And the Global South has never really been physically around the table when it comes to deciding what Canada’s foreign aid should or should not do.
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The issue here is not that Canada is leaving behind millions of impoverished lives. It is how much autonomy foreign aid has given those lives. Autonomy in the aid sector depends on who has more political and financial power, and that has always been the donor.
Canada’s budget cuts also highlight the long-standing tension in the aid-versus-trade argument: policy-makers have long debated over whether trade, or foreign aid, lead to better outcomes for economic and social development in low-income countries. Currently, despite the growing need for global peace, equality and rights, the trade argument is winning in a Canadian context because of the need for self-reliance. Foreign aid, ironically, was never designed to create self-reliance within recipient countries. So if Canada can pivot toward self-reliance in divesting from its dependency on the United States, then Global South countries can – and should – use the same argument for divesting from foreign aid.
Canadian aid organizations, which themselves depend on Canadian foreign aid – one of the sector’s many contradictions – have widely condemned the cuts. Undoubtedly, there will be further condemnation as the FIAP is dismantled. And admittedly, some of the cuts do defy logic. For instance, there is no reason for Canada to reduce funding to multilateral global health initiatives. In the wake of COVID-19, if anything, this is where Canada should be spending more.
But aside from this head-scratcher, the cuts to foreign aid and the shift away from a gender-based policy should not be seen as a detriment to the lives of those in low-income countries. It should, in fact, be seen as an opportunity for these countries to focus on self-reliance – to build their economy and society on their own terms. It is a wake-up call that says they cannot and should not rely on foreign aid indefinitely. And Canada‘s aid institutions need to understand the role they have played in perpetuating this indefinite need for aid.
Mr. Carney’s decision is clearly related to defence, trade and investment. But it’s high time we realize foreign aid should not be about Canada’s leadership on the global stage. It should be about others leading the way.