A Palestinian boy inspects the damage at an UNRWA school sheltering displaced people that was hit in an an overnight Israeli strike, in Gaza City, on July 5.Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Themrise Khan has spent over 30 years working in the foreign assistance and humanitarian aid sectors.
In the chaos of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the frenetic attempts by Canada’s new Liberal government to save a sinking economy, the country’s foreign aid budget has taken a back seat. That may be a good thing.
Canada’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) program has been subject to an intellectual beating over the last few years, as has the foreign-aid sector in general. Canada’s foreign assistance programs, while looking to “do good” in the world, have been facing increased scrutiny over a colonial mindset, for focusing too much on resource extraction, and for a lack of objective, third-party evidence that Canada’s foreign aid has contributed to promoting global equality and alleviating poverty.
Unlike our counterparts in the Global North, Canada still remains on the periphery of discussions regarding foreign-aid reform. But we cannot stay on the sidelines. At a time when the world is being forced to rethink its approach to trade, diplomacy and international relations, Canada must reconsider its role in international development assistance.
Canada’s ODA budget has hovered between $6- and $10-billion annually over the last 10 years, making Canada the sixth-largest OECD donor. Most of Canada’s ODA funding goes to developing countries and multilateral agencies supporting a range of sectors, including global health, agriculture, governance, civil society, energy and sustainability. For the last decade, these funds have been guided by Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), building on former prime minster Justin Trudeau’s commitment to gender equality. In that timeframe, we’ve witnessed several major geopolitical events, including COVID-19, the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine and a mounting crisis in the Middle East. And now, Donald Trump.
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Prime Minster Mark Carney has not laid out a specific plan for Canada’s foreign aid commitments since taking office, likely due to his preoccupation with battling a trade war. And rightly so. But if we are to recalibrate our domestic priorities in a changing global order, it also makes sense to re-evaluate our international development priorities. If the current government intends to maintain ODA as a policy priority, some important considerations should be kept in mind.
Firstly, a foreign aid review in light of the many of the accusations against the efficacy of ODA would be wise. Countries in the Global South have been making increasingly louder calls for greater autonomy, and so a review must factor in how countries can be less dependent on ODA, not more, and how Canada can support that outcome. The review would need to carefully study documented examples of colonialism and imperialism in ODA structures and ascertain Canada’s own role in perpetuating these problems through its programming. This should include some recent epic fails in Canada’s response to global crises – for example, fleeing Afghanistan and leaving its people stranded after decades of support, and the balance (and/or lack thereof) of support for Ukraine while a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in Gaza.
Secondly, Canada has been belting out several regional strategies over the last three years, including the Indo-Pacific Strategy (2022), an Arctic Foreign Policy (2024) and an Africa Strategy (2025). While having regional focus is an effective way to prioritize, these strategies cannot conflate foreign policy with foreign aid anymore. This is one of the failings of ODA – imbibing it as a tool of foreign policy or “soft power.” Foreign policies are about political, not human priorities. Canada needs to carefully study how we can segregate foreign policy and foreign aid, so political decisions in one area do not influence policy directions in the other.
Lastly, the latest Statistical Report on International Assistance for 2023-24 places Canada’s humanitarian aid contribution at roughly 7 per cent of its total ODA spending. Humanitarian assistance is in crisis globally, with human displacement, wars and climate disasters all on the rise, and not enough infrastructure or funding to respond to their consequences. A shift for Canada to consider would be to gradually move ODA funding away from “development” and toward humanitarian assistance. We can advocate for Global South countries to partner with us in building their plans and priorities for the future, with a focus on moving them away from aid dependency, which would eventually free up more funding to respond to humanitarian disasters more quickly.
Canada has the opportunity to redesign its ODA policy by working to end wars, aid in humanitarian endeavours, and protect the lives of those at risk. We need to redefine and prioritize risk, whether political, economic or human. If we don’t, then our ODA priorities will continue down a path of linking geopolitics with people’s lives, and making no positive impact at all. It’s time for Canada to divorce its foreign aid from politics, and focus on people and their well-being instead.