It’s wrong to dismiss Trudeau’s ‘feminist’ foreign aid.

It is tempting to dismiss the “feminist” foreign aid makeover outlined by International Development Minister MarieClaude Bibeau last Friday as worldstage virtue signalling, or a sop to Justin Trudeau’s rather too fervent foreign admirers, or a shell- game exercise in political cynicism and brand-management opportunism.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spend less on foreign aid than Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did. We’re spending about half what we should be to match G7 foreign- aid levels. The defence budget just got $ 62 billion over 20 years. All true, or at least close enough to true by the low standards of political drama queening. It’s tempting to whinge like this, but it’s facile and wrong-headed.

The rationale underlying “Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy” is that the smartest and best way to build a more peaceful and prosperous world is to fight for the empowerment of women. The idea is that by advancing gender equality, you directly tackle the primary cause of global poverty and instability: the inequality and economic exclusion of women.

The overwhelming preponderance of hard evidence from vast volumes of social and economic data shows that this is an unimpeachable proposition. The emancipation of women is the most important freedom struggle in human history.

While Trudeau may not be doing either himself, the Liberal brand, or the cause of feminism any favours by courting the affections of corporate landlady Ivanka Trump (whose fashion line is produced by the exertions of Chinese and Indonesian sweatshop labour), Trudeau’s Liberals are nevertheless getting the basics right.

The plan Bibeau outlined in fairly exhausting detail would ensure that within five years, 15 per cent of Canada’s bilateral development assistance will specifically target gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Bibeau calls this a “dramatic shift” in Canada’s international development focus, and it is. Across the gamut of Global Affairs Canada programs, 80 per cent of spending will hinge on the contribution the outlays make to this objective. Within five years, “at least 95 per cent of Canada’s bilateral international development assistance investments will either target or integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.”

You could say that it is disingenuous of the Liberals to say the Conservatives set aside no more than two per cent for gender equality — that estimate doesn’t fairly account for the $ 3 billion in commitments Stephen Harper’s government made to an innovative, private- public partnership aimed at maternal, newborn and child health, worldwide. Similarly, just one focus of Global Affairs’ attention will be the scourge of child marriage, forced marriage and female genital mutilation, and the eradication of those customs and practices would likely have been missing from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals without the efforts of the Harper government. An estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to genital mutilation in 30 UN member states that persist in a barbaric contempt for the rights of women.

The idea that the emancipation of women should be understood as both a critical poverty- reduction objective and a national security matter is not exactly new. President George W. Bush described women’s equality as one of the “non-negotiable demands of human dignity,” and while she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton established women’s equality as a key American foreign-policy and national-security concern. Before the Liberals were elected in 2015, the feminist foreign- policy mantle had already been passed to Sweden, where Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom had committed to establishing gender equality as the driving force behind Swedish foreign policy.

You could say that without a separate budget of its own, there’s little of substance to the Liberals’ foreign- aid feminism, but that would be to miss the point. Feminism is not intended as an add- on in the Global Affairs budget. It’s intended to be the heart of the entire exercise. International development funding is not expected to remain at 2015-2016 levels, and in any case, last March, Trudeau announced the outlay of $ 650 million over three years to augment the previous Conservative government’s Muskoka initiative on international sexual and reproductive health programs. Trudeau also committed $ 20 million to a European initiative aimed at filling in the shortfall created by U. S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U. S. funds for projects related to abortion services.

What the Trudeau government is proposing is not frivolous. Two years ago, the McKinsey Global Institute produced a groundbreaking study reckoning that $ 12 trillion could be added to the world’s GDP by advancing the cause of women’s equality. The McKinsey study built on the work of numerous scholars that shows how women’s equality is the most significant predictor of a country’s stability. “In fact, the very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethnoreligious identity,” Valerie Hudson, lead author of the 2012 volume Sex and World Peace, observes. “The best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated.”

The wider the gender gap, the more likely a country is to be embroiled in civil war, social violence and inter-state aggression.

“On issues of national health, economic growth, corruption, and social welfare, the best predictors are also those that reflect the situation of women,” Hudson writes. “What happens to women affects the security, stability, prosperity, bellicosity, corruption, health, regime type, and ( yes) the power of the state. The days when one could claim that the situation of women had nothing to do with matters of national or international security are, frankly, over.” Or at least those days should be over.

The Trudeau government’s intention to integrate the cause of the emancipation of women worldwide with defence policy, foreign policy and international- development policy is to be applauded. What we’ll want to keep an eye on is how serious Trudeau’s Liberals remain about this, how effective the government is in this purpose, and how cost-effective its programs are.

But credit where it’s due. Justin Trudeau has got the basics right.

THE DEFENCE BUDGET JUST GOT $62 BILLION OVER 20 YEARS.