National Post (National Edition)
If Canada is ‘back,’ why aren’t we helping?
Canada is back, my friends” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously declared at the Paris Climate Summit back in November, 2015, just weeks after having routed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in a federal election campaign that ended the Liberal Party’s 10-year interregnum on the Opposition benches in Ottawa. “We’re here to help.”
A year later, Trudeau struck the same triumphalist tone in his maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, concluding with almost exactly the same line: “We’re Canadian. And we’re here to help.”
As things have turned out, Canada is indeed back again, and we’re helping the UN meet its lofty obligations where it really matters, with pretty much the same gusto as Canadian governments have always managed to muster. Which really isn’t all that much.
By 2014, in the final throes of the five-year spending freeze Prime Minister Stephen Harper had imposed on his ministers in response to the global financial meltdown’s challenge to solvency and good government, Canada’s overall foreign aid spending had shrunk to about 0.24 per cent of gross national income.
By last week, when the Trudeau government unveiled its ambitious $650 million International Women’s Day foreign aid reorientation to the purpose of sexual and reproductive health rights, much attention was focused on the new strategy’s dedication to fighting for abortion-rights, worldwide. It was almost a footnote, as the New Democrats’ Hélène Laverdière pointed out, that Canada’s overall foreign aid spending had again fallen to 0.26 per cent of gross national income.
Still, Trudeau’s Liberals were back doing what Harper’s Conservatives had done with their Muskoka Initiative, a far-reaching, $3.5 billion initiative aimed at reducing infant mortality and improving maternal health. The initiative was a keystone of Harper’s foreign policy. Trudeau’s initiative will keep faith with it in the three years that remain in the Muskoka spending pledge.
That’s a good thing, although a downside to Harper’s approach was that he tended to pay for these sorts of things from unallocated foreign aid funds. And, surprise, surprise, Trudeau’s International Women’s Day pledge will be financed from “unallocated funds” in Canada’s foreign aid budget, which, since 1970, is supposed to amount to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, which Canada has never come close to meeting.
It may be neither a good nor a bad thing that when you add it all up over the years, in any number of the ways Canada makes its presence known in the world, there’s not really much change at all between governments, no matter who’s got the Parliamentary majority. It’s mostly about tone, and at the moment it’s mostly because Trudeau’s youthfully exuberant brand is so radically different from the fusty-accountant image that Harper projected that it’s more obvious than usual that the Liberal-Conservative “world stage” distinctions bear differences between them that really don’t amount to all that much. Not in the long run, or in the short run between elections.
Trudeau was greeted with standing ovations at the Paris climate summit two years ago, but he was cheered just as enthusiastically last week at a gathering of 1,200 oil company executives and other energy industry leaders in Houston, Texas. As one would expect, there was much brow-furrowing among environmentalists when they heard what Trudeau had told the Houston gathering: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” How Trudeau’ pipeline-booster approach to Canada’s oil and gas sector will be made to square with the greenhouse gas targets Trudeau set in Paris is very much an open question.
The key thing that determines Canada’s place in the world is not Canada, but the world, and the world is suddenly a more dangerous place than it was during the early years of Harper’s Conservative majority government. The Syrian catastrophe — a damning testament to the United Nations’ irrelevance (Harper was certainly right on that point) — thanks to the Obama administration’s retreat from the world, and to Vladimir Putin’s chokehold on the UN Security Council, quickly erupted into the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
The “world stage” has become even more of a bedlam since the euphoria of Trudeau’s supporters, following the Liberals’ 2015 election victory, induced fits of rapture and a constant hum of touching sentimentality about the sure bet that Canada would at last resume its rightful place as a junior partner in the nonveto cheap seats around the Security Council table.
But last November’s elevation of the populist demagogue-weirdo Donald Trump to the office of president of the United States has not only left Americans reeling in a polarized dystopia. The sturdiest institutions in Washington D.C. are lurching from paralysis to psychosis and back again with every news cycle. The nation state formerly known as “the world’s last great superpower” is rapidly losing any influence in global affairs, and any day now the United States may be wholly absent without leave.
The State Department is looking at cuts of up to 37 per cent of its budget and all its foreign aid budgets. Departmental accountants have been told to find ways to lop off 50 per cent of the American contributions to key UN programs. This couldn’t be happening at a worse possible moment.
“Already, at the beginning of the year, we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations,” the UN’s humanitarian chief, Stephen O’Brien, told reporters last week. “Now, more than 20 million people across four countries face starvation and famine.” Without global leadership and immediate international co-ordination, “people will simply starve to death,” O’Brien said, “and many more will suffer and die from disease.”
The worst crises, apart from Syria, are now unfolding in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria. Said O’Brien: “We need $4.4 billion by July.” And there’s no telling where the money is going to come from. In Yemen, 18.8 million people are in need of aid, and seven million of those people are already hungry and do not know where their next meal is going to come from.
If Canada is back, whatever that might mean, and if Canada is here to help, then we’re going to have to do a great deal more than anyone in the Liberals, the Conservatives or the New Democrats imagined that we’d need to. It’s time Canada started actually helping.
THE WORLD IS SUDDENLY A MORE DANGEROUS PLACE THAN IT WAS UNDER HARPER.