Scheer’s plan to cut foreign aid is baffling

We can improve lives in Canada and abroad

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer played something of a campaign wild card this week by pledging to slash foreign aid by 25 per cent, cutting off “middle- and upper-income countries as well as hostile regimes,” and redistributing the dough to Canadians in the form of various tax cuts and benefits. It’s a very difficult policy to understand, even as a populist bauble.

Except in Liberal mythopoeia, Canada is not especially known for its generosity on the world stage to begin with: In 2017, according to OECD figures, Sweden spent four times as much as we did on official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI); the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands each spent almost three times as much.

Conservatives haven’t historically been any more miserly than Liberals — nor would you expect them to be, concerned as they tend to be with Canada pulling its weight on the international stage. And while Scheer is packaging it as a rebuke to Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy, it doesn’t really work. The Conservatives are using a UN Human Development Index score of 0.6 as their cut-off point for recipient countries. But in most years between 2006 and 2018, under Conservative and Liberal governments alike, there have been two or three recipient countries in the top 10 with HDI scores above 0.6 — countries like Iraq, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and India. None seem like outrageous destinations for Canadian aid money.

Also, no one can figure out how all this aid to the unworthy adds up to a claimed $2.2 billion. At his press conference, Scheer mentioned “countries like Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, China, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Turkey” as undeserving of our assistance. But Canada’s aid to those countries in 2018 added up to less than $30 million.

A frustrating number of Canadians seem to believe that foreign aid is useless, and no doubt this is an appeal to that sentiment. But the UN HDI itself — a credible collection of socioeconomic metrics like income, education, life expectancy, security, gender equality and mobility — puts the lie to that.

In 1990, Bangladesh scored 0.39; not even 30 years later it’s at 0.61, in danger of being cut off by a Scheer government. Cambodia, Myanmar, Uganda, Guinea, Mali and Niger have seen even more spectacular growth over that time — as has Rwanda, even while enduring one of history’s most monstrous genocides. With an HDI score of 0.44, Mozambique is still one of the poorer countries in Africa, but in 1990 it was 0.21. That kind of score simply doesn’t exist anymore — the worst in 2017 was 0.35.

This is a gigantic ongoing global success story, basically, and it didn’t happen all by itself. Any party leader who wants to divest Canada from that success story by 25 per cent ought to face some tough questions. One would be this: Instead of rolling all this money into a tax cut, why not invest it in our own human development crisis?

Last week APTN reported that between 2013 and 2017, 72 “Indigenous children connected to child welfare (agencies)” died in Northern Ontario. It’s difficult to overstate how staggering that ought to be. My back-ofa-napkin math, based on the 2016 census, suggests we’re talking about an annual mortality rate approaching 50 per 100,000 Indigenous children — and that’s just among children who have been in contact with government agencies that are supposed to help them!

To put that in perspective, the overall mortality rate among Canadian children aged 1-14 in 2017 was 11.2 per 100,000; for those aged 1519, 35.6. And the real numbers of Indigenous children dying — the majority of them by suicide — is likely considerably higher. APTN reporter Kenneth Jackson and his colleagues have faced resistance at every turn trying to unearth even the most basic information.

I have said before that if children were killing themselves in our big cities at the rate they are on the worst-off First Nations, there would be nothing else in the newspaper. Broadly speaking, that’s a symptom of Indigenous Canadians’ human development indicators lagging far, far behind non-Indigenous ones.

Those indicators are by and large improving — many, particularly educational achievement, dramatically so. But that’s all the more reason to ramp up our efforts. The APTN story notes that “almost half of the deaths … happened in the two years it took … Trudeau to respond to multiple orders made by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that … found Canada guilty of purposely underfunding on-reserve child welfare.” Asked about it last week, the prime minister rattled off some boilerplate answer about there being much more work to do.

He’s not wrong. And Canada is rich enough that we should be able to improve Canadians’ lives and other people’s lives around the world at the same time. But we’re not — not nearly quickly enough, anyway. “Screw foreigners, let’s help our own people” isn’t a message I’m predisposed to appreciating. But I’ll listen to any plan to tackle our greatest national shame on a war footing, as opposed to incrementally. Scheer’s isn’t it, needless to say.

THIS IS A GIGANTIC ONGOING GLOBAL SUCCESS STORY.