Foreign aid money slashed
Canada’s spending on international poverty cut by 7% over 3 years
To Mark Fried, the prospect of another year under the federal government’s frozen foreign aid budget looked worrisome for both Canadian aid agencies and their impoverished recipients abroad.
But when the Oxfam Canada policy coordinator learned of the Conservatives’ plan to slash millions of dollars from the already-choked aid budget over the next several years, he was near speechless.
“I’m sad and disappointed. Apparently aid is not a priority,” said Fried, 58, who has worked in the field for 35 years. “They’re pennywise and pound-foolish.”
International assistance will shrink by more than 7 per cent by 2014-15 — a $377 million slice from Canada’s current $5.16 billion aid budget. That cut is part of a plan “improve the effectiveness of Canada’s aid by strengthening its focus, improving efficiency and increas- ing accountability,” according to the federal budget document.
The Canadian International Development Agency, the government agency that manages foreign aid programs in developing countries and supports Canadian aid organizations, will bear the brunt of the shrinking aid envelope. CIDA’S budget will be cut by $319.2 million by 2014-15.
For Fried, whose agency provides humanitarian and emergency help in developing countries, the government’s cost-cutting measures mean that CIDA will have reduced capacity to coordinate humanitarian projects and that fewer Canadian dollars will be sent abroad to communities in need.
“Poor people shouldn’t have to pay the cost of putting our fiscal house in order,” he said, adding that the government’s plan to reduce aid was reminiscent of the 1990s, when CIDA’S budget was gutted.
“CIDA has not recovered from that yet and now they want to cut back personnel even further. It doesn’t bode well for efficient and effective funding of Canada’s aid program,” Fried said.
The foreign aid budget has been set at $5.16 billion since 2010, when the government ended nearly a decade of annual 8 per cent increases by announcing a four-year freeze. In that time, Canada’s aid spending has slipped from 0.34 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product to an estimated 0.29 per cent this year — a far cry from our longstanding commitment to reach the United Nations’ aid target of 0.7 per cent of GDP. Days before the federal budget was released, Oxfam — which got $10 million of its $23 million budget from the government in 2010 — had called on the Conservatives to remove the spending cap and increase aid funding by 8 per cent again. But that call was rebuffed. With these planned aid cuts, Fried said Canada’s rank among international aid donor countries will continue to plummet — and so too will Canada’s reputation among its global trading partners and fellow aid donors, he said. “Maybe this government has not quite realized that we can’t be fairweather friends when times are tough,” he said. “You have to stick by your friends.” With files from Joanna Smith