Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you for inviting me to appear before your committee. It is an honour for me to provide you with some of our observations on Bill C-293.
There are four basic points I would like to make today about the potential implications of draft Bill C-293. Under each point I will try to highlight for you the complications that could arise, depending on the final version of the bill, and complications that members may not have intended or have not yet had a chance to discuss or consider among yourselves.
First of all, in speaking about the “competent minister,” the bill needs to be sensitive to the diverse accountabilities involved in spending Canada's official development assistance—ODA, the shorthand term I'll use. The term “ODA” is a policy tool, negotiated among members of the OECD's development assistance committee to assist them in determining what kinds of international assistance should be counted as aid, and to give them, therefore, a basis for comparison of country-by-country aid statistics. It is not a definition that is established by legal statute.
For more than twenty years, and under different Governments, at least three different ministerial portfolios have been accountable for expenditure of Canadian ODA: the Minister of International Co-operation, who is responsible for the majority but not the totality of Canadian aid, through the Canadian International Development Agency; the Minister of Finance, who is responsible for Canada’s participation in the Bretton Woods institutions, the world’s largest providers of multilateral ODA; and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is responsible for payment of most of Canada’s assessed contributions to international organizations, a percentage of which is counted as ODA; and increasingly various kinds of peace- and security-related development assistance, some of which also count as ODA.
While the amounts of ODA allocated to each of these three portfolios that I've just referred to will vary over time, this basic division of labour between ministers is likely to endure. Thus, there is no one minister at present, or likely to be in the future, with an overarching responsibility for the management of all Canadian official development assistance.
In addition, a significant percentage of Canada’s ODA flows, currently about 3% or $130 million, are disbursed by the International Development Research Centre, or IDRC. While IDRC reports to Parliament through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, it is an autonomous decision-making body accountable to its independent board, as constituted by the IDRC Act. As IDRC has pointed out in its own written submission to this committee, there is a risk that Bill C-293 may conflict with these important provisions of the IDRC Act.
My second point is that committee members may wish to examine more carefully the implications of the language relating to human rights in the draft bill in paragraph 4(1)(c), specifically the call for Canadian ODA to be “consistent with Canada's international human rights obligations”. I specifically wish to focus your attention on the implications of the word “obligations” in this context.
Canada's human rights obligations derive from the international human rights treaties and conventions we have signed and ratified. These treaty obligations relate to the promotion and protection of human rights by the Government of Canada within the jurisdiction of Canada. Thus, the current reference to Canada's human rights obligations would have the effect of focusing the draft bill on the human rights of Canadians. It does not underline the role of ODA in promoting and protecting human rights internationally. Language to the effect that ODA activities should be “consistent with international human rights standards” would be in line with Canada's policy to promote and protect human rights internationally. Canada uses various review mechanisms, as specified by the human rights conventions that we have signed, to hold other governments accountable for their obligations for the human rights of their citizens. There is a risk that the reference to “Canada’s human rights obligations” in the bill might go beyond current state-to-state obligations that exist in international human rights law. It could also implicitly reduce the emphasis on recipient countries’ obligations towards their own citizens.
Thirdly, and turning to the specific responsibilities of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, it's important to point out that the poverty reduction test proposed in the act could affect the government's ability to fund core activities of a number of international organizations. That is because Canada's assessed contributions to different international organizations can, in varying degree, be counted as ODA, ranging from--and I'll give you a few examples--3% of our contribution for the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, to 18% for the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, to 80% for the World Health Organization, and 100% for the Organization of American States, OAS.
I picked those to give you a sense of the range of the organizations. Those percentages, by the way, apply to all donor countries that claim official development assistance as part of their contributions.
The objectives of these organizations are varied, hence the different percentages of the contributions that can be counted as ODA. Canada is, of course, only one country among many that belongs to each of these organizations, and the programs and priorities of these international organizations are determined by their entire membership. Thus, the committee may wish to avoid asking the minister responsible for these contributions to certify that each of these international organizations observe a Canadian-legislated standard for how it spends the ODA portion of its budget.
My final and most important point reflects on how tightly and how precisely the committee, and in future a government bound by the act, would wish to hold Canadian ODA expenditures to the goal of reducing poverty. This is a narrower focus for Canadian ODA than the OECD definition, which defines the goal of ODA as “promoting the economic development and welfare of developing countries”.
Much of Canadian development assistance contributes to the goal of poverty reduction in developing countries, but some of it does so only indirectly and over a longer period of time, through such means as increasing citizen security, encouraging better governance, improving policies and policy-making capacity, and promoting respect for human rights.
The Department of Foreign Affairs, in particular through the human security program and the global peace and security fund, spends ODA for all the purposes I have mentioned.
I'll give you some examples from the last fiscal year of program spending, which has counted as official development assistance spent by the Department of Foreign Affairs. This could include mine action and education programs, or mine awareness programs; the deployment of corrections training officers to Côte d'Ivoire; the purchase and transfer of a secure e-mail system to improve international criminal justice cooperation in the Americas; witness protection training in Brazil; seminars on crime scene investigations in Central America; assistance in border management for the Palestinian Authority; human rights training in Indonesia; and support for the Colombian peace process.
Examples of potential funding for this current fiscal year from the Department of Foreign Affairs include financial support for the peace talks in south Sudan; support for prison reforms; gang member rehabilitation; the deployment of corrections officers and anti-money laundering activities in Haiti; and support for civilian peacekeeping missions via the RCMP.
While an indirect connection can be drawn between each of these activities and poverty reduction, a direct connection cannot be made in each and every case. If these kinds of programs and projects continue to be deemed worthwhile by Parliament, it would be unfortunate if they had to be terminated in order to comply with a strict interpretation of a poverty focus for Canadian development assistance.
Depending on how strictly the poverty focus for Canadian development assistance is interpreted, the government could be placed in the awkward position of, on the one hand, being expected to report these expenditures to the OECD as official development assistance, while on the other hand not being able to report them to Parliament as development assistance because they do not meet all the legal requirements of this act.
To conclude, I'd like to repeat what all G-8 leaders highlighted at their summit this past July in St. Petersburg, and I'm quoting now from the declaration:
Multilateral and regional organizations and states have focused significant resources on developing new tools for S&R in recent years. Individual states are trying to make better use of their national resources by integrating defense, development and diplomatic capabilities in support of joint planning and strategy for stabilization and reconstruction.
This approach has been welcomed and encouraged by the development assistance committee of the OECD, to which Canada belongs. The OECD currently has important programs under way to harmonize donor best practices in fragile states, to better understand and integrate security system reforms into development programs and to clarify how ODA in these contexts is both defined and applied by donors.
We're proud to say that Canada has been at the forefront of these activities designed to increase the coherence and transparency of donor activities in support of international peace and security.
Thank you for your time and your patience.
