Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I will be speaking to you in English, but if you'd like to ask me any questions or make any comments in French, it will be my pleasure to respond to you in the official language of your choice.
Countries like Canada provide aid to foreign countries for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we seek to alleviate poverty overseas, sometimes we want to help contribute to some global public good, sometimes we want to win friends and influence people abroad, and sometimes we contribute funding just so that we can have a seat at the table and know what's going on in that part of the world. Overarching all of these objectives is, of course, a concern that public funds should be spent wisely, effectively, and honestly.
Sometimes these various objectives come into conflict with each other. We saw an example of that under the last government, when the policy of focusing our aid on fewer countries in the name of greater aid effectiveness came into conflict with our objective of winning enough friends and influencing people to get them to vote us onto the UN Security Council.
The idea that Canada's aid should be focused on fewer recipient countries is rooted in the objective of aid effectiveness. The idea of greater country focus is, as my colleague Stephen Brown has said, an old one. Indeed, I suspect I was invited here today because over a decade ago I wrote an article on this, and I entitled my article “Focus-pocus?” I have long been, and continue to be, a sceptic on country focus as a way of increasing aid effectiveness.
Focusing aid on fewer countries makes intuitive sense, and that's why the idea became and has stayed popular in policy and media circles. Working in fewer countries means that we have fewer overhead costs for each country program. If we work in fewer countries, we get to know their problems better and can work more effectively with them to solve their problems, or so the argument goes.
Why, then, do I remain a sceptic about the benefits of country focus as a way of increasing the effectiveness of Canada's aid program?
Well, first of all, I know of no evidence whatsoever to prove the assertion that working in fewer countries increases a given aid program's effectiveness—not for Canada, not for any other country. I'm not even aware of any attempt to construct a measure of aid effectiveness for bilateral programs that could then be correlated with a measure of country focus. While country focus may make intuitive sense, the lack of concrete evidence to support the notion is absolutely striking. The idea that aiding fewer countries will make Canada's aid program more effective is faith-based policy-making, not evidence-based policy-making.
The most focused bilateral aid program in the world, as far as I know, is the Belgian development cooperation group. Historically, well over half of Belgium's aid has gone to a single recipient country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Without wishing any disrespect to my Belgian friends and colleagues, I know of no one who will tell you that Belgium's is the best bilateral aid program in the world, or even close to it.
If Canada did focus its aid on fewer countries in the name of aid effectiveness, would that be enough? Would Canada's aid suddenly become more effective if we gave it to fewer countries? It might, but if and only if Canada did other things to increase its aid effectiveness.
I have argued before this committee in the past that the first step in aid effectiveness should be a fundamental rethink of the tsunami of bureaucratic rules, oversight, and risk- and results-based management procedures that have engulfed our good public servants in recent years under governments of all political stripes in the name of accountability.
I hasten to add, lest I be accused of being partisan, that I cannot recall any opposition party denouncing this tendency either.
Moreover, the logic of country focus tells us that our bilateral aid program would be more effective because we would be specializing on fewer countries and would get to know these fewer countries better, but that logic, if we really followed it—and we haven't, as my colleague has just shown, with all the flipping in and out of that list—would impel us to redesign Global Affairs Canada's whole system of recruitment, training, career development, and rotation. At the risk of oversimplifying somewhat, our current system values generalists, not country or regional experts. Taking country focus seriously would imply a generation-long attention span by politicians and senior public officials to set a list of focus countries, and then follow that up with a systematic cultivation of deep expertise on individual countries, including fluency in local vernacular languages.
I cannot end without making one final comment on the whole issue of country focus in our bilateral aid program. That comment is to say that country focus is a very 20th century way of looking at things. It assumes that bilateral aid and bilateral co-operation with independent states is at the heart of the aid and international co-operation business. While that might have been the case 30 or 40 years ago, it is no longer the case.
Today the most interesting and important challenges in international development and international co-operation all cross national borders. Climate change; new and emerging diseases like Zika, Ebola and SARS; international peace and security; the fight against transnational organized crime, including terrorism; international financial instability—none of these problems will be solved or even dented by bilateral aid programs. They can only be addressed by international—indeed, global—co-operation.
At the next level down, the more mundane but nonetheless important issues, such as river basin management, the construction of regional infrastructure projects, and the movement of refugees, require transnational networks of projects that are consciously linked and complementary with each other.
Focusing our bilateral program on fewer countries is not inherently a bad idea, but it is no magic bullet and it is an unproven idea; in fact, it's one that's never been tried. Furthermore, and more importantly, we have reason to believe that the frontiers of development co-operation lie elsewhere, in areas where co-operation must be multilateral, not bilateral, and where developing countries must be brought in as equal participants in the search for solutions to problems that are global and networked and beyond the power of any single actor, even the most powerful, to conquer.
Thank you for your consideration.