Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the members of the committee.
This is a great opportunity to participate in this timely and important study. As someone who has spent much of his life thinking about how Canadians have and should engage with African countries and people, I'm happy to see signs of renewed interest in Canada's approach to Africa—not least at this committee.
There are very good reasons that Africa should be the focus of more sustained and strategic policy interest. However, in thinking about the ways this occurs, we should be under no illusions about the degree to which Canada has become more marginal to African interests and actors. This increased marginality is partly due to structural changes in the international domain, but it is also self-inflicted.
Practically, it means that in pursuing renewed engagement with Africa, we are playing catch-up. In this context, we should be modest in our expectations, consistent and consultative in our commitments, comprehensive in our thinking and careful not to make exaggerated claims for the importance of what we are doing.
I say this not to diminish the important ongoing efforts of many Canadians and Africans at both intergovernmental and transsocietal levels to engage in mutually beneficial ways. Indeed, relationships between Canada and Africa are more diverse and more diversified than ever. At the level of official Canadian policy, however, an always limited overall level of commitment has diminished over the past two decades at precisely the same time as many other governments were recognizing Africa's growing economic, security, diplomatic and political importance and undertaking new initiatives to forge deeper and more strategic relationships.
Historically, Canada's involvement in Africa rested on a comparatively broad but disconnected and shallow foundation of international development assistance; periodic and sometimes troubled military and police deployments to multilateral peace operations; commitments to multilateral bodies with large African memberships, including la Francophonie and the Commonwealth; and people-to-people links through civil society organizations. Later, these were broadened by the impactful but controversial role of the Canadian extractive sector.
Periodically, however, these more routine points of contact were supplemented by prominent Canadian diplomatic initiatives. Two particularly prominent examples, among many, were the Mulroney government's sustained engagement with the struggle to end apartheid—which we've been reminded of with Prime Minister Mulroney's recent passing—and the Chrétien government's championing of the Africa action plan through what was then the G8 in 2002. These kinds of initiatives were never part of a comprehensive African strategy. We've never had one. However, they occurred often enough to regularly renew the idea that Canada could and should play key roles in issues that matter to Africans.
Since the mid-2000s, however, this intermittent African impulse has largely dissipated, and sustained, high-level interest and engagement with Africa have been notably lacking. In the face of previous Canadian initiatives on the continent, as well as escalating interest from governments elsewhere, this came across as relative indifference. This was true not only in a general sense, but in key bilateral relationships such as that with post-apartheid South Africa.
It is this sense of relatively diminished interest that needs to be confronted in pursuing a renewed approach to Africa.
To be sure, in a time of urgent demands in other parts of the world and scarce resources, a more concerted focus on Africa may seem difficult to justify, although I don't get the sense that I have to justify it to this committee. Engaging with the continent is important for both self-interested and systemic reasons, many of which you have already heard about. I watched your opening session. It was a very useful background.
Africa's potential economic upside is greater than any other global region's, yet its security and humanitarian challenges are more widespread in ways that have systemic impacts and could greatly limit its potential.
Major collective action challenges that we're all affected by, including forced migration, global health and environmental sustainability simply cannot be successfully faced down without African partnerships.
Finally, because of its growing importance as well as its large number of states, Africa is of great and growing international diplomatic importance. Broadly, this places Africa at the fulcrum of growing world order tensions, and I hope we get a chance to talk about those in the course of our conversation. Narrowly, Canada's inability to gain significant support from African governments was important in the failure of our last two campaigns for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Given these incentives to engage, it is entirely appropriate for the government to explore ways of enhancing Canada's involvement in Africa. In doing so, however, it is important that we build on Canada's diverse but unconsolidated connections to develop a more sustained, comprehensive and respectful approach.