Sure. Thank you. I'm used to just talking as much as I want and forcing students to listen.
While Canada helped draft the global compact on refugees, our support for the CRRF seems remarkably less clear. The fact is that if you look at where our programming is right now, we're simply rebranding existing development and humanitarian programming and calling it a root-causes approach to irregular migration and refugee situations. It's just old money with new labels.
I had the chance to conduct a study this year on the CRRF for Global Affairs Canada, specifically looking at it in the Central American context, where it's a regional mechanism called MIRPS. That study found three main impediments to real solidarity and burden-sharing for the CRRF from Canada.
The first is that the timelines for humanitarian and development programming and the funding cycles are very different.
Second, despite the amalgamation of CIDA and DFAIT, programming at GAC remains functionally siloed between humanitarian and development work.
Last and maybe most important, we're not spending enough money. Canada's ODA is quite paltry, to be honest. The recent budget called for 0.26% of the gross national income over the next years. Against inflation, that's actually a real decline. It's also a decrease from the 0.31% since the last 2012 OECD review. This current government is spending less money on ODA than the previous government.
I've had several conversations with people at Global Affairs and IRCC about the situation. The situation is basically that the old CIDA people and the humanitarian people don't work together on programming. Regional offices within GAC don't communicate thematically. Global Affairs and IRCC work in parallel on the same issues when they should be complementary. That's also the issue with the CRRF.
The public service is waiting for a champion with the political capital to provide direction on work at the humanitarian development nexus, to support the CRRF. Of course the situation is complicated—bureaucratic path dependency and financing constraints are real—but it's far from impossible.
Canada's civil service, academic institutions and civil society organizations have a wealth of expertise in all of these areas. Together we can readily identify pilot projects with clear outcome metrics for displaced people in CRRF countries, leverage international development financing, mobilize existing resources to incentivize host state co-operation, and offer complementary pathways for resettlement and labour migration to relieve the most pressing burdens on host states.
Just to close, in my opinion the discussion about whether we should sign onto the compacts or how they affect our sovereignty misses the point entirely: It's not whether we should do this stuff, but how we equitably share the burden moving forward.
Thank you.