CIDA

By Stephen Brown, Ian Smillie in Embassy Mag. 9/21/2011

For instance, as Canada winds down its military involvement in Afghanistan, the Canadian International Development Agency will be "normalizing" aid to a level comparable to its 19 other "countries of focus." This confirms a poorly-kept secret: aid to Afghanistan was always more about Canadians, candy and Kandahar than about sustainable long-term development.

With aid levels frozen, there will be fierce competition for the freed-up funds. We should probably expect new assistance to Libya, where Canadian companies are already jockeying for important reconstruction and oil contracts.

We have already seen CIDA shift priorities to the Americas, where middle-income countries like Colombia and Peru have replaced low-income African countries as CIDA priorities, a move aimed primarily at greasing the skids for Canadian commercial interests. Following Prime Minister Stephen Harper's second extended visit to the region, aid there may become an even higher priority.

The aid budget freeze announced a year ago may not last—it could actually get worse. Like other government departments, CIDA is preparing scenarios for five per cent and 10 per cent budget cuts. This would push Canada further down the list of donor generosity, where we already rank 14 of 23 OECD countries.

Where multilateralism is concerned, funding has held up relatively well, especially for international financial institutions, but the knife looms here as well. CIDA has, in fact, increasingly left the policy leadership in this area to the Department of Finance, which was conservative before the Conservatives.

Insiders say CIDA is planning to rework—yet again—its list of priority countries, last rejigged only two years ago. So much for long-term partnerships being the basis of effective foreign aid. In this regard, one might well ask about CIDA Minister Bev Oda's magical mystery tour to Mongolia in August. Although Mongolia is not a CIDA focus country, our mining companies have made Canada Mongolia's second largest investor