ARTICLE - CANADIAN AID BUDGET

NEW MONEY OR OLD, AID BUDGET COULD USE A FEW MORE DOLLARS
(Toronto Star) - By Ian Smillie - EDITORIAL OPINION

In November 1945, C.D. Howe, who served as “minister of everything” in the governments of Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, replied to nitpicking critics of his budget estimates by asking, “What’s a million?”

At the end of the war, a million dollars was a lot of money. It still is. It doesn’t matter that Howe’s exact words were a little different; his cavalier attitude toward a large amount of money is what made headlines that are remembered today.

Times have changed, but cavalier attitudes toward money have not. We had two examples of this at the G8/G20 meetings. One was the commitment of $1.1 billion in “new money” to the government’s maternal and child health initiative. It turns out, however, that the new money isn’t actually new, because Canada’s aid budget is being capped next year. It’s only “new” in the sense that it won’t be spent on whatever the government’s aid priorities were before the meetings — education, perhaps, or agriculture.

This not-so-new billion dollars — to be doled out over five years — is almost exactly the same amount spent by the government on G8/G20 security in only three days, for an event that failed to persuade anyone else to kick in much for maternal and child health. Defending the security outlay, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said, “It costs a lot to showcase Canada.”

Then came the news that Canada was about to deliver its first tranche of money to the multi-donor Haiti Reconstruction Fund. In March, Canada committed $400 million for Haitian reconstruction, to be spent over a two-year period. But the government has been unable or unwilling to write a cheque until now. And apparently there won’t be any more until Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon and CIDA Minister Bev Oda meet with UN special envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton, because Clinton recently expressed dissatisfaction at the pace of reconstruction.

“So these are issues,” said Cannon, “that I want to be able to, with Minister Oda, discuss with him so that we scope all that out and get a better sense of what he means by those comments.”

What Clinton meant was clear enough. The pace of reconstruction is slow, and one reason is that very few of the donor pledges, including Canada’s, have been realized. “We need a schedule at least from the donors of when they are going to give that money,” Clinton told CBS News in July.

Unless they are just celebrity hounds, it isn’t clear what Cannon and Oda need to “scope out” with Clinton. There are thousands of Canadians in Haiti with answers: Canadian embassy and CIDA officials, dozens of Canadian NGOs, Canadian armed forces personnel and RCMP officers.

Maybe it’s the recession. On May 13, Canadians were told by Vice-Admiral Dean McFadden that a shortage of money and sailors was about to force our navy to mothball half of the 12 vessels used to patrol the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The next day, however, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, Chief of Defence Staff, said, “I’ve ordered Admiral McFadden to rescind his instruction until we can have a look at the amount of resources the Canadian Forces can give him.” Maybe there’s a billion available somewhere in “new money.”

And now the planes: $16 billion, untendered, for 65 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. It is no wonder Vice Admiral McFadden thought he had to mothball half the navy. It’s no wonder CIDA can’t cut a cheque for Haiti. It’s no wonder the “new” money for maternal and child health isn’t really new. And it’s no wonder the government has capped foreign aid spending at current levels — levels so low that Canada is now one of the least generous aid donors in the world.

To put the aircraft in perspective, if we reduced the number from 65 to 62, we could double that commitment to Haiti. If we reduced the number from 65 to 57, we could double our aid to Africa in a year.

In June, a smaller number came up in a speech that Michael Ignatieff made in Toronto. He calculated that the government will save $1.7 billion annually when the Canadian combat role ends in Afghanistan next year. He said that instead of burying the money in the budgetary bafflegab that is currently the order of the day, he would reallocate the money to “defence, development and diplomacy.”

If even a third of this $1.7 billion could be devoted to Canada’s aid budget, it would represent a solid 10 per cent increase on current spending, and that really would be new money. This is a number and a commitment worth remembering and pursuing. It might not be a billion dollars, but unlike the numbers being thrown around by the government today, it could be real, and it could be important.

Ian Smillie is an Ottawa-based writer and consultant. A member of the McLeod Group, his latest book is Freedom from Want.