Haiti, Canada, and the price of aid

With the Harper government making noises about significant changes to
the way aid is delivered, it's a good time to examine the premise of
these kinds of demands.

It remains widely assumed that Canada's foreign aid will be used for
benevolent purposes. But without an understanding of *why* Canada
gives foreign aid, campaigns to either increase aid or make it
effective will lack any real meaning, and could have dangerous
unintended consequences.

The origins of Canada's foreign aid are central to such an
understanding, as they directly inform Canada's current aid policies.

Canada's first significant allocation of foreign aid was in 1951,
with the Colombo plan. In the plan's first year, Canada contributed
$25 million, mostly for food aid and the construction of dams in post-
colonial South Asia. As Nik Cavell, the administrator of Canada's
part of the Colombo plan told the Toronto Empire Club in 1952, the
plan's core orientation was anticommunist.

"Communism," Cavell said, "has made a great inroad in Asia... and is
busy day and night softening up, and preparing, other populations
ready for the day when they too can be made satellites of an ever-
growing world of terrible totalitarian slavery of the human mind and
body."

Canada, it's safe to say, would have been unlikely to provide aid to
post-colonial India if a desperate, starving population hadn't
threatened to resort to communism to feed itself.

As the British Empire receded further, the model of the Colombo Plan
was extended to Africa and the Carribean, with Canada taking on a
larger role.

As the authors of Perpetuating Poverty: The Political Economy of
Foreign Aid explain, "Great Britain was dismantling its empire in
these areas... and it was reluctant to leave its old territories
undefended against the influence of the socialist bloc."

The anticommunist bent of aid continued until the end of the cold
war, when the threat of withdrawing aid became a way to convince
developing countries to adopt structural adjustment. With communism
out of the way, free market reforms went on the offensive.

Today, aid has become more aggressively politicized.

In Haiti, Canada cut off aid to a democratically elected government
that refused to carry out IMF directives. But when a puppet
government was installed by the US, France and Canada, Canada gave
hundreds of millions of dollars to the new government in aid and
loans, funding what numerous human rights reports have shown to be an
unmitigated disaster, with RCMP-trained police carrying out massacres
of political opponents, and previously convicted war criminals
released by a justice system overseen by Canadian judges.

We only know what happened in Haiti through independent journalism.
Official policy documents, however, make the future easier to predict.

For the last few years, military leaders have been touting the "3-D
approach" to military intervention ("defense, diplomacy and
development"), which integrates development aid with
counterinsurgency warfare. According to journalists Jon Elmer and
Anthony Fenton, who obtained a copy of Canada's new counterinsurgency
field manual, the new strategy is designed to combat enemies who are
motivated by "ideas for social change".

"The new military environment," they write, is characterized by
"urban-based warfare against fighters operating amid, and often with
significant support from, local populations." With 3-D, aid is used
to win over "populations" from whatever social or political movements
they are supporting, while those movements are literally killed by
troops on the ground.

Regarding a Conservative plan to give more money to fewer countries,
the author of a C.D. Howe report on aid told the CBC that "The
rationale for aid is not just to dole out money but to have influence
over the host countries. It sounds a bit neo-colonial. But if Canada
wants to be any kind of actor in this game, it has to step up and
become a significantly important donor."

For those who want increased, or more effective aid, the question
remains a live one: what happens when you get what you want?