Canada’s shrinking development spending crosses party lines

Always good to have these kinds of long-term analysis of trends and their related effects. While decisions taken at the time were for valid reasons, the cumulative impact can be significant and force a rethink (although rebuilding capacity is not easy):

If you think Canada’s unimpressive response to resettling Syrian refuges is a sign the country is shrinking into a smaller role on the world stage, a new research paper suggests that decline has been going on for a generation, under both Conservative and Liberal governments.

Robert Greenhill, the co-author of the paper, calls Canada’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis a symptom. In 1979, when Canada welcomed 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, it also spent far more of its resources – the equivalent of billions of dollars more – on development assistance for people overseas, he said. And more on the military, too.

The shrinking is a trend that has transcended party lines and become a generational decline in global engagement, he concludes in a working paper with co-author Megan McQuillan for Open Canada, an online foreign affairs forum of the Canadian International Council. When you compare combined spending on defence and development – the two biggest parts of any country’s international-relations resources – to the size of the economy, Canada’s global engagement has declined dramatically: from 2.4 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 1.2 per cent in 2014.

“A symptom of that is that we’re not doing what we historically did in terms of helping refugees at home, we’re also doing much less than what we did in 1979 for refugees abroad,” Mr. Greenhill, former managing director of the World Economic Forum and a former president of the Canadian International Development Agency, said in an interview.

Source: Canada’s shrinking development spending crosses party lines – The Globe and Mail

Link to report: Assessing Canada’s Global Engagement Gap