On CIDA and DFAIT Statement before House Committee

Thank you.

My name is Colin Robertson. I served in the Canadian foreign service for more than 32 years. I am currently vice-president of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and a senior advisor with McKenna Long & Aldridge, a Washington law firm. I work through them with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. My volunteer activities include sitting on the board of Canada World Youth, which is funded by CIDA.

That said, my remarks are personal and do not represent any of these organizations.

I support reintegration of CIDA and Foreign Affairs into International Trade because I believe by linking the three critical policy levers of diplomacy, trade, and development, we’ll get better policy coherence in advancing Canadian interests abroad and advancing our development outcomes. I think the nexus of development, diplomacy, and trade works very well, and that’s how we try to do policy back in Canada, but in the field my observation was that sometimes CIDA operated separately. In my view, this did not serve our international interests, and it often confused, particularly those with whom we were dealing.

The short-term problem, and Paul addressed this, is how we deal successfully with the integration of CIDA into DFAIT.

Past experience with reorganization is not encouraging. The severing and then reintegrating of the trade part of the department in the early 2000s sapped energy. The best talent was devoted not to advancing the national interest but to moving boxes around in what was a rather painful and draining bureaucratic odyssey.

Development that creates the conditions where development assistance is no longer needed is the outcome we seek to achieve. Closer collaboration with the private sector, always a central theme of our international policy objectives, should be reinforced with the reintegration of CIDA into DFAIT.

I’m going to put my questions to you around four baskets: accountability, foreign policy, trade, and values and interests.

In terms of accountability, will DFAIT be ready to administer a fivefold increase in its budget? That’s significant. I would refer you to work by Barry Carin and Gordon Smith, both formerly of the department and now working with CIGI at the University of Victoria, on the millennium development fund. They are looking at accountability standards as to how you ensure that you’re getting full value for aid broadly, and I think that’s something we need to pay attention to.

With an extra $4 billion of the people’s money in its wallets, will the new foreign affairs and international trade and development department’s culture be up to the task?

CIDA has embraced results-based reporting and open data. Will the new department embrace this approach?

The challenge of integration is getting it done without handicapping operations or shortchanging policy development, always a problem with any kind of integration. You, as members, need to get from the department a timetable, with benchmarks, for reintegration and clear communication as to who, what, when, and, most importantly, why this is all going to take place.

The second basket is foreign policy. It’s one thing to say we’re going to align development to foreign policy interests, but in doing so, are you de facto reviewing your foreign policy? An example is the information technology shops in the merging of the DFAIT system. In the DFAIT system, Africa missions are put at the bottom of the priority list in terms of upgrades and modernizations. For CIDA, the place is at the top, and appropriately so. So how do you fix that?

At the level of foreign policy, will integrating CIDA transform Canada’s foreign policy priorities geographically? Will Africa, for example, be at the centre of Canada’s next generation of global relationships? How, for example, do we now deal with China? China ceases to receive Canadian development, becoming a player itself. How are we going to work with China, having helped it to achieve a certain degree of development?

On the trade front, how will the new department handle private sector and capital flows? Will integration allow trade deals that enable people to earn more money and create new jobs by exporting to Canada?

Canada is an exporting nation, so three vital policies are necessary: trade promotion, trade policy aimed at trade liberalization, and trade negotiation.

We are underresourced on trade negotiation, just when the world is awash in trade negotiations, bilaterally, regionally, and globally. The Prime Minister, of course, is down in Cali today looking at a new trade negotiation, a Pacific alliance. Again, I think that’s a good thing, but we don’t have the capacity. Trade negotiating teams need constant input from the private sector, and this remains weak, unlike the free trade agreement and the NAFTA, which I worked on, where we had a very strong system of consultations with various sectors. The private sector, for its part, truly has to step up. It could do more on public-private partnerships. Bringing new ideas and best practices to the table in a practical sense is something the business community should be able to help us with, and I would encourage you to look, for example, at the work on the Pacific Century that’s being done right now by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

As we proceed with trade negotiations, our foreign aid should strengthen our industry position internationally, including the rights of local youth, women, and local governance. The case of Bangladesh and the garment industry is a case in point.

As for values and interests, which I think are important, but I put them last in my set of questions, the integration of CIDA tests whether our values are in fact interests in disguise. Take, for example, the condition of women and girls. Any state that does not address the condition of women and girls can be neither prosperous nor secure. Does the integration propel our non-geographic foreign policy interests more firmly in this direction? Does Canada now have any choice except to increase development assistance?

Look, for example, to Britain and Japan. Despite government cutbacks, each has increased foreign aid and support, particularly for youth organizations. Japan has developed new youth exchanges with 41 countries, including Canada. In my view, youth exchanges are the best form of soft power because they build a global brand for Canada among young people. We are, after all, a young country. It constitutes the front end, in my view, of building Canadian corporate trends and brands. To do this, I think we need to apply the “can do, own the podium” spirit that we saw exemplified during the 2010 Olympics.

The CIDA of the past perhaps relied too heavily on the voluntary sector to reflect Canadian values in the effort to reduce poverty worldwide. Their collaboration, however, particularly with the mining industry, proved that public-private sector projects can be a win-win for all sides.

Again, I think you need to task the new department to develop a branding approach so that these initiatives are not only coordinated at an execution level, but are also easily perceived and understood by and within the Canadian system. It is important that Canadians understand what we’re doing on aid. The Swedes do this well; Australia does this well; so do the Americans.

I think partnering with national companies and countries where we work makes sense. Look at the German model. We can and also should look to the EDC financing. It’s creatively Canadian.

In conclusion, the reintegration of CIDA into DFAIT makes sense in terms of better administrative coherence, but the sooner it is achieved, the sooner we can get on to policy development, which is the core purpose of Foreign Affairs. For now the focus needs to be on the administrative efficiency of the new department, and then on the effective delivery of programs that advance our values and reflect our national interests.

On foreign policy itself, that’s an issue for another day.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much.

I’d like to ask Mr. Robertson some questions.

In your letter to the Globe and Mail, you stated that the philosophical shift that’s being proposed here is not unique to Canada. You mentioned other international countries, such as Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and other European countries, that are moving toward the same objective.

Could you give us a view of what international thinkers, such as Dambisa Moyo or William Easterly, are saying about the future of international aid, and how this amalgamation ties into some of the things that are being talked about among international academia on this subject?

Certainly. There has been a sort of rethink about development assistance. We’ve put close to $1 trillion into it, and the results are not what we intended. So we began to have people ask what’s not working.

Dambisa Moyo, Paul Collier, William Easterly, and others began to say it wasn’t good enough to just send money into a place. What you’re trying to do is develop skills and what I would call “sustainable jobs”.

The argument is that the private sector has to play a bigger role in this. We have a lot of foreign investment in Canada that creates jobs, and we should be doing the same in Africa. The private sector is now moving in that direction—the jobs that provide the sustainable development that we seek to achieve are largely being driven by foreign investment, working with the government at home. It’s not the pure development as we saw it in the past.

That’s a philosophical shift in thinking on how we’ve done aid for the past 50 years. We have a lot of opportunity. Think of our mining companies, which are extremely active. The Prime Minister just announced today in Peru—and he’s going on to Colombia—that we have opportunities.

We have an actual place and standing if we choose to use it. This takes us into social corporate responsibility. There are areas like labour, the environment, and respect for women in which we can make a shift in things. It is harder to do, but it is doable.

I want to make one last comment on integration. I have a very practical suggestion. Do not leave CIDA “siloized” on the other side of the river. My view would be to take the African bureaus and put them all together. Take the trade, the policy…. In my experience—and Paul lived through this as well—when you put the two together, cheek by jowl, and we did this in the early 1980s, it means that you lunch together, you walk down the hall and you talk together. The worst thing we can do in this integration is to leave the silos.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Robertson, we may give you the opportunity to pursue that.

I just want to first be very clear, for the committee and for people who may be reading this, that there is a distinct difference between what we do in humanitarian aid and what we do in development. I just want to read the Prime Minister’s quote when he said:

But when the need is great and the cause is just, Canadians are always there.And we will always be. Because that is what Canadians do.

We have stepped up to the plate with the Sahel, with the East African drought relief, with Syria, with Haiti. With innumerable humanitarian situations, Canada has been there. We will continue.

I want to posit a slightly different theory, though, and I ask for your comment on this. Canada has had enormous contributions. In fact, we are one of the largest contributors to the Global Fund. The reduction of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS is significant around the world. Our contribution in the reduction of polio has been enormous, and we are seeing such success there it’s almost astounding. We have put money into the World Food Programme, and again we’re one of the largest contributors. The maternal, newborn, and child health initiative, which is a signature project for Canada, is saving moms and babies all over Africa, in particular. What we’re seeing is reduced mortality rates, increased numbers of babies who are surviving and reaching five years of age.

Does it not mean that we need to restructure our development because we actually have a reclaimed generation? For the long run, what are we looking at? We’re not just dealing with getting food in the mouths anymore. We need to look at what the long run looks like in skills training and job opportunities, because we have a new generation, thank God, of young people who are alive and need hope and a future.

Do you have comments on that, gentlemen?

Yes, we’ve always had instant, immediate relief to places that have had disasters, and that’s always been a key part, but at the same time, there’s the whole idea of development designed to basically take us to the point where you don’t have to provide development. We use all sorts of policy levers to do that.

You talked particularly about Africa and the things we do. I know that Madame Laverdière has a very good proposal she put forward some time ago in terms of providing drugs. I think that’s the kind of thing that sometimes deserves a re-examination, particularly in light of, as you described it, the Prime Minister’s personal commitment to maternal health and child care developments and improvements, and the real, personal commitment he has made with the President of Tanzania through the United Nations.

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Yes, but it’s based on experience and talking with people in the private sector, particularly in the field, going into our offices. I’ll use Africa as an example and to a degree Latin America, where companies were going in and trying to seek assistance from CIDA to help them get a better sense of the projects and also tell them what they’re doing. CIDA felt constrained, for whatever reason, not really working with Canadian companies. The trade commissioners thought this was an opportunity where we could actually bring together development and trade. I think Lucien has seen this often.

This is one thing I hope the integration does, because you had a philosophical difference, which did not serve Canadian interests. Again I come back to long-term development. It depends on sustainable jobs, which then create the conditions by which we can eventually move development on to other things. Canadians win as well because we trade with these countries. That’s part of what the Prime Minister is doing.

So that part of the mindset needs to change. That’s why I favour the development side. I can give you specific examples, but I think you’ve got the general sense.

I will say that Export Development Canada should not be ignored in this, because it plays a very constructive role in helping Canadian companies work abroad. I think that also has to fit into the development mix, because that’s a big chunk of money, more than $4 billion, and it’s also helping the Canadian presence abroad in a major way. It’s looking at Canadian interests as a whole and the whole Canadian side.

That’s why I don’t want to handicap the foreign affairs department with moving boxes around. We should be thinking of broad policy at this critical time.

Thank you. I’m going to share my time with Madame Péclet.

I just wanted to nail something down. Mr. Robertson, I think I’ll put it to you.

We had witness testimony at the last committee hearing about the concerns right now of the concentration of power within the Minister of Foreign Affairs’ office, and we’ve certainly seen that in announcements, etc.

The concern you’ve mentioned around making sure we still have that voice for international development is certainly aligned, and we all get that with our foreign policy. But in the legislation as you see it, we have “the minister”, and that’s the foreign affairs minister, and then “additional duties”. I certainly get and agree with this idea of putting people together and thrashing things out, but my concern is right now what we have is a very concentrated office, and we have a structure that’s going to bring in another office.

You were underlining the concern around development dollars and where are they going to go. How do you see managing…we’ll call it creative tension? Some others might have other words for it, but how do you ensure that things aren’t going to be swallowed up by one minister? I think that’s a fair concern, and certainly when you see the legislation structured the way it is, how is this going to happen? Who’s wagging the dog, so to speak?

We had someone else who said trade could learn a lot from those in CIDA who are doing good CSR work.

The Kofi Annan report just on Africa, which I’m sure gained a lot of attention for you, is something that is a lesson. You can’t just look at GDP and exports; look at results. And that usually comes from a sensibility of those who are in international development. How do we make sure we’re not, within the structure, losing that important voice?

Leaving personalities aside, the legislation as I read it now makes this a significant part of the portfolio of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has overall responsibility, which I think is a good thing. You do need a single point of contact.

I think in adding that to the minister’s portfolio, that minister, by definition, with responsibility to cabinet and to you as members of Parliament, has to take that into account. That becomes an additional part. In the past, when I go back to the eighties and the nineties, when we jiggled the chair slightly and added to the Minister of Foreign Affairs…there was no question in the early eighties, for example, when we did this that the then Minister of External Affairs, Allan MacEachen, spoke with greater authority because that was part of his portfolio.

I have no doubt that the current minister, Mr. Baird, should take…. He has, not entirely elaborated as yet, a dignity agenda, which goes into a lot of the things that are absolutely vital to development—women, girls, the disadvantaged groups.

I think the CIDA addition should play a major role, because it needs to be remembered—and I go back to Lloyd Axworthy, who also had things changed when he was there, and his whole sort of soft power. He took into account all of the facets of foreign affairs. In a sense you’re arming the foreign minister. Again, to use the example of other countries, the foreign minister in Britain, the foreign minister in many of the European countries, Hillary Clinton, what she did—you added aid to Hillary Clinton and she significantly increased what she was able to do and with devotion to a couple of areas, in particular women, as you know, as a key piece of it.

So my argument would be that the foreign minister will have this because it is now part of their responsibility, and in a sense we’re going to get a better—

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