February 11, 2009 - The Chronicle-Herald
February 9, 2009 - The Windsor Star
February 6, 2009 - The Guelph Mercury
February 4, 2009 - Toronto Sun
By Colin Kenny
There is a world recession on. Job-hungry Canadians are hurting. People in developing countries are hurting even more.
At a time that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) could be helping counter these problems, the agency is actually becoming less helpful to our economy at home and economies abroad.
Canadian foreign aid helps make the world more stable. It also gets Canadians involved in running meaningful projects to help the world’s poor. Or it should be getting Canadian involved.
Why is it then that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) increasingly funnels money overseas to be spent in unaccountable ways, rather than continuing the proven system of inviting Canadian-based aid specialists to bid on projects and manage them in an accountable way?
Why is CIDA killing off quality jobs when the government is spending big bucks in a desperate effort to staunch widespread job losses?
CIDA’s traditional bidding process on bilateral projects has largely been replaced with three non-competitive approaches:
· the simple transfer of money to other countries’ treasuries (with a clear loss of accountability)
· funneling money into multilateral agencies (again, with a loss of accountability)
· sole-sourcing contracts out the back door to chosen Canadian agencies (with a clear loss of the kind of competition that produces better projects at a cheaper cost)
Between 2004 and 2006 CIDA tendered 30 competitions for bilateral aid contracts worth more than $1 million apiece. Over the past year only six such contracts have been put out to tender.
This makes life much easier for CIDA bureaucrats. The agency’s bidding process had become so complex that projects were taking too long to get to the field. Instead of fixing its clumsy competition process – which would have taken some creativity and energy – CIDA took the lazy way out: cut down on competitions.
CIDA can argue that it is more efficient to simply give poor countries money, but what guarantee does the agency have that the money won’t get lost in the kind of inefficiency and corruption so prevalent in the Third World?
Two of the country’s on CIDA’s priority aid list – Afghanistan and Haiti – rank a lousy 121st and 157th respectively out of 160 countries on list of least corrupt countries on NationMaster.com (a website that collects data from the UN and other international agencies).
Why is CIDA throwing so much money to places it can never properly monitor? And why is a Conservative government, so devoted to free market economics, allowing CIDA to abandon competition in favour of handouts?
International development is a field in which Canada needs to pull up its socks, especially when so many poor countries are being hit so much harder than rich countries. Canada spent only .28 percent of GDP on development assistance in 2007 – a puny amount compared to the 0.7 percent target set by former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.
Foreign aid creates Canadian jobs by creating more international stability, which enables more trade. Canada is a trading country; stability creates jobs for Canadians.
Canada needs to spend more on foreign aid, and it needs to spend it more intelligently, so it helps Canadians as well as recipients abroad.
Competition and accountability are cherished Conservative principles. But foreign aid doesn’t get much attention in the Prime Minister’s office, so maybe nobody has noticed that at CIDA they begun to disappear.
Senator Colin Kenny was chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence during the last Parliament.
He can be reached via email at kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca