bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1999-2000) — Winter 1999-2000 // Hiver 1999-2000, pp. 44–45
AID AND EBB TIDE: A HISTORY OF
CIDA AND CANADIAN DEVELOPMENT
ASSISTANCE by David R. Morrison (Wilfrid
Laurier University Press in association
with The North-South Institute/L Institut
Nord-Sud: 1998) p. xxi, 602 pp., $65 (CDN)
David R. Morrison, a Professor in Development Studies at Trent University, sets out to tackle an especially complicated and unwieldy subject in this lengthy history of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Canadian development assistance. Based on an extensive reading of the secondary literature and published sources, Aid and Ebb Tide traces the evolution of Canadian aid starting in 1950, when Canada joined its Commonwealth partners in the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia.
Motivated by political, commercial and humanitarian considerations – what Morrison dubs a “trinity of mixed motives” — this early aid program, which totalled only $25 million in 1951, set the pattern for subsequent efforts. Much of Aid and Ebb Tide is the story of Ottawa’s recurring efforts to frame a clear and lucid development assistance policy that appropriately balanced each element in Morrison’s trinity.
For Morrison, who believes that aid should be concerned primarily with humanitarian objectives, that proper balance was only achieved between 1966 and 1976. An expanding domestic economy permitted two successive prime ministers, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, to support calls for increased development assistance. And in Maurice Strong, whom Pearson placed in charge of the External Aid Office in 1966, they had a tough and unorthodox administrator determined to place developmental considerations at the heart of Canada’s aid operations. Strong and his successor, the Quebec politician Paul Gérin-Lajoie (whom Morrison refers to affectionately as PGL), are the principal heroes in this study. Indeed, with Marcel Massé and Margaret Catley- Carlson, two latter CIDA presidents, they are Aid and Ebb Tide’s only heroes.
In Morrison’s view, in 1968, Strong transformed a musty and slightly antique External Aid Office into CIDA — cool, modern and sophisticated. Aid policy went from being “a marginal operation into a central facet of Canadian external relations.” The imaginative Gérin-Lajoie, who embraced every new aid problem and solution as they emerged, made CIDA a leader in international aid. Strong and Gérin-Lajoie worked hard to equip CIDA with the analytical tools and policy-making capacity it needed to challenge the bureaucrats in the Department of External Affairs, the Department of Trade and Commerce and other branches of government. Morrison argues that development assistance rather than political or trade considerations became the agency’s primary focus, and as funding increased from $122 million in 1966 to $383 million in 1970-71 to $963 in 1976-77, CIDA developed more coherent policy priorities and better methods for delivering aid.
But Morrison’s account is not uncritical. The progressive rhetoric of the 1970s eventually outran CIDA’s performance. Bureaucratic inertia, lengthy project lead times, resource limitations and growing pressure to dispense funds conspired to limit the organization’s ability to frame policy in a genuinely innovative fashion. CIDA’s efforts to strengthen its control over the policy-making process invited the hostility of other departments and diverted the organization’s energies into bureaucratic squabbles. Finally, both Strong and Gérin-Lajoie d failed to develop effective program evaluation mechanisms, leaving CIDA exposed to public criticism for waste and inefficiencies. By the time Gérin-Lajoie left office in 1977, CIDA’s public image was badly tarnished.
By the late 1970s, CIDA was in trouble. d Preoccupied with managing its financial resources and an endless series of management reviews, it was increasingly forced to subordinate aid policy to the government’s overall objective of enhancing Canadian competitiveness. CIDA, especially under Massé and Catley-Carlson, and its allies in Parliament, the media and among non-governmental organizations, tried hard during the 1980s and early 1990s to re-focus the government’s aid priorities on development and aid delivery but with little success. In any event, their efforts were rendered irrelevant by government cutbacks after the 1988 federal election. With the end of the Cold War, the competition for funds from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union complicated matters — and led to yet another strategic management review to discover “how to do more with less.” As deficit reduction became a priority following the 1993 election, CIDA’s position went from bad to worse; aid appropriations fell from 49 percent of GNP in 1991-92 to .34 percent in 1996-97 to a projected figure of .27 percent in 1998-99.
Aid and Ebb Tide gathers together in one place the most important statistics for almost 50 years of Canadian aid, places those figures in a comparative context and relates aid expenditures and programs to general statements of government policy. This is its strength and is no small accomplishment.
But densely written and burdened with unnecessary detail and jargon, Aid and Ebb Tide lacks a clear thematic focus. Part aid policy history, part CIDA administrative history, in the end, it is neither. Its policy discussions are too CIDA-centric to offer a full and compelling account of how aid policy was shaped in Canada; as an administrative history, Morrison’s preoccupation with public statements of high policy leaves little room for the more mundane, yet important, task of describing exactly how Canadian aid was administered. This is especially important since the abstract policy statements carefully described and parsed in detail by Morrison were often overtaken by events or reflected innovations and policies already in place at the ground level. While ministers and presidents struggled again and again to articulate a sound and coherent aid policy, Canadian aid flowed abroad. Unfortunately, Aid and Ebb Tide tells us little about how that aid was delivered and about the people who parcelled it out in Ottawa and overseas. For a work whose author hopes to re-focus our attention on the humanitarian impulses that should lie at the centre of any discussion of aid policy, the human element is sadly absent.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1999-2000) — Winter 1999-2000 // Hiver 1999-2000, pp. 44–45. Read the rest of this issue →
