Cannon Fodder

The title of respected journalist Jim Traver's article today, New Face of Canada Isn't Pretty, highlights a growing perception that we aren't held in the international esteem we once were. When he writes that, "accountability is the forgotten promise of Conservatives applying secrecy and control with such audacious ingenuity," he might well have been considering Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon's sentiments yesterday about Africa. When the minister announced that Canada had fulfilled its foreign aid commitments to that troubled continent, it left a huge number of people in the development community breathless and angry. The confusion extended to our international partner countries as well.Cannon made two assumptions yesterday. The first was on the amount of money spent in Africa by the Canadian government and the second was on his claim to be championing accountability. We'll cover the money issues tomorrow, but today we'll talk about responsibility for aid dollars.The minister speculated that Canada would spend no more aid dollars in Africa until it figures out what happened to the $2 billion already spent. "There's an accountability factor," he said, leaving the reader with the impression that somehow Africa might have once again misspent what was given. But the recurring issue has really been about the Canadian government's own accountability. When the Auditor General investigated CIDA's books a few months ago, she had to conclude that there has been so much shifting within CIDA that shouldn't couldn't really deliver a complete report. And there was no evidence at all in her conclusions that the Aid Accountability Act (C-293) was in fact being implemented. After four years in government, the Mr. Cannon can't even show where their money has been spent. It's accountability for everyone else but Canada.In speaking with some African ambassadors yesterday, they didn't know what the minister was getting at. Africa has turned a clear corner on the responsible delivery of aid, often at past Canadian urging. Now that progress is being made by Africans themselves, what did the minister mean by wanting to see more aid accountability?What, for instance, would he say to Rwanda, and its president Paul Kagame? Following the 1994 genocide, the president realized that women made up 70% of the entire population. Any hope he had of recovering from the devastation would involve important investments in women's empowerment programs, including financial and political. He reserved 30% of the legislative seats for women, and placed qualified female representatives as the head of the supreme court, the minister of education and the mayor of Kigali. Today, Rwanda is the only nation on the planet where women now constitute a legislative majority. To top it off, Rwanda has become one of the least corrupt and best governed countries on the continent. So, how did CIDA handle that? It pulled out most of it's long-term development funds. Is this what Cannon meant by accountability?One would think that an accountable government would have been monitoring aid disbursements all along and documenting them in a way the Auditor General could clearly prioritize. In international development, accountability runs both ways, and the fact the government can't track its recent disbursements means that it's us that haven't been holding up our end of the bargain. And yet Minister Cannon sought to shift the responsibility and perhaps blame to African's themselves, thereby continuing a pattern of a lack of transparency and accountability that's extended to other files such as isotopes and the parliamentary budget officer.If Mr. Cannon can't decipher what happened to his money, either in Africa or at home, perhaps he should be humbled by his own neglect and show more grace to his NGO partners. There was a time when CIDA was more understanding and humane. Our own lack of accountability has turned us into harsh judges, only proving that our new face isn't pretty at all.