Miles to Go, Promises to Keep

With the G8/G20 summits going into full swing over the next few days, it was interesting to hear Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon wishing that donor nations would stop making wild promises but instead concentrate on keeping the vows they already made in previous sessions.  In so doing, the minister was merely repeating the requests made by numerous NGOs and think tanks over the past year.Recurring summits have repeatedly reached beyond their collective grasp; it just goes with the territory.  The problem this time, however, is that Cannon himself, as host, has castigated other nations for what Canada itself is guilty of.  When both the PM and his minister claimed last week that this country has met its G8 commitments, it barely caused a ripple in media circles yet infused anger within the development community – both here and overseas.  For months the government has claimed that Canada has kept its 2005 Paul Martin commitment to double aid to Africa.  Trouble is, it’s not true, as Toronto Star reporter Tonda McCharles heard when she interviewed Paul Martin on the claim.  See http://www.thestar.com/mobile/canada/article/822694.This Conservative sleight of hand can’t hide the reality that Canada has fallen a full $700 million short of their claim.  That’s serious stuff, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by our other G8 partners who chafe at Cannon’s lecture when they know Canada has stumbled on that commitment.Things got decidedly worse today when the Ottawa-based consultancy organization McLeod Group called on the Harper government to resign from both the G8 and G20 until it stops fudging the figures and lives up to its commitments.  As they point out:

Canada is one of the least generous aid donors in the OECD (ranking 18^th out of 22), and a recent World Bank study, placed us 29^th out of 38 in terms of aid effectiveness.”

Intriguingly, they remind us that the more than $1 billion spent on security alone for the summits is more than five times what would have been spent in an entire year in the eight African countries which CIDA cut off from bilateral assistance.  The McLeod group frets that, with the way the government has used voodoo math on the aid file, any money proposed by Stephen Harper for the child and maternal health initiative he proposed for the G8 this year will be slashed away from other desperately needed programs.The group’s demand that Canada withdraw its membership from the summits will go unheeded, but their point has been made, and well.  To the summits’ bizarre costs of $1 billion must now be added targets deemed to be met that aren’t even close – an expensive gathering of artifice.False claims have been part and parcel of these events for the last couple of decades and past Liberal governments have been culpable, but what makes this particular gathering so insipid is not only the sheer range of the false claims but the amount of desperately poor people Canadians believe their government is assisting who have never seen the benefit of even one loonie.The entire situation has been compounded by the rigorous funding cuts to those very agencies once charged with delivering on such promises.  Add to that the African countries that have been chopped and you have a grand parody of supposed humanitarian compassion.  Meanness masked by deception is hardly a fitting mantle for a host country.  No wonder our G8/G20 partners are more than a little dubious.