“Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation”

In the seven months since Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, the takes have been plentiful. But one line has flown under the radar, and I’m increasingly convinced explains the different paths countries have taken since the election of the Trump administration in the United States.

So, we can interpret the above line in two ways. Either, Carney says principles are a second-order, nice-to-have, once the economic fundamentals are safe. Or, he says principles are a hinderance to economic security, because a larger power will punish us for them. In effect, principles in foreign policy are a luxury or a liability.

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On one hand, there’s a truism in his words. In this new world, there is a much finer balance in what countries can say and do. Decisions involve more serious risk and harder trade-offs, between what we want to do (digital tax, supply management, protecting our own International Criminal Court judge from sanctions), and the possible economic retaliation for those acts. It would be naive not to see this.

Carney is also right that it’s wise not to rise to the bait every time. That is to say, the United States in particular lays provocative ideological bait, in hopes of instigating a pig-wrestling contest about Woke. As tempting as a Hugh Grant moment is, that’s for the movies. Sometimes, we need to let it slide.

It is also true countries have been punished for their perceived principles. Spain has been called out because of its stances on immigration, equality and Gaza. And we can argue Spain can afford these stances in part due to the protective umbrella of the European Union. Spain can’t face tariffs itself, for example. But we should note the US has threatened retaliation for perceived principles far more than it has delivered. Thus far, a country is more likely to be subject to a deranged Stephen Miller speech about the fall of western civilization, than an 80% tariff on its honey industry.

Plus, economic retaliation has been driven more by US domestic politics than by any ideological stance the receiving country has taken. For example, the United States does not want to annex Canada because of some principled stance we’ve taken. It wants to annex Canada because expansionism is a defining feature of a state sliding into fascism. The US cites principles as a pre-text for punishment, but the motivation is more likely weak domestic polls, distraction from foreign policy quagmires, or the monthly ‘Spin The Wheel, Pick A Punching Bag’ game at the White House.

All this to say, the idea there is no values-based foreign policy in an economic foxhole, is incorrect.

Carney says we earn rights, but rights are not earned, they are inherent. Sure, this is a concept normally applied to people, and countries don’t have rights per se. But the point remains. We have rights. We may choose not to exercise them, or they may be denied, but they are not earned. Applied in this case, it means there is no magic US export percentage at which rights suddenly kick in. There is no global level of trade dependence on a hostile hegemon, at which, rights no longer apply. We have the right to a principled foreign policy, by virtue of being a sovereign country that decides its own affairs.

Secondly, and critically, values (principles) and interests (economic security) are not opposing ideas at odds with each other. Our values are our interests and vice versa. It is in our interests for other countries to be democratic, follow the rule of law, and have healthy, educated populations. It is in our interests that the countries we work with play by agreed rules, treat their people well, and don’t make rash moves that endanger everyone. Conversely, our values make us attractive, stable, trusted partners in a transactional world.

Values are not a luxury you can only afford once you face no consequences for them. Our economic resilience rests on values. Particularly in the post war periods, values came from a generation who learned the hardest way what happens when, to paraphrase Carney, the large powers are submitted to no limits, no constraints. The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. And people died in their millions, economies were destroyed, and countries razed to the ground. Without principles, we do bad, short-sighted things that don’t keep us safe or make us stronger. Upon our principles rests almost everything good we’ve achieved as societies.

And if principles are either a luxury or liability, why do other states spend so much political capital trying to advance them? Why does the US threaten Europe with tariffs over its free speech laws? Why does the US want to dismantle various United Nations entities? Other states advance ideology in their foreign policy because they see considerable value in it. Relatedly, swapping one regressive, retaliatory trading partner (the United States), for another regressive, retaliatory trading partner (China, Saudi Arabia), doesn’t help us much either.

“Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum”

“Building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together”……What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities”

Back to Carney’s own speech, he’s using economic, McKinsey-esque language, but what he describes is building long-term, trusting communities bound by shared interests and values, often against a common external threat. Another name for that is solidarity. And solidarity is a value.

Finally, sometimes, principles are so fundamental, they’re worth the economic cost. Particularly when that principle is sovereignty. And sometimes, the cumulative impact of a hundred decisions to put short term economic gain above long-term foundational values, is effectively a loss of sovereignty.

This month saw the 15th anniversary of the far-right terrorist attack in Norway. In the immediate days after 77 people were massacred, then Prime Minister Jens Stolenberg gave a speech. He argued when a country is subjected to ugly, awful, violating behaviour, our response should be to double down on our values, to be more truly ourselves. “Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivety”

Our response to ugly coercion should not acquiescence. It should be to double down on our own values, with more democracy, more openness and more humanity.

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Borne of an ingrained risk-averse culture at GAC, plus government desire to please every pressure group possible and stretch to every issue under the sun, the overall picture of Canadian development assistance had become incoherent. We can’t ladder up impact or tell a story. The targets initially borne of good intent, came to artificially drive the policy, instead of good policy by default delivering on the targets.

All this is set against the backdrop of tectonic shifts in the development sector. Whether it’s the alleged end of aid, the rise of African sovereignty, the global health architecture review, or faltering multilateralism, it is a tumultuous time.

So where next for Canadian development assistance? This excellent Charles Kenny piece proposes a narrow, targeted, back-to-basics version of global aid, and building on it, here’s a suggestion of what targeted, impactful aid might look like for Canada.

• Return aid to its primary purpose of poverty alleviation, focused where concessional, grant-based aid works best – in low-income countries. I understand the majority of the world’s poor live in middle income countries, but there are other ways to support MIC development outside of aid. Unless there is a specific, timebound, or compelling reason aligned with a need Canada is best placed to fill, we should focus aid on low-income countries.

• Rethink efforts to use Canadian aid to leverage private sector investment. Evidence shows the billions to trillions agenda has largely failed, and that using precious aid dollars has delivered only pennies in private sector return, at a significant opportunity cost. Canada has tried for 15+ years to do innovative financing and it’s time to take stock of the lessons from those efforts. We struggled because the amounts of funding we offer are too small, our processes are too cumbersome, we don’t have the risk tolerance needed, and the concept struggles to deliver anyway.

  • If we want to reduce poverty by generating economic growth, we’re better following the evidence and funding IFIs/MDBs, targeted programmes like improving women’s access to capital, or increasing FinDev capitalisation.

  • On clear role Canada can play in developing country growth is using our voice and shares in the IFIs and multilateral institutions to address structural questions of debt, fair financing, the finance and global health architecture, representation, and trade policies

  • Tied aid policies are the opposite of fair, thoughtful private sector engagement. Canada should urgently rethink attempts to create protected Canadian markets in developing countries.

• A mature, joined-up approach to development. Building on GAC reforms to embed development at country and desk level alongside other aspects of international engagement, Canada should deepen connections between Finance Canada, Global Affairs Canada, Immigration and Citizenship, and even National Defence. We need to see countries as whole, complex entities that don’t fit into our neat aid, security, or trade buckets. Silos within Canadian government mean we sometimes approach developing countries incoherently. A country asks us for a visa office to give their youth mobility opportunities, and we give them money for malaria instead.

• Canada should narrow its limited aid dollars to issues where we have a specific capacity, a unique value-add, or an interest in advancing. In this bucket, I’d put our excellence in global health, our values-based support for sexual and reproductive health and rights, and our longstanding interest in promoting human rights and democracy.

• Rather than being the 15^th largest donor putting a tiny $1.2 million into a country, Canada should pool and align its financing a) with domestic country goals and strategies, and b) with other donors. An example of this is country compacts, developed by countries as a whole, with donors funding one plan, one pot, and one set of monitoring and evaluation requirements. Our aid alone won’t move a needle, but it could be a pivotal piece of a larger tranche of work.

• Canada should increase its two-way technical assistance where we have a unique value add. For example, Canada pioneered and led global legal fights on tobacco taxation, and tobacco taxation is a very effective way to increase domestic resource mobilisation. We also have expertise in gender-based budgeting, and many of our research institutes are already engaging in non-extractive, equal partnerships on global health R&D.

• Finally, Canada should retain its feminist approach, not because it’s virtue signalling or Woke, but because it’s the best way to understand the world currently. Nobody understands how raw power gets used and abused by strongmen like feminists.

In summary, we need to refocus Canadian aid on tightly delivering impact. Even if it will make some people unhappy. Even if some groups lose out. Even if we are criticized. The current woolly, drifting, stretched-too-thin and delivering too little approach isn’t sustainable.

A new approach will also go a long way to rebuilding the case for development engagement to Canadians. There is a powerful story to be told in doing less things, but doing them really, really well and making a real difference in someone’s life.

I had a conversation last year with a diplomat from a global south country. I asked how USAID cuts had affected their country. The answer? “People will die, of course. It will hurt our people, but that is nothing new for us. Aid is not the future of our country. We want a chance to be equals. We want you to drop your protectionist trade policies. We want equal access to financing, to grow our economy. We want freedom to travel and be educated. We want an equal say in how the world works”

It was a response that should guide donors as they define mutual benefit partnerships.

• What is aid for and how does it move us towards the world we want to see? This is the big question, and I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer. In recent years, we’ve seen tensions between in-country refugee costs, climate financing and traditional poverty reduction efforts. We’ve stretched the definition of poverty reduction so far, I’m not even sure it’s meaningful anymore. We’ve romanticised aid as a white saviour charity project, and we’ve reframed it for conservative audiences as soft foreign policy power that helps impose our interests. More recently, we’ve tried global public goods as a lens. Aid is a million things and nothing.

My view is that aid should be used to end itself. Aid will be successful when a country no longer needs it, because the country can provide for its people, and is accountable to those people. This means:

• Aid should sit within an overall effort to support a country towards its own development. Countries should move towards graduation from aid, with forms of financing to match their place on the graduation scale. Low-income countries and humanitarian contexts will continue to need grant-based aid. But as countries move up the economic scale, concessionality should increase along with the role of domestic government. Consequently, aid should pivot to supporting equitable economic growth, domestic resource mobilisation, and strengthening the ability of the state to fairly collect and disburse resources to its people.

• Aid must critically be accompanied by wider fiscal and foreign policy to increase access to affordable credit, reduce unsustainable debt, and increase fiscal space of government to fund their own services. We must connect donor finance ministries with foreign affairs and trade ministries, to properly address issues like illicit financial flows, tobacco taxes, or free trade areas. Donors must support more representation and voice for global south countries in institutions that hold significant sway over their futures, like the IMF, World Bank and the UN Security Council. They must drop punitive, demeaning visa processes for visitors and students. Donors have delivered much rhetoric on these issues for years, but have struggled to be the first mover, or make hard domestic choices to action their words.

• Donors should align aid and foreign policy with country-led plans. We must end the hodge podge of small aid projects scattered over 100+ countries, often carried out by donor country NGOs. The grant management alone is horribly inefficient – numerous bureaucrats with $150,000 salaries each, managing a $100,000 project. The projects are reported separately within and across donors, all with their own metrics, so we cannot ladder up impact across a country. We should move to a model of a single country-led plan, developed by stakeholders across a country (and not just governments), with a single set of indicators, and then funded strategically. First by domestic resources, then multiple donors crowded in according to their value add, then private sector.

• Donors should prioritise and sequence aid in the context of a country’s other fiscal flows. Should countries first fund their own core responsibilities, like health and education? How much of a health budget for example, should first be filled by the country, then topped up by donors? What do we assume non-traditional donors and private sector capital will fund? For example, it is likely that China and Middle Eastern states will fund self-interested infrastructure projects in their own backyards. Is there therefore a case for global north donors to concentrate on Africa? For all the talk of China taking over Africa with the withdrawal of USAID, the early signs are China is only picking up classic development projects in South East Asia.

• The more interesting tension is how to align with country goals and plans, in a way that reflects the whole of a country’s aspirations and needs, and not just the government’s. Especially when that country is not a full democracy, and certain populations are often left out of government efforts. While we should support state capacity development as the ultimate sustainable goal, the government is not the entirety of a state. We must recognise what populations want and what governments want are often very different things. How do we ensure aid supports initiatives that reflect general population needs? How can aid support civil society and a free press for instance, in holding governments accountable for their spending, without playing into donor-recipient power dynamics? We also know that global north lectures on LGBTQ rights or gender equality for example, are largely performative and often result in entrenchment of said attitudes.

• Sort out the chaos that is blended-innovative-private-sector leveraging. Again, donors need to move from rhetoric to action on the role of private sector. Too often, public money generates embarrassing levels of private return. Or ODA competes with itself, and tries to generate returns where there is little market. Public and private money have very different roles, and both are wasted when they do not play to their strengths. ODA should be reserved for countries who need concessional financing, and sequenced alongside other financial flows. Private sector should pay its fair share of taxes, and private investment should be directed where ODA cannot or should not go. Finally, ODA should not be used to subsidize private sector while they deliver very little.

• Support a clean-up of the multilateral architecture. We have created a sprawling hodge podge of global north-dominated funds, efforts and initiatives, across climate, global health, finance and more. They compete with each other, have mandate creep, result in verticalization of cross-cutting issues, duplicate responsibilities, and are far too complex to navigate. We need to strip back the global architecture so it is fit for purpose and delivers for developing countries. And I don’t mean in the current way where progress is slow and institutions try to protect themselves while still looking cooperative. I mean, Accra Reset levels of ambition.

• Support democracy, rights, and local accountability. This is ultimately the key, and answers a number of the conundrums above. It’s also why a technocratic-only or development economist approach to aid is a mistake. Yes, we can make aid more effective, align it better with evidence, and target it at high-impact initiatives. We should use cash transfers more, and vaccines are indeed a no-regrets use of aid. But politics matters, and technocratic solutions can only be sustainably and fairly implemented where there is political will, national ownership and accountability. Too much of technical aid discussion imagines itself outside of politics. As if politics is a vague, unscientific and distant issue. Yet ultimately, what aid should work towards is a manifestation of democracy – that people in a country can identify and speak their needs, and then hold their government accountable for the choices it makes and money it spends. Accountability cannot be imposed from outside. A country’s future belongs to its people. It is possible there is no end to aid, until the needs of citizens are reflected in the policies and spending of their own states. I’m not so interested in labels, and am frankly fatigued by a lot of global north rhetoric on decolonialism, which has often been more about progressive positioning to each other, than about structural change that acknowledges and dismantles harms, but I suppose this is a decolonial approach to aid.

• Finally, we must make compelling, unapologetic cases for international engagement, including aid, to global north populations. In a world turning in on itself, we need to be unapologetic about why global engagement is good and what role aid plays in that good. We need a new narrative about why we spend public money on other countries. We must remake the basic case for helping others. Much of the above, and to be honest, what global south countries want from donors, is often at odds with domestic global north’s understanding of development. And this is probably the biggest barrier to change. As voters turn inwards and rightwards, as they scapegoat immigrants and we see rising attacks on racial minorities, politicians have been afraid to lead electorates in a different direction. They have fallen for the fallacy that they can only succeed by becoming a lite version of a far-right political party. When all evidence from every country around the world shows that voters will always pick the full-fat version of populism. If donors are going to shift their foreign and development policies, they need to lead their populations with a compelling narrative, and build political cover for their actions.

My last piece covered why tied aid – possibly the development equivalent of a Juicy Couture tracksuit – is back, and why it probably shouldn’t be.

So if governments are seeking to better align domestic and global goals, what should they do instead?

Firstly, tied aid is one very specific and blunt policy option that uses aid as a tool to create protected markets. Donors need to stop deploying it as a one-size-fits all policy. When you have a hammer, everything is a nail. Instead, we need to see domestic interests (and not just economic interests) and development impact as a spectrum, and assess the trade-offs as we slide down the scale.

At one end of the spectrum are development investments that produce economic, political and security returns to donors as documented side effects. That is to say, the development impact is the primary goal, but the donor benefits as a second order effect. Pandemic prevention is a good example. The money goes to developing countries, but the donor derives health and economic benefits by avoiding the significant costs of a global pandemic, as well as political benefits in the form of soft power and leverage.

In the middle of the spectrum, there are programs designed on dual grounds, as in, they benefit each party mutually. And at the far end, we see aid as a tool to achieve geopolitical influence or commercial market access. This includes tied aid, or further down the scale, the US’s bilateral health deals that offer reduced financing in return for sovereign data, and exclusive access to critical minerals.

All that to say, we have a wealth of domestic-to-global policy options we can deploy, without whipping out the tied aid velour tracksuit like Paris Hilton never existed.

Then we get to guardrails - principles to guide how and why we connect domestic benefits with development impact overseas. In Canada, Global Affairs Canada should develop and publish such a framework. As a start, I’d suggest:

1. Development as the primary goal: Donors already derive documented second order benefits from aid investments. This is sufficient. Efforts may be mutually beneficial, but donors should not be the primary beneficiary of their own development efforts. Aid is not another corporate subsidy scheme. If a donor wants one of those, they have separate departments to establish them.

2. Guided by evidence: The evidence on mutually-beneficially development partnerships is relatively paltry. Donor should avoid over-claiming impact, or wishful thinking. If evidence doesn’t exist, donors should conduct a full analysis of gains and risks, and identify the primary beneficiary, before proceeding.

3. Assessment of risk: Likewise, donors should conduct a full risk assessment of any initiative. What’s the opportunity cost? What else could we do with this funding? Which demographics or people could be harmed?

4. Conflict resolution: Donors should develop a framework to guide decision-making when global and domestic goals inevitably conflict. Which wins out? Development impact, or trade exports? Who decides that and how?

5. Alignment with rights frameworks: It gets a lot harder to align with rights frameworks when profit becomes the primary goal….

6. Appropriate financing: Financing should be matched to the goal, the timeline and the partners. Official Development Assistance has a legal purpose, and it is scarce. It is not the default form of financing for all aid and trade efforts. ODA should not be used where private capital would already flow, because it displaces existing financing and distorts markets. Private sector should have a stake in society by financing their own projects, without first resort to public subsidies. Blended, innovative or social finance may be more appropriate.

7. Transparency: Donors should publish economic analysis, risk frameworks and lessons learned efforts from new aid and trade initiatives.

8. Country-led priorities: Donors should align domestic interest efforts with partner country goals and frameworks.

And finally, if we’re bringing anything from the 1990s back, it should be the Spice Girls.

Sometimes in life, we can kill two birds with one stone. For example, spending an extortionate amount of money on ice cream for small children. Children get ice cream, parent gets ten minutes peace. Win-win.

And sometimes, doing two things at once, only results in doing both badly. Think, driving to work while tying your shoelaces. You possibly get to work in one piece (maybe), but the laces will be partly undone and the drive will be hairy.

And so we come to tied aid - the development version of ‘two birds with one stone’.

As many countries seek to better align their foreign policy across trade, diplomacy, and aid, they’ve reached for the good old tied aid idea. Tied aid is essentially where a government uses its foreign aid to subsidize its own domestic industries and open up protected markets in developing countries for them. This could look like the US Food for Peace program, where US aid money paid for US farmers to produce food, which was then shipped to developing countries as food aid. It could also look like Japan’s infrastructure program, where aid money pays for roads in the Philippines or ports in Bangladesh, but only Japanese companies are eligible to bid for the construction contracts.

It’s a seductive idea – that developing countries and poor people can have their needs met, and donor country industries can benefit at the same time. Two birds, one stone. It was a popular idea in the 1990s, and in fact, at that time, 50% of all bilateral aid was tied or partly tied to exports^[1].

Instead, in reality, tied aid is more like the driving-shoelaces metaphor. The benefit to the developing country is significantly reduced compared to untied aid, and the economic impact on the donor economy is reduced compared to other industrial policy options. There are good reasons we formally agreed in 2006 not to tie aid.

In policy as in life, there are no magic solutions, only trade-offs. So why do we do tied aid?

• It benefits domestic industry. The average donor derives between $1.30-$2.60 in exports for every dollar of tied aid^[2]

• For domestic industry, tied aid is protectionism. It gives them the opportunity to sell to a foreign country without any competition

• It maintains domestic public support for foreign aid, because domestic companies and NGOs benefit from it

• It’s an alluring idea for governments under pressure on economic growth, but still trying to meet obligations to developing countries. Cake, and eating it

So what’s the problem with tied aid?

• Tied aid is more expensive. A monopoly market drives up price. In the case of individual tied aid projects, often by double. Across all donor aid, by at least 15-30%^[3]. Food aid costs 40% more on average^[4]. Many donors like to complain about wasted aid or respect for taxpayers, yet are happy to pay double in taxpayer dollars for the same project, as long as the primary beneficiary is their own domestic company

• Tied aid is less effective. Because tied aid is more expensive, it diminishes purchasing power. We buy less of the same commodity, for the same cost. Less food aid for hungry people, less healthcare, less pandemic prevention. Take the US requirement for its food aid to be grown in the US and at least half carried on US-flagged ships. Without this provision, the same spending would reach 4-10 million more hungry people. Aid shipped from donor countries also takes longer to reach people. Delays of 70-100 days are not unusual, even in crises^[5]

• Tied aid distorts local markets. Tied aid protects donor country industry, at the cost of private sector growth in developing countries. It artificially cuts out local firms who could bid for contracts, hire local people, and support local economies. Instead, it floods local markets with protected goods from abroad, and local traders simply cannot compete^[6]

• Tied aid harms developing country growth. Studies show tied aid decelerates growth by 0.89% annual from 1973-2013^[7]. Tied aid distorts local markets, undermines local capacity and growth, changes incentives for recipient governments, and discourages necessary economic reforms^[8]

• Tied aid isn’t sustainable. When donors ship water pipes from Canada, or x-ray machines from Japan, they limit local capacity to maintain and repair these goods. Everyone who works in aid has stories of shiny equipment sitting broken and unused after mere months, because nobody in the country has the skills to repair or maintain it.

• Tied aid isn’t even the optimal policy option for supporting domestic industry. As the World Bank’s new stance on industrial policy shows^[9], protectionism like tied aid is a second order policy choice. There are at least six first choice policy options that are more effective for supporting domestic industry.

And so to Canada. Canada is making a hard pivot toward tied aid. For example, we’re exploring using aid to support domestic potash, potato and lentil industries, presumably exporting produce as a form of aid, into essentially protected markets in developing countries.

Canadian businesses already benefit from an array of government programs to support them. From R&D tax credits, incentives to hire, direct subsidies, or supply management. In fact, a total of $11.2 billion to $140bn per year across 200 initiatives^[10], depending on your source^[11],^[12]. They’ve risen 140% in the nine years up to 2024^[13]. I’m not passing judgement on the value of any of these initiatives. But it is worth asking whether aid needs to become the 201st government effort to subsidize Canadian businesses, at the direct expense of vulnerable, hungry people around the world.

^[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889158303000108

^[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889158303000108

^[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/022/0006/003/article-A003-en.xml

^[4] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/oda-standards/untied-aid.html

^[5] https://www.cgdev.org/publication/ft/food-aid-21st-century-saving-more-money-time-and-lives

^[6] https://www.cigionline.org/articles/us-food-aid-debate-major-reform-horizon/

^[7] https://www.academia.edu/68315528/Ties_That_Bind_The_Impact_of_Tied_Aid_on_Development

^[8] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12116-024-09432-4

^[9] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b98ce474-f652-4b58-8c74-a65210da7d4c/content

^[10] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260304/dq260304b-eng.htm

^[11] https://thehub.ca/2026/03/31/avi-lewis-is-right-about-corporate-welfare-on-corporate-taxes-he-has-it-backwards/

^[12] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/cost-of-business-subsidies-in-canada-updated-edition

^[13] https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/FP6-FedBusSubsidies.Lester.Mar7_.pdf

When Mark Carney was elected, Canada had a supposed Feminist Foreign Policy. I say supposed because it was announced, attempts were even made to write it down, but it was never published. It was Schrodinger’s Policy, in that it both existed when useful, but was never codified and thus never inconvenient. In any case, Mark Carney scrapped it shortly after assuming office.

Canada’s National Security Policy was last published in 2004. Canada’s last defence policy was launched in April 2024, but has since been upended by the election of the Trump administration and its ensuring effects.

There have been rumblings for a year of a National Security Review, followed by a Foreign Policy Review, but also a Defence Review, who knows. Many people claim to have provided input into these documents, even if they aren’t actually sure which one. In short, many reviews underway, no actual policies published yet.

On the international development side, Canada has the Feminist International Assistance Policy. Launched in 2017, FIAP was one of the Trudeau government’s first initiatives. It guides about $10 billion in annual Official Development Assistance spending. In a nutshell, it’s not bad. It makes a strong (and Trudeau-esque) case for why gender equality is critical to overall social progress. It corrects decades of gender-blind efforts that effectively primarily reached men because they did not counter for the different ways women experience the world. There is also plenty of fair criticism, including around its Global North framing of feminism, and its onerous implementation framework.

Since the Carney government was elected, FIAP has essentially been in limbo. It both exists and yet doesn’t exist. It remains the formal framework, and until civil servants and partners receive orders to stop implementing, they continue to loyally implement. They are accountable to the indicators in its implementing frameworks, and it formally guides positions on development policy.

At the same time, nobody is daft and the winds are clearly blowing against FIAP. On the more minor end, Official Development Assistance is being cut by about 15%, so more areas of FIAP will go under-funded. But more importantly, much of the content of FIAP is being explicitly or implicitly contradicted by government direction. With every month that passes, the gap between policy and reality grows larger.

Take trade for example. Trade appears substantively in FIAP just four times. FIAP specifies that Canada will apply a gendered approach to trade. It also says we will take a coherent and balanced approach across aid, trade, and diplomacy. Both points are directly contradicted by current government statements and actions, which arguably, flip the policy on its head, instead conceptualising development assistance as a tool to further Canada’s trade goals. The policy says: “Canada is committed to a progressive trade agenda that fully considers gender equality during trade negotiations; this agenda also includes strong environmental protections and ensuring that labour provisions of all trade agreements are non-discriminatory”. Does anyone believe this to still be the case in reality?

Women’s economic empowerment appears once substantively in FIAP, in the context of Canada’s Development Finance Institute better deploying capital to support women-owned business. Now, women’s economic empowerment has become the primary way the Minister threads the needle between a policy that formally directs a main focus on gender, while sitting in a government that primarily focuses on exports and market access. The cinnamon factory investment has become a familiar friend.

Canada used to be the dog with the gender equality bone in multilateral spaces. Always asking about the gender angle, the gender-based analysis, or the gender framework. Now anecdotally, this has noticeably slowed, or even stopped entirely. The tea leaves are being read.

It’s an impossible situation in which to place government departments and organisations that work under FIAP. It both exists and you must align with it. But it also doesn’t really exist and you should instead take your cues from ministerial speeches and potential foreign policy reviews. As a basic rule, without a policy, people will indeed do their best to read tea leaves, but the result will be inconsistent, un-measurable, and subject to people’s bandwidth, expertise, and personal opinions. There is also significant risk in giving vague cues with few formal accountability measures. You end up with a hodge podge of results, some of which may cause political embarrassment to government, or worse, harm to vulnerable people.

To be clear, FIAP needs to be revised. It was a policy of its time, and that time has largely passed. We also have 10 years of learning from FIAP to implement. It is right that FIAP fits better into an integrated foreign affairs landscape, across trade, diplomacy and possibly even defence. Maintaining FIAP in name, while government has all but abandoned FIAP in practice, is the worst of both worlds.

In Canada, the sovereignty conversation has been almost all-consuming. We’re building our own defence industry, expanding energy infrastructure, diversifying supply chains for critical and raw materials, and pushing for new market access for Canadian companies.

But there’s a cost to sovereignty. On the domestic side, these are mostly financial and effectiveness costs. Buying Canadian means we control and own the asset, but Buying Canadian can cost more money and may result in an inferior product. Supply management is another example. It increases our control over our food supply, but at the expense of cost and choice in product. As I often say, in policy and life, there is no ideal solution, only trade-offs.

Where we are beginning to see an uglier side of Canadian sovereignty is on global engagement. There is an almost pugnacious, Canada First approach emerging that prioritizes Canadian economic sovereignty at the expense of longer term collective good. Many of the challenges Canada face are collective action problems. As the PM said in his infamous Davos speech, putting up walls is not the answer. Canada cannot go it alone. We need new partnerships through common ground. Mutually beneficial partnerships where there cannot be a clear winner and loser.

There are early signs that Canada’s push for sovereignty in development is a) punching down and harming poorer countries, and b) making us an uncooperative party to global cooperation. By this I mean, Canada looking for ways to advance its own direct economic gain through global development efforts. We are subverting either work intended to benefit poor people and countries, or mutually-beneficial partnerships, to make Canada the primary beneficiary.

So let’s give examples of policy options that may be under discussion:

· Trade Promotion: Canada tries to piggyback on global efforts, in order to create market access for Canadian companies. As a theoretical example, using a global effort to build healthcare facilities in Africa, to secure new contracts for Canadian construction companies. Or insisting that global sanitation efforts use Canadian piping. Is the goal providing healthcare and water to poor people, or is the goal securing contracts for Canadian companies?

· Buy Canadian As The Primary Goal of Aid: The Buy Canadian policy now appears to apply to aid spending. If so, Canada could insist its humanitarian aid must use Canadian food products. Good practice is for emergency food aid to be procured in poor countries, so it builds sustainable supply chains, benefits local economies, reduces cost and carbon emissions, and provides local food to hungry people. Instead, in this example, the beneficiary is no longer hungry people. The beneficiary is Canadian food producers. The hungry people are ancillary, and consequently, Canada would pay significantly more to fly Canadian food into Yemen, Syria and Sudan. Hungry people get less food, but Canadian food producers get more contracts.

· Intellectual Property: We may see new demands for Canadian ownership of intellectual property, because Canada funds the body that developed a global innovation. If Canadian money helped fund scientists in Ethiopia, should Canada own the IP for any resulting invention? This hasn’t been the case previously. But Canada could insist our own economic benefit be the primary goal. It would throw a needless wrench into agreed global engagement, and risk a race to the bottom as potentially other funders consequently demand ownership of IP too.

Many donors connect their aid and trade policies, but largely, they do so in a more sophisticated, integrated way because they developed their approach over a decade or more. Canada’s approach so far appears cruder and frankly, a little gauche.

To be fair, I suspect bureaucrats are reading tea leaves and doing their best without the expertise they need, to interpret what little direction they’ve been given. Their bureaucratic inputs are: one (1) mandate letter, one (1) Davos speech, and a central narrative of trade investment delivered immediately, at the expense of all else. The resulting policy output so far is inconsistent, incoherent interpretation based on skills, topic, team capacity and I suspect a bit of personal opinion. On the output end, there’s also little oversight because there’s little central interest or bandwidth to worry about small potatoes like this.

But the small potatoes are being noticed. Other countries are beginning to privately view us as gauche and obstructionist at times. We’re newbies to this whole sovereignty thing, and we’ve come out of the gate too hot. We need to moderate in places. To ensure our immediate push for sovereignty isn’t preventing us achieving longer term partnerships and collective goals. And we need more political direction and oversight before this gets out of hand.

“We should give some money sure, but aid is 30% of the budget and that’s far too much”

If you’ve worked in public engagement on development for more than five minutes, you’ve heard focus group feedback like this. If you’ve worked in public engagement on development for 35 years, you’ve heard endless focus group feedback like this.

And in fact, if you’ve worked in any form of redistributionist policy, you could replace ‘aid’ with ‘benefits’, or ‘social assistance’, and the feedback would be equally familiar.

Very generally, median beliefs on redistribution are consistent over time. People theoretically support helping others under specific conditions. Yet when these conditions are met, they often find another reason they don’t support redistribution.

When those specific conditions are ‘people like me’, support goes up. “Other people” waste money. On soda, cigarettes, Sky TV, junk food or whatever other topical small-but -luxury good that poor people shouldn’t be allowed.

And in any case, it’s not the principle of it, it’s the sheer amount of spending. For 40 years, the public has vastly over-estimated how much their governments spend on aid, welfare or direct benefits. And each country has a strawperson cause from which aid allegedly steals. In Canada, it’s clean water on indigenous reserves. In the UK, it’s the homeless.

“Once we solve homelessness here, then we can be generous to others”

“Great, so you support more funding for Housing First and addiction support?”

“Oh hell no, the lazy layabouts should get a job”

People’s views are inherently contradictory. They say aid is wasteful and corrupt, but also say it’s shameful to cut aid. They care about the moral stain when their country’s aid cuts lead to deaths. They are proud of ‘their’ aid workers helping others. When the question is framed right, we can get a poll with 85% support for aid increases. It’s a reminder that people individually are generally kind, fighting battles we know nothing about, and trying to do their best with what they have.

And so, when I saw new aid polling this month, I sighed a little because it was largely the same old. But then I saw a new concept buried at the bottom of a slide. It was glossed over, as an ancillary finding. But it’s a critical new insight.

It was an explicit statement that people no longer want to change their minds on aid. In the past, when provided with facts on aid during a focus group, people grudgingly acknowledged softening their opinions as a result. Yes reluctantly, because changing our minds is not a factual process and nobody likes to ‘admit’ to being wrong. But overall, for example, when told aid was actually only 1% of the government budget, they accepted this as proportionate. Or when told that their help saved the lives of 30,000 babies, they felt proud.

Apparently no longer. For the first time I’ve seen, people explicitly named what many of us have felt for some time. They do not want to be confronted with the facts, because they do not want to change their minds. They want their priors reinforced, and when provided with facts that run counter to their beliefs, the facts are either unwelcome or wrong.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I worry as voters turn inwards in the face of a frightening, fragile external environment, they’re encouraged to find comforting scapegoats in ‘others’. Immigrants, poor people, trans people, Black people, people in other countries. The comfort derived from this is protective, and for the first time, people are telling us openly they enjoy the feeling of having their (often racist, let’s be honest here) priors reinforced.

I suspect in part, we’re seeing the impact of our ability to seal ourselves in media echo chambers. Of our ability to curate a perfect information ecosystem that only feeds us comfort, and in doing so, pushes us further down an algorithm-driven ideological rabbit hole. It’s not just the phenomenon of watching a benign YouTube nature documentary and six suggested videos later, you’re somehow watching a rant about White Replacement Theory. I suspect it’s also the sycophantic style of Artificial Intelligence, and dark money funded outrage content across social media.

If this nugget is replicable, it begs the question, do we no longer consider as genuine the public’s conditions under which they’d support aid? Are our myth-busting efforts a fool’s errand? We used to think if we got the facts in front of people, they’d change their minds. The challenge was how to do that effectively and at scale. Now, the bigger challenge seems to be that people find it deeply comforting to indulge their priors, and are not just immune to facts, but facts may actually harden their existing their beliefs.