International co-operation minister Aileen Carroll called last week “a wonderful week for foreign aid in Canada” as the government affirmed a promise to add $3.4 billion to its foreign aid spending over five years, a doubling of the budget.
Aid groups were not as impressed.
“While (finance minister Ralph) Goodale’s announcement to lock in eight percent increases to the international assistance envelope to 2010 gives certainty to the funds that will be available, it unfortunately falls dramatically short of what is needed,” Gerry Barr of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation said in a statement after the Feb. 23 federal budget.
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Government officials said that while aid spending will double, it will not really move Canada closer to its official aid goal of spending 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product on international assistance, established in 1969.
“At the end of this, we will be in the 0.30 to 0.35 percent range,” the official said at a background briefing.
After sharp cuts in the aid budget during then-finance minister Paul Martin’s campaign against the deficit in the late 1990s, Canada’s aid spending fell to the 0.25 percent range of GDP.
The official said that in the current fiscal year, with spending on the Asian tsunami relief effort and debt forgiveness to poor countries, Canada’s share of the economy devoted to aid has risen to the 0.30 percent range.
“This increase, considering the expected growth in the economy, will keep it pretty well where it is,” he said.
Conservative international development critic Ted Menzies said it was curious that Ottawa is lumping military spending with aid as part of its international commitments. As well, the cost of sending a special emergency disaster assistance team of soldiers to Sri Lanka is counted as aid spending.
“I don’t think it is right that we are counting troops, the DART team, as an aid expenditure,” Menzies said.
In the House of Commons, Carroll connected aid and military spending as international commitments.
“Because we are a balanced government and have assigned funding to the armed forces at a time when they need it, we have also done equal funding for aid,” she said.
