- The International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, an organization created by and responsible to Parliament, has been brought to the edge of destruction by the Harper government’s appointment of staff and board members bent on constricting the work of the organization. At question initially were three small grants to human rights organizations in the Middle East, taken to be “anti-Israeli”. Several Board members resigned in protest because of governmental manipulation, including Sima Samar, former deputy president of Afghanistan and a noted human-rights campaigner. Executive Director Remi Beauregard died of a heart attack shortly after a stormy board meeting, and several staff were fired following the appointment of a successor, someone with close ties to the government’s agenda;
- CIDA announced in 2009 that it had halted all funding to the ecumenical church-sponsored NGO Kairos, saying that its work did not “fit” with CIDA priorities. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said during a speech in Israel that the reason had to do with the government’s “zero tolerance” policy towards ant-Semitism, referring apparently to Kairos’s position on Israeli human right abuse in the West Bank, and mistaking the Canadian Kairos for another organization by the same name;
- CIDA has taken a different approach with the Montreal-based organization, Alternatives which, unlike Kairos, has called for a boycott of Israel as a way of bringing attention to the Palestinian crisis. An application for renewed funding from CIDA in April 2009 has simply gone unanswered. Despite many calls and letters, Alternatives has effectively been ignored by CIDA and starved of funding;
- The government is considering the creation of a new “Canadian Democracy promotion Agency” with a large budget (estimated at between $30 and $70 million) and a very narrow mandate “to establish or strengthen pluralistic democratic institutions, particularly political parties…” Work on the agency is moving forward, although there is widespread concern among parliamentary organizations, human rights bodies and NGOs that the proposal is ill considered, and may eclipse the work of many Canadian organizations already working in the field;
- The government has stated that maternal and child health will be a centrepiece of Canadian development assistance. No sooner was this announced than questions were asked about women’s reproductive health and rights, and whether Canada would promote the same rights for women in developing countries as those available to women in Canada. CIDA Minister Bev Oda has refused to answer the questions, leading many to fear that Canada will adopt the approach of the Bush administration in the United States: no funding to any organizations that promote family planning, and a curtailment of support to any health or medical facility that condones abortion.
In Canada’s 2005 International Policy Statement, “good governance” was taken to mean several things: democratization, human rights, the rule of law, and public sector capacity building. Historically these have emerged as different streams in Canadian policy and programming, with different emphases at different times. Human rights has the longest record, perhaps because as a discipline it is well articulated internationally, and it has deep and honourable, if vexed roots in Canada’s domestic history.1 The international application of a human rights policy has been at times principled and at other times situational. Concerns about Indonesian human rights violations in East Timor, for example, were not allowed to interfere with the sale of weapons and other commodities. But Canada took a principled position on South African apartheid in the mid 1980s, one that put a Conservative Canadian government at odds with its conservative counterparts in the United States and Britain.
As an explicit tool in the ODA arsenal, “governance” has a more recent provenance, emerging largely from economic structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and what became known as the “Washington Consensus”. Canada was an eager member of this consensus, which emphasized cutbacks to the state in some areas without much thought about state strengthening in other areas where it was badly needed. It is only in the past decade that the need to build state capacities has been seen as an important part of governance, a position that Canada now strongly endorses.
The promotion of democracy and democratic processes emerged as the most recent part of Canada’s good governance agenda in the mid 1990s. This too has been somewhat situational, although the ambiguities are not as striking as in US policies, where there are stark everyday tradeoffs between, for example, the promotion of human rights and the detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, or between support for democracy and human rights, and the desire for friends in countries such as oil and gas-rich Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, both of which run serious deficits in democracy and human rights.
Some critics of Canada’s approach to governance lament the absence of coherent policies tying all aspects of the agenda together. A patchy, project-by-project approach with no obvious central policy and no central management, they say, is unlikely to yield coherent results. This may be true, but given the overwhelming size of the governance agenda and the limited track record in its promotion by any donor, healthy doses of humility and caution are warranted, along with a good set of brakes in the expectations department. Given the complexity of the challenge, a case can be made for selective interventions, made in concert with other donors, aimed at learning what works and what does not.
The apparent absence in Canada, however, of a place where the lessons can be rolled up, spelled out, shared and remembered, works against the learning that is so badly needed in this field. This is a role that the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development could have played, but did not. Instead of pushing it to do so, however, the government has effectively wrecked it, because it disagreed with one small part of its program. It has sought to silence other Canadian organizations with which it disagrees, and plans to create a new agency that will presumably do its bidding without demur.
The issue here is not the Middle East. The issue is Canada, Canadian pluralism, Canadian democracy and freedom of expression. The government is under no obligation to support positions taken by others if it disagrees with them, but the heavy-handed emasculation and destruction of entire organizations sets a very dangerous precedent in Canada, with strong echoes of the abuse and bad governance that we have sought to mitigate elsewhere.
The world of 2010 is considerably more fraught with the outcomes of bad governance than anyone might have imagined when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989. War, human rights abuse and collapsing states in Asia and Africa inevitably have a real and significant impact on Canada, in much the way that war and collapsing European states did in the 1930s.
In the face of governance disasters in Haiti, Afghanistan, and two dozen other “failed” and “fragile” states, humility and caution are important watchwords for outsiders. Good governance, including respect for human rights, does not drop from the sky; it is not a gift; it cannot be imposed. Good governance is unlikely to flow from a collection of disparate, time-bound projects offered by a dozen ill-coordinated donors. It cannot be transferred holus-bolus like pizza from a delivery truck. It must be earned and learned, not just by those for whom it is intended, but by those who would help them. Effective application of the full governance agenda as we now understand it is still pretty much undocumented, untested and uncoordinated. And it is far too young for dogmatism and certainty.
It is old enough, however, that mistakes should not be repeated. And it is important enough that lessons, both positive and negative, should be documented, learned, remembered, and applied. For democratic governments that want to encourage some of their values elsewhere, doing this well is a test of their own understanding of, and commitment to, principles of democratic good governance.
1 See, for example, Ross Lambertson, Repression and Resistance: Canadian Human Rights Activists 1930-1960, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2005 [back]
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