Trudeau suggests shift away from humanitarian aid toward financing infrastructure | 24CA News

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is signalling a shift away from humanitarian support towards funding infrastructure tasks in creating nations.

“A lot of it is less around humanitarian development, in my conversations with the Global South, and much more about, well, how can you create investments in renewable energies that’s going to last the next 20 years?” Trudeau stated final week in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press.

“How are you going to build resilient infrastructure that’s not going to be wiped out by the next hurricane or landslide or heavy rains, or whatever it is?

“These conversations are shifting, however we’ll proceed to very a lot be current in investments within the Global South.”

Canada’s humanitarian aid sector is closely watching next spring’s budget to see how the Liberals interpret their own commitment to keep raising humanitarian spending each year.

The Liberals have held that promise since taking office in 2015 and Trudeau instructed International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan a year ago to “enhance Canada’s worldwide growth help yearly.”

The Liberals had earmarked an annual $6.6 billion in aid before the COVID-19 pandemic. They boosted that target beyond $8 billion, largely for programs related to fighting the impacts of COVID-19, and then this year also to help Ukraine and its neighbours.

With Ottawa warning of a possible recession, the sector is unclear on whether the Liberals intend to use the pre-pandemic spending as their benchmark.

The sector hopes they will instead top up the more generous baseline.

“The feminist coverage that the Trudeau authorities has put in place is having a terrific affect, however we have to preserve going,” said Louis Belanger, a former Liberal staffer who now advocates for Canadian humanitarian groups through the group Bigger Than Our Borders, backed by major charities.

“We have a particularly strong coverage in place that may be very a lot welcome within the creating world and with civil society right here in Canada,” Belanger said. “It has (made) an enormous distinction … when it comes to ladies’s rights, when it comes to ladies’s well being, when it comes to women’ schooling.”

Aid groups worldwide and development banks are particularly concerned about western countries diverting their traditional grants to help Ukraine cope with the impact of Russia’s February invasion.

Belanger said aid from Canada and its partners has helped countries nearly reach the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and Belanger say those nearly filled gaps now risk cratering.

“We have to preserve going, and never go backwards. So it is worrying to listen to that there could also be a development backwards, as an alternative of going ahead,” Belanger said.

Yet Trudeau said leaders of developing countries have been asking him less about humanitarian aid and more about investments in projects that will last decades, such as renewable energy projects and bridges or roads that can withstand hurricanes or landslides.

He said the West heard a wake-up call following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when countries like Canada asked developing countries to isolate Russia. Trudeau summarized the response as: “They’re the one ones exhibiting as much as spend money on our infrastructure.”

Pledges to invest in Global South

In June, G7 countries pledged to invest $600 billion US in the Global South, with a focus on climate-resilient infrastructure, health systems and digital economies. The pledge was widely seen as a counterbalance to programs like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has seen Beijing become a major player in Africa.

That paved the way for Canada’s announcement in November of $750 million for a Crown corporation to leverage the private sector to finance infrastructure projects in Asia over three years, starting next March.

The funding is part of the Indo-Pacific strategy and will be administered by FinDev Canada, which previously had only a mandate to finance private-sector projects in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

“I feel there was a collective understanding, one thing Canada has lengthy identified, that we’re all related, north and south,” Trudeau said.

He noted that developing countries took the spotlight at numerous summits, such as the Organization of American States meeting in October and the Commonwealth meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, this past June.

“The emphasis that we placed on the Global South was extra strong and extra actual than we ever had earlier than,” Trudeau said.

In a separate interview, Sajjan said that humanitarian funding is already helping to pay for things like solar power in rural Jordan.

“If you need to forestall the shocks of local weather change, we have to do issues in a different way within the Global South,” he said.

“The prime minister is concentrated on ensuring that we have a look at the long-term capacity-building inside these nations.”

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis, the international development critic for his party, said he’s open to Ottawa using its aid dollars in any way that improves livelihoods abroad.

“It needs to be about outcomes, and the outcomes that this authorities have achieved leaves so much to be desired,” he said.

Genuis noted the government has said it may take a year to meet a House of Commons committee’s request to change anti-terrorism laws that have barred humanitarians from working in Afghanistan. He said government programs have overly favoured multilateral organizations over Canada-based aid groups, which he argues are more effective at raising money and spending it wisely.

In any case, Genuis said a deeper focus on FinDev Canada would be better than having Ottawa keep contributing to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is controlled by China.

“Our engagement round infrastructure within the creating world should not be advancing the Chinese authorities’s strategic pursuits. It needs to be by way of bilateral partnerships with nations that assist to strengthen Canada’s presence and relationship with these nations,” he said.

“We’re on this new world of intense competitors between the free world and revisionist powers. That context underlines the essential significance of engagement with the creating world.”

‘A terrible mistake,’ NDP critic says

Heather McPherson, the NDP’s international development critic, said any shift away from foreign aid toward financing private-sector infrastructure projects will likely benefit Canadian corporations more than people facing the brunt of humanitarian crises.

“It’s an enormous, enormous missed alternative and a horrible mistake,” she said.

“The local weather disaster, inflation, inequality — all of these items are huge challenges that may require a global or a worldwide response. And we as Canadians are more and more forgetting the function that our authorities should play.”

McPherson added it’s crucial that Canada supports Ukraine but that shouldn’t come at the expense of helping developing countries push back on poverty and build resiliency to climate chaos.

“That is the worst state of affairs of stealing from Peter to pay for Paul and it’ll come again to hang-out us multiple-fold.”

Belanger said the world will likely be watching how Trudeau proceeds. He is currently co-chairing the United Nations advocates group for the Sustainable Development Goals, together with Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

“We have made investments in human rights which might be no much less essential than an funding in infrastructure,” Belanger said.

He argued girls in developing countries need to have schools they can attend.

“It’s good to have good roads for the varsity bus, however not if the varsity bus is empty.”