foundation of canada asia pacific - Content Tagged with

6
DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE
ODA for a
borderless world
59
Canadians are a generous people, both in our self-image and in the real world. We believe
in helping those less well off than ourselves. As a middle-sized economic power, and a
strong advocate of cooperative welfare programs, Canada has always sought to use some
of its national wealth to help the people of less developed countries through official
development assistance (ODA). Unfortunately, at a time of budget restraint, we have
been forced to curb our ambitions to match the resources available to meet them. This
has been a frustrating task. One result is that Canada’s ODA as a share of GNP has declined
sharply. From a high of 0.49% in 1991-92, the share fell to about 0.29% in 1998-99, the
lowest in almost 30 years. In that time, Canadian ODA to Asia fell more than 40%. It is
unlikely that the government will reach its commitment of allocating 0.7% of GNP to
ODA any time soon, even though it has pledged more resources to international assistance
in the 2000 budget. At the same time, there is a new challenge emerging for our
international assistance program which affects not only how much we spend on ODA, but
what it is we spend it on and how we deliver the aid. In the globalized economy, there
are new needs to meet and alternate ways of addressing them. This has seen a variety of
government departments and agencies become newly involved in international assistance
programs. It has reached a point where we must develop a partnership approach to the
delivery of aid so that different arms of the Canadian government do not overlap or compete
in the planning and delivery of projects.
Today, borders mean less than ever to the flow of goods and money. This applies to ODA
as much as it does to commerce. It means that Canada is sometimes helping developing
economies as a group or across a region rather than as individual countries, which are the
traditional focus of ODA. Cross-border needs that hardly existed a decade ago are now
attracting attention. To meet these new needs, Canada’s aid delivery has become more
diffuse, with many government departments and agencies increasingly involved in
international projects. Asia is at the centre of this evolution. The emergence of the
cooperative, if unfocused, approach of APEC to regional development has been the catalyst
for much of this change. Government departments which until a few years ago had a
purely domestic mandate are becoming involved in overseas cooperation projects, driven
by their participation in APEC working groups or reacting to international regulatory
requirements set out in agreements like the Kyoto Convention. One result is a growing
concern about overlapping commitments by different arms of government.