Struggling for Effectiveness

The overarching message of Struggling for Effectiveness is that Canada's foreign aid policy has lacked a clear and inspiring vision for quite some time. The result of this absence of vision has been policy incoherence, which implies that Canada will remain a "middle of the pack" country in the area of foreign aid for the foreseeable future. The objective of the book is twofold: to identify precisely where Canada's shortcomings lie and to offer advice and potential solutions for raising Canada from its middle status. While the authors largely succeed in the former task, their ability to make progress on the latter is limited by the overly critical focus of much of the volume. Indeed, the vast majority of contributors focus on policy failings since Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party came to (minority) power. Rare exceptions to this focus on Harper's failings are found in [Stephen Brown]'s critique of the contraction of Canada's aid budget under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (95) and [David Black]'s acknowledgement in a chapter titled "Between Indifference and Idiosyncrasy: The Conservatives and Canadian Foreign Aid to Africa" that the Liberals presided over the deepest cuts in the history of the Canadian aid program (248). While this book may not have been edited according to a political agenda, it certainly reflects the contentious domestic politics of Canada of the past decade. Furthermore, David Black criticizes Canada's new emphasis on maternal and child health by arguing that this focus "comes effectively at the expense of a broader commitment toward poverty reduction" (261). Given that the relationship between aid and poverty remains unclear, in spite of decades of research, and that infant mortality is often used as an indicator of poverty, the basis for this critique is unclear.1 While acknowledging that "the aim of the government of Canada in spearheading a G8 initiative of this sort seems to reflect a legitimate concern for a significant challenge in the developing world," Liam Swiss also criticizes Canada's focus on maternal and child health for being "a tool to achieve broader foreign policy aims" (142). The full extent of Canada's challenges in its efforts to lead internationally in foreign aid is reflected in the wide array of aid goals that this volume addresses: among them, promoting gender equality, regulating corporate mining practices in Latin America, cooperating with Canadian nongovernmental organizations, and provid