Canada’s Coercive Diplomacy: How the Liberals Impose the Woke Agenda on Developing Countries
"Climate, contraception and the queer-nexus. This unlikely triad of foreign assistance priorities has become the face of Canada in the developing world...
The
words “development assistance” probably conjure up images of Canadian
specialists overseeing the provision of clean water in dirt-poor rural
areas, conducting immunizations of vulnerable children, building roads,
planning much-needed energy infrastructure in regions that still use
dung fires and candle-light, constructing new schools, fighting forest
fires, or organizing and staffing colleges that turn out agronomists,
foresters, hydrologists, engineers and so on. In other words, doing the
things needed to, first, address crises that are killing people and
shortening lives, and second, providing poor countries the tools needed
to lift themselves out of poverty over the long term.
But
if these were ever the priorities, they have been deliberately cast
aside. In 2017, then Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of
International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau produced a 77-page policy
document, Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy. The paper is explicitly calibrated to the United Nations-sponsored Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The Agenda, a multilateral agreement signed by Canada in 2015,
describes itself as “a global blueprint…to achieve gender equality,
reach net zero emissions, halt and reverse nature loss, build resilient
and inclusive societies and economies, and make sure everyone has access
to quality education and health care.”
Like the 2030 Agenda, Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy
advocates an “intersectionality” that ties together climate action and
feminism. Bibeau described it as a “new vision for international
assistance” and proclaimed that Canada should play “a leading
international role.” In her preface to the document, Freeland wrote
that, “Canadians are safer and more prosperous when more of the world
shares our values.” For the average Canadian, the word “values” probably
brings to mind things like a commitment to democracy, individual
equality, tolerance of minorities and religions, or being left at
liberty to pursue a livelihood and build a family. But those are
apparently not the most important values of the people who plan and
implement Canada’s foreign assistance effort
Freeland
performed a nifty conceptual shuffle by moving from the innocuous
statement that “women’s rights are human rights” to an explication that
those rights include “sexual and reproductive rights – and the right to
access safe and legal abortions,” and then to the pronouncement that,
“These rights are at the core of our foreign policy.” In Freeland’s
world Canadian “values” – and the values Canada seeks to transmit to
other countries – are focused in very particular areas and skew towards a
particular end of the ideological spectrum. Whatever your view is on
contraception and abortion rights, the idea that sexual and reproductive
“health and rights” are top-tier Canadian values, should drive foreign
assistance funding and lie at the “core” of the nation’s foreign policy
should surely all be matters for serious public scrutiny and debate.
The
money was fairly quick to follow the policy directives flowing from the
2017 paper. In 2019, Trudeau announced that Canada would spend $14
billion to “support women and girls’ health around the world”, with half
of the funds earmarked for sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The funding envelope was to extend for 10 years. The $1.4 billion per
year represents 9 percent of the approximately $16 billion Canada spent on
foreign assistance in fiscal 2023 and 79 percent of the amount
allocated to health. The Liberals’ most recent budget includes a further
$4.2 billion over six years for the provision of contraception and
abortion globally. This funding was included in the section of the
budget document entitled “Upholding Canadian Values Around the World.”
It
appears the ideological commitment to what is always termed “modern
contraception” and abortion as the tickets to women’s freedom and
economic independence precedes engagement with the countries in which
Global Affairs is involved. David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador
to China under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has consistently hammered
away at this point. “Far from deploying Canadian aid workers to African
countries to listen, learn and craft policies that promote development
in line with local goals and aspirations,” Mulroney said in an e-mail
interview, “Canada simply transfers funds to its likeminded partners in
multilateral organizations, progressive foundations, and the big
abortion providers like Planned Parenthood.”
In many cases, Global Affairs is not doing the development work but
outsources it to agenda-driven, left-leaning non-governmental
organizations (NGO) whose missions align with that of the current
government...
Given
the level of funding that many of these organizations receive, and the
close ideological affinity between the two parties, they cross the line
from NGO to QUANGO, or quasi-non-governmental organization (better terms
might be “pseudo-governmental organization” or “government proxy”). One
example is Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, also known as
Planned Parenthood Canada. The organization disclosed in its 2022-2023 financial statements that close to 60 per cent of its annual funding is derived from government sources.
Much
of the program funding is designated for sex-ed, which is couched in
grant-writing language as a matter of access to reproductive rights. But
the curriculum developed for these subsidized programs is not comprised
of straightforward biology lessons with age-appropriate information
about available forms of contraception. The keyword is “comprehensive”
sexual education (CSE), which follows a “pleasure-based”
methodology. The “right” to sexual pleasure – to “satisfy yourself”, as
a Zambian government document aimed at children puts it – is now one of
the reproductive rights children are being taught they are entitled to.
In
2020, Global Affairs funded a four-year, $11 million project with
Action Canada and the International Planned Parenthood Federation
entitled “Rights from the Start” that targeted four South American
countries: Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana and Peru. To take a few selected
development indicators, less than 20 percent of Ecuador’s road system is paved. The average life expectancy in Bolivia was 63.6 years in 2021 – and falling. Guyana’s was slightly higher – but also falling. Peru ranks 129th worldwide in the number of motor vehicles per capita.
But
these nuts and bolts issues aren’t of any concern to the Action Canada
project, which instead lists a number of expected “gender equality
outcomes”, including the “strengthened capacity of partner organizations
to develop and implement advocacy plans for the fulfilment of human
rights comprehensive sexuality education.”
Abortion,
interestingly, is illegal in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, except for
cases of rape, incest or endangerment to the mother’s life, and illegal
after eight weeks’ gestation in Guyana. It is not a big leap to conclude
that the choice of those four countries upon which to push unrestricted
abortion is not accidental and that Global Affairs is essentially
funding an activist group to lobby a foreign government to effect legal
and political changes there. Whatever one thinks of abortion and how
freely available it should be, such programs appear to cross the line
from “development assistance” to ideologically driven political
agitation.
The queer-nexus (aka LGBTQ2SI) funding also sees Global Affairs
outsourcing program delivery to advocacy groups. In 2019 – the year
Trudeau announced the $14 billion for women’s health – Bibeau announced
$30 million over five years and $10 million in every subsequent year “to
advance human rights and improve socio-economic outcomes for LGBTQ2
people in developing countries.” We are now a very long way from
building the proverbial water well in the poor village – let alone one
that’s available to every villager. Canada is instead targeting its
expertise and its taxpayers’ funds at particular types
of people deemed worthy of help – and they happen to be the very sorts
of people the Trudeau Liberals also favour in their domestic policies.
Under an agreement entitled LGBTI Pathways, Global Affairs last year granted over $1 million to ILGA World
(the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex
Association) “to improve the lives of LGBTI persons across the world.”
How was this goal to be achieved? Largely, it seems, by teaching global
LGBTI organizations how to lobby for more funding. The project’s two
expected outcomes were “enhanced awareness of donors on the priorities,
strategies, and funding gaps of the international and regional LGBTI
movements…and an increased capacity of LGBTI-led organizations…to
advocate with donors to influence policy making and funding strategies.”
The same year, Global Affairs gave nearly $500,000 to Égides,
a Francophone non-profit, to advance the “Rights and Well-being of
LBTQI+ Women and Girls in West Africa and International Spaces.” Also in
2023, a Global Affairs-funded agreement with Rainbow Railroad, a U.S.
and Canada based non-profit that “helps at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to
safety worldwide,” provided $700,000 to conduct a meta-analysis, convene
roundtables and hold a “3-day conference on policy issues related to
forced displacements in a Global South transit country.”
One
might think it would be hard to tie feminism, sexual liberation, queer-
and transgenderism, foreign policy and climate policy all together but,
according to the Government of Canada,
“environment and climate action is a pillar of” the Feminist
International Assistance Policy. Why would that be? “Research has
shown,” the document continues, “that climate change and environmental
degradation disproportionately affect women and girls, and that women
and girls can be powerful agents of change if given access and control
over environmental resources. Since the introduction of the [Feminist
Policy], Canada has strengthened its work at the nexus of gender and
climate action.” This has become a standard intersectional verbal slide
of ministers and apparatchiks.
The
Liberal policy also is being pushed by Canada’s left-wing opposition
parties. In late May, NDP MP Laurel Collins addressed the House of
Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, saying
(at 16:00 in the linked video for May 23), “Climate emergencies are not
gender neutral. The degradation of ecosystems disproportionately
impacts women and girls, and I am wildly emotional. This is the
existential crisis of our time.”
Whether
it is actually occurring or not, this “existential crisis” is certainly
costly, already resulting in the transfer of large amounts of money
from taxpayers in the Frozen North. Canada is currently on the tail end
of a five-year, $5.3 billion International Climate Finance Program that encourages recipient countries to adopt practices that may not even be to their benefit.
A
portion of those billions was, for example, allotted to the Canadian
Foodgrains Bank, which received $35 million to undertake a project
entitled “Nature Positive Food Systems for Climate Change Adaptation.”
The project “aims to improve low carbon, climate-resilient economies in
rural areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe for enhanced
well-being of communities, especially women, girls, and other vulnerable
groups.”
The average life expectancy at birth in these four countries is, incidentally, five-and-a-half to seven years longer
for women than men, suggesting men might actually be the “vulnerable
group”. Instead, men presumably will be left to fend for themselves in
the allegedly hotter, drier, more hostile and unpredictable climate that
is to come. Who knows, perhaps simply by stealing some of that
delicious “nature-positive food” that will be grown by all those
aid-receiving, longer-lived women and girls.
Even
were we to stipulate that women and girls in certain developing
countries are in greater need of Canadian largesse than their
shorter-lived male compatriots, the evidence doesn’t appear to matter
one way or the other, as the Liberals are immune to facts that undermine
their woke agenda. Consider war-torn Ukraine, a country whose men are
exposed to nearly all the risks of combat, do nearly all the fighting
and dying – with 200,000 killed or wounded (many of them permanently
crippled) since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 – and are subject to
special laws preventing men aged 18-60 from leaving Ukraine, while over 6
million Ukrainian women and girls have sought safety abroad.
Among its aid programs, Canada in February announced it would contribute $4 million
to help Ukraine remove some of the millions of dangerous mines sown
during the war. But instead of focusing on the technical aspects of
doing this difficult job safely and efficiently, i.e., getting the most
mines removed for the effort expended, Canada has pressured Ukraine to
ensure there are plenty of demining jobs for members of designated
groups – namely women and transgenders. Along with this
“gender-inclusive demining” aid, multiple other Canadian aid programs
also explicitly tell the Ukrainian recipient agencies to focus “in
particular [on] women and vulnerable groups” (other than men, of
course).
Returning to the issue of climate, there are plenty
of Africans who believe their continent is facing bigger and more
immediate problems than the threat of future climate change. Jusper
Machogu, for example, is a young Kenyan man who uses social media to
advocate “fossil fuels for Africa” because he believes Africans above
all need access to reliable, affordable energy. “Most people over here
don’t really know what [the UN’s] Sustainable Development Goals are
about or what the UN is truly doing in Africa,” Machogu says in a
lengthy interview. “They say that there are these 17 big problems that
Africans, or developing countries are facing. I’m surprised to see
climate change as one of those problems.”
Machogu
bristles at the hypocrisy of prosperous aid-giving countries now
expecting Africa to develop in an ideologically prescribed – and, he
argues, ineffective – manner. “There is no western nation that developed
minus oil, minus [natural] gas,” he notes. “The four pillars of modern
civilization are cement, fertilizer, plastics and steel.” This is the
core argument made in How the World Really Works, the
2022 book by Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the
Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba (Smil specifically
cited ammonia, a key constituent of fertilizer). Machogu says Africa
requires much more of each pillar – and all four in turn depend on large
amounts of plentiful, affordable and reliable energy to produce (with
fertilizer and steel also containing a fossil fuel as an ingredient).
In
addition, natural gas and propane are much cleaner-burning fuels than
the wood and dung still used by millions for cooking and heating.
There’s even a gender-equity dimension, notes journalist Anthony Furey in a recent column:
millions of African women and girls spend hours each day walking in
search of wood fuel and carrying it back home. Making fossil fuels
widely available at reasonable cost could begin to liberate them from
this drudgery while improving air quality in homes and villages.
But
instead of helping Africa develop more of its significant oil and
natural gas potential, Western nations and multilateral institutions are
relentlessly pushing wind and solar power. “They say we’re going to get
you loans, but if we’re going to give you a loan, you must invest in
renewable energy,” says Machogu. “When they say renewable energy, they
don’t mean hydro or geothermal. Power usually means solar and wind.”
He is certainly right about Global Affairs Canada. A recent analysis by the Epoch Times
shows that aid for renewable energy was the fastest-rising category of
foreign assistance, reaching $555 million in fiscal 2023, and expected
to rise further in the coming years. Virtually zero was allocated to
natural gas or even nuclear energy, which emits no carbon dioxide while
generating electricity. Meanwhile, spending on traditional
bread-and-butter areas like transportation, storage and disaster risk
reduction has been cut sharply in recent years.
Machogu
remains unconvinced that solar and wind power – which are expensive,
intermittent and unreliable – are the solution for Africa. “What’s going
to make an average African rich?” he asks rhetorically. “Solving
agriculture. Today about six to seven out of 10 Africans rely on
agriculture for their livelihood. How do we solve agriculture? Of
course, we need fossil fuels. We need farm machinery. We need
irrigation. We need nitrogenous fertilizers. That’s what the crop needs
to grow or to do better.”
But
on this issue, Canada is as stubborn as the EU, the World Bank and
other international organizations with which its policies are aligned,
refusing to provide any loans or other financial assistance for oil and
natural gas development in Africa. As Machogu notes, even hydroelectric
dams – a foundation of the electricity networks in numerous Western
countries, especially Canada – are now virtually anathema. Ethiopia, for
example, recently began producing power from the enormous Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the fabled Blue Nile, and wishes to build several more dams on other rivers. It seems a reasonable goal, as barely half of its population has access to electricity.
And
yet while this dam site was originally surveyed using U.S. aid money in
the 1960s, Western nations bowed out of the project one by one, while
environmental groups as well as neighbouring Egypt fought vehemently
against it, and the World Bank now stubbornly pushes
only wind, solar and geothermal power. So Ethiopia had to scratch
together funding from its own meagre public finances, from
crowd-funding, investment by dam employees and, finally, a $1 billion
loan from China. China unapologetically uses aid to advance its
geopolitical agenda while enriching Chinese construction companies and
equipment manufacturers to which some of the loan funds are tied. The
story has been similar on several other recent Ethiopian dam projects.
These are foreign policy win-wins for China, Ethiopia gets its dams –
and Western nations look arrogant and inept.
Canada’s Liberal Party prides itself on its woke bona fides.
From the early days of Trudeau’s appointment of a gender-equitable
Cabinet “because it’s 2015” to its intimate ties with Canada 2020, the
self-described “upstart think-tank for Canada’s progressive community”,
the current government understands itself as a standard-bearer of
progressivism. Most Canadians know that by now; but most perhaps don’t
know that this agenda extends to pretty much every South American or
African village where Canadian aid money finds its way.
After
one recovers from the eye-watering – and rising – amounts of money that
the federal government is spending on climate, contraception and the
queer-nexus triad, the next question is, is it money well-spent? Even if
you are ideologically aligned with the goals, are the people Canada’s
government favours in developing countries – women, girls and LGBTQI+ –
less poor than they were before? More climate-resilient? Eating
nature-positive foods? Where is any bang for the billions of Canadian
bucks? In what world could this magic be brought into effect, one where
reducing the carbon footprint, providing contraception and changing the
mores in developing countries increases the safety and wealth not only
of the (sometimes unwilling) recipients, but of Canadians (as Freeland claimed her policy aims to do)?
The
experience of other aid-giving countries suggests such an approach does
not work and eventually may even backfire in the donor country.
Freeland and Bibeau may have taken their lead in crafting the 2017
Feminist International Assistance Program from Sweden, which in 2014 had
adopted a similar policy directive. Perhaps Global Affairs Canada
should look once more to the Nordic country, because in 2022 Sweden
announced it was abandoning its feminist foreign policy. Tobias
Billström, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, that year told the
newspaper Aftonbladet
that, “Gender equality is a fundamental value in Sweden and also for
this government, but we’re not going to continue with a feminist foreign
policy because the label obscures the fact the Swedish foreign policy
must be based on Swedish values and Swedish interests.”
Something
needs to give in Canada as well, because not only is the current
approach not working, there’s at least some evidence it’s angering more
and more people in aid-receiving countries. Groups have been founded, in
fact, specifically to oppose Western aid if it comes with too high an ideological price.
Obianuju Ekeocha is a Nigerian scientist and founder of Culture of Life Africa,
an organization that seeks to push back against what it terms
“unbelievable cultural pressure that is beginning to erode and alter the
trajectory of the African cultural values of life, marriage,
motherhood, family and faith.” She has written and spoken extensively on
the misalignment between the actual needs and desires of African women
and the funding priorities of Western nations. To her, the 21st
century coercive diplomacy and haughty ideological conditions evoke
sinister overtones of relations in past centuries. “Many Western leaders
have revealed themselves to be modern colonial masters, threatening to
withdraw aid from countries such as Nigeria and Uganda unless they
accept their global sexual agenda,” Ekeocha writes in her 2018 book Target Africa: Ideological Neo-Colonialism Of The Twenty-First Century.
Machogu,
for his part, goes even further. “I think it boils down to [a goal of]
depopulation,” is his stark assessment. “They’re trying to keep Africa
poor.”"
Wokeness is about sexualising children in the developing world too, not just the West
