Canada and Africa in the New Millennium: The Politics of Consistent Inconsistency

By David R. Black

Chapter 5
David R. Black
Canadian Aid to Africa: The elusive search for purpose. 
Provides a historical account of development assistance as the most persistent and important basis for Canadian links with Africa. Shows how it can be explained as a manifestation of good international citizenship, western hegemonic objectives, and the narrative (re) construction of Canadian identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771120623

Book preview

Canada and Africa in the New Millennium

Canada & Africa in the New Millennium

The Politics of Consistent Inconsistency

David R. Black

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Black, David R. (David Ross), 1960–, author

         Canada and Africa in the new millennium : the politics of consistent inconsistency / David R. Black.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-060-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77112-062-3 (epub).—

ISBN 978-1-77112-061-6 (pdf)

           1. Canada—Foreign relations—Africa. 2. Africa—Foreign relations—Canada.

3. Canada—Politics and government—1993–2006. 4. Canada—Politics and government—2006–. I. Title.

FC244.A35B53 2015                             327.7106                         C2014-905560-9

                                                                                                      C2014-905561-7

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Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover image by The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick. Text design by James Leahy.

© 2015 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Theorizing Canadian Policy toward Africa

2 Canada, the G8, and Africa: The Rise and Decline of a Hegemonic Project

3 Africa as Serial Morality Tale in Canadian Foreign Policy

4 Iconic Internationalists and the Representation of Canada in/through Africa

5 Canadian Aid to Africa: The Elusive Search for Purpose

6 Canada and Peace Operations in Africa: The Logic and Limits of Engagement

7 Canadian Extractive Companies in Africa: Exposing the Hegemonic Imperative (with Malcolm Savage)

8 Conclusion: Africa Policy and the End of Liberal Internationalism?

Appendix A: Canadian Bilateral Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa 1990–2010

Appendix B: United Nations Peace Support Missions since 1990

Appendix C: Key Canadian Contributions to Peace Operations in Africa since 1990

Notes

References

Index

Preface

As this book was being finalized, around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, another acute humanitarian and political crisis was unfolding in another small, landlocked central African country. When this preface was being written, the renewed crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) had already displaced nearly a million of the country’s 4.5 million people and generated an appalling catalogue of atrocity crimes, mainly committed along sectarian lines. African Union (AU) and French forces were already on the ground, but insufficient given the magnitude and complexity of the crisis. The UN Security Council had authorized a nearly 12,000-person peacekeeping force to be deployed by mid-September 2014. Meanwhile in Ottawa in late April, Canadian government representatives expressed their extreme concern and condemnation of the atrocities, and asserted that Canada was pulling its weight with a C$16 million contribution of humanitarian assistance and C$5 million contribution in support of the AU and French operations, but were evasive about the possibility of any direct involvement in the planned peacekeeping force. At the same time, six CF-18 fighters and accompanying military personnel had been quickly deployed to bolster NATO’s presence in the context of the political crisis in the Ukraine, and 500 election observers were being sent to monitor the Ukrainian elections. At this relatively early stage at least, there was a more or less directly proportional mismatch between the human costs of the crisis in the CAR on the one hand, and the economic, human, and security resources deployed to the Ukraine on the other.

We cannot know at the time this is being written how either of these crises will unfold, but the response thus far has been telling—particularly in light of previous Canadian contributions to peacekeeping operations in both Rwanda during the genocide, and the Central African Republic subsequently (MINURCA, 1998–2000). It would be easy to conclude, based on these observations, that there has been a decisive shift in the current Canadian government’s approach to African crises and challenges from that of its predecessors. There is considerable truth in this conclusion. At the same time, however, it runs the risk of overstating the differences, as well as the virtues, of previous governments, and of understating the significant ongoing limitations and inconsistencies that have marked Canada’s involvement in sub-Saharan Africa over time. It is this broader and more contextualized understanding that this book seeks to foster.

The research and writing of it has taken an inordinately long period of time. The reasons for this are unimportant; what matters is that, as a result of this lengthy process, I have many to thank for enabling me to get to this point. Essential financial assistance was provided by a Standard Research Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Dalhousie University. I am grateful to them all. In the course of my peripatetic research and writing process, I benefited greatly from the hospitality and insights of hosts in a number of locations: Ulf Engel in Leipzig and Berlin; Mary Breen in Addis Ababa; Oliver Jutersonke, Keith Krause, and Sandra Reimann at the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding in Geneva; and the Department of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand.

While this is clearly not an insider’s account, various Canadian, German, British, Ethiopian, and African Union practitioners (governmental and non-governmental) and analysts enriched my understanding. Interviewed on a non-attribution basis, they cannot be named but I am enormously grateful to them all for sharing their time and insights. While several dozen were interviewed for this particular project, many others have assisted with previous and related work, both formally and informally, and in doing so have also aided my understanding of the subject. It is my hope that the opportunities for interaction and exchange with public officials that scholars in my field rely on, but which have become constrained of late, will become more open and productive again in future.

Many friends and colleagues have read versions of the chapters that follow, and have provided valuable comments and critiques. They include: Bruno Charbonneau, Wayne Cox, Bob Edwards, David Hornsby, Chris Kukucha, Heather Smith, Tiffany Steel, and Paul Williams. A special thanks goes to partners in crime Stephen Brown and Molly den Heyer, both of whom read large portions of the manuscript (in Molly’s case, the whole thing) and provided sage advice, often in tight time frames. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for WLU Press, whose comments significantly strengthened the final product. Needless to say, any remaining errors of fact and judgment are entirely my own.

Chapter 2 is a revised and updated version of David Black, Canada, the G8, and Africa: The Rise and Decline of a Hegemonic Project? in Duane Bratt and Christopher J. Kukucha, eds., Readings in Canadian Foreign Policy: Classic Debates and New Ideas, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 2011). It is used with the permission of Oxford University Press. Much of Chapter 7 appeared originally in substantially different form in David Black and Malcolm Savage, Mainstreaming Investment: Foreign and Security Policy Implications of Canadian Extractive Industries in Africa, in Bruno Charbonneau and Wayne S. Cox, eds., Relocating Global Order: American Power and Canadian Security After 9/11 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). It is used with the permission of UBC Press. Portions of chapters 2 and 5 appeared originally in substantially different form in David Black, Between Indifference and Idiosyncracy: The Conservatives and Canadian Aid to Africa, in Stephen Brown, ed., Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). Thanks to the publishers for permission to use this material. Thanks as well to Lisa Quinn at WLU Press for her patience and ongoing confidence in this project.

Many current and former graduate students made indispensable contributions as research assistants and sounding boards. They have included: Jenny Baechler, Emily Colpitts, Sarah Dunphy, Jordan Guthrie, David Morgan, Ben O’Bright, Malcolm Savage (co-author on Chapter 7), and Carla Suarez. Working closely with graduate students has been one of the great, unanticipated pleasures of my job and I am grateful for all they have done to challenge and teach me.

A number of fellow travellers of more and less long-standing have provided ideas, support, and friendship through the long and sometimes lonely process of research and writing. More recently, I have benefited from the support and encouragement of a new generation of scholars deeply interested in Canada’s relationship(s) with Africa. They include Edward Akuffo, Bruno Charbonneau, David Hornsby, and Chris Roberts. Long-time friends have been sources of inspiration, encouragement, and good company in too many times and places to be accurately remembered—among them Erin Baines, Audie Klotz, Jane Parpart, Heather Smith, Claire Turenne Sjolander, Jean-Philippe Thérien, Susan Thomson, Rebecca Tiessen, and Janis van der Westhuizen. My earliest and longest companion on this intellectual journey, from Ginger’s in Halifax to the WUSC guest house in Gaborone, to Greenmarket Square in Cape Town, to the wilds of Waterloo, Ontario, has been Larry Swatuk. Here’s to the next steps in the journey!

Mentorship, for me at least, is a quality that is often unrecognized and underappreciated at first, but that unfolds, enriches, and inspires in enduring and surprising ways. Two Dalhousie mentors among many—Tim Shaw and Denis Stairs—have stood out in stimulating and shaping my ongoing interest in the subject of this book. Two more distant mentors—Cranford Pratt and Doug Anglin—might be surprised by the impact they have had, but continue to serve as inspirations.

Finally, my family has shared the many trials, distractions, and detours of the writing process. Through it all, they have kept me grounded and supported. This book is for Rory, Holly, Elizabeth, and Heather.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Canada has played an important role in bringing African issues onto the global agenda, within the G8 and other forums. We will continue to press forward, in close collaboration with other partners in Africa and with other donors, to support regional initiatives such as NEPAD.

—Government of Canada, International Policy Statement—A Role of Pride and Influence in the World: Development, 2005

In the last five years, the Conservatives have walked away from Africa… Canada must return to Africa. We must rejoin the fight against extreme poverty, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and the effects of climate change. And we must empower women—in Africa and across the developing world.

—Michael Ignatieff, Rebuilding Canada’s Leadership on the World Stage, Speech to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations, 2 November 2010

This year, joining the hundreds in the crowd [for the Africa Day celebration in Ottawa], were two noticeable additions from the past few years: Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Trade Minister Ed Fast. Members of the diplomatic corps and observers applauded the attendance of the two ministers, calling it unprecedented, with one Tory saying they joined the celebrations to drive forward Canada’s relations with the continent.

—Sneh Duggal, Debating the Beginnings of an African Strategy, 6 June 2012

Canada’s engagement with post-independence Africa presents a puzzle. On the one hand, much of the country’s identity and reputation as a good international citizen has rested on activism toward the continent, through diplomatic initiatives in multilateral organizations, through aid and humanitarian relief, through (more controversially) multilateral peace operations, and through the leadership of particular Canadian internationalists. Examples have included the roles played by John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney in relation to apartheid South Africa; the extraordinary response to the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s; Roméo Dallaire’s witness, and ongoing response, to the Rwandan genocide; and Jean Chrétien’s leadership in orchestrating the G8’s 2002 Africa Action Plan. On the other hand, critics have long noted the inconsistencies and contradictions of Canadian involvement in Africa: through erratic aid policies that benefit Canadians and reinforce inequities; through security policies that fail to match normative advocacy of high-minded principles with sufficient resources to realistically support them; and through large extractive industry investments that undermine local environments and human security. How are we to make sense of these inconsistencies and, more broadly, of the place of Africa in the Canadian political imagination? How, more specifically, do we explain a record that, as reflected in the epigraphs above, has oscillated within the past decade between aspirations toward global diplomatic leadership, through transparent indifference, to renewed interest and initiative?

This book seeks to make sense of the puzzle of Canadian involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. Though the focus is primarily on the period since the start of the new millennium, marked by the striking juxtaposition of Jean Chrétien’s G8 activism and Stephen Harper’s retreat from continental engagement, these comparatively recent trends are part of a longer history of consistent inconsistency, in which the prominent role of African issues in the Canadian political imagination has been in chronic tension with the country’s limited and contradictory role in addressing Africa’s multiple challenges.

No one interpretive frame can adequately explain this record. Rather, I will argue that three approaches must be combined to account for it. Canada’s involvement in Africa reflects, first, genuine instances of activist engagement, reflecting a more cosmopolitan or solidarist tradition of what international society theorists characterize as good international citizenship. These instances are the necessary foundation for two other, less celebratory theoretical accounts: Canada’s role as a benign face of, and key interlocutor for, western hegemonic interests in Africa; and Africa’s role as the basis for a resilient narrative concerning Canada’s ethical mission in the world, and thus a cornerstone of Canadian identity—a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The question that comes to the fore in light of the Harper government’s departure from the post-colonial pattern of Canadian involvement in Africa is whether this most recent phase should be understood as simply the latest oscillation in the historic pattern of consistent inconsistency, or a more fundamental break with—and retreat from—the liberal internationalist narrative of the Cold War and immediate post–Cold War periods? While this question is impossible to answer definitively, the framework developed in this book provides the basis for a more theoretically grounded account of what the Harper government has sought to change, and why. It also underscores the way in which Africa—though relatively marginal to Canadian interests as traditionally conceived—has served as an important marker of the wider characteristics of Canada’s international role.

In order to properly understand Africa’s place in Canada’s foreign relations, and Canada’s role in Africa, it is necessary to provide an account that encompasses the most important dimensions of Canadian involvement and their cumulative impact. Thus, in contrast to most previous treatments of Canada’s involvement in Africa, this book combines a focus on: multilateral, and particularly G8, diplomacy; foreign aid—the traditional touchstone of Canada’s continental role; security assistance through peace operations and training; and the role of Canadian extractive companies, which have become this country’s dominant and deeply controversial face in many parts of the continent. While it is impossible for one book to provide a comprehensive account of Canadian involvement in this huge and diverse region, it is essential that we move beyond views that extrapolate and generalize from isolated cases and issues.

The research for this book thus draws together comparative historical and thematic analyses of the key aspects of Canada’s African presence, and its place in the forging of Canadian identity. It aims to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of this country’s record and role. As well as secondary and journalistic sources, it is based on interviews and documentary research from publicly available sources, drawing on insights from Canadian practitioners and scholars as well as counterparts in the UK, Germany, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Thus, although my purpose is fundamentally interpretive, I hope that individual chapters will be sufficiently grounded to provide persuasive contributions to the thematic debates concerning Canada’s evolving roles in multilateral diplomacy, development assistance, peace operations, and the extractive sector.

The Contours of Consistent Inconsistency

There are two linked premises that underpin the analysis in this book. The first is that, particularly judged according to traditional Realist theoretical assumptions, sub-Saharan Africa has been and remains marginal to what would be regarded as core Canadian national interests. The second is that, notwithstanding (indeed partly because of) this apparent marginality, Canadian involvement in Africa has reflected a recurrent pattern of high-level engagement and intense media and popular focus followed, and sometimes accompanied, by a kind of collective amnesia or indifference. It is this pattern that I characterize as consistent inconsistency. Although the chapters that follow elaborate and explore these premises, they require some clarification at this initial stage.

Africa’s historic marginality to Canada and Canadians is a familiar theme that can be quickly summarized (see also C. Brown 2001, 195–98). Because Canada was not a colonial power in Africa, and was indeed itself a settler colony of Britain,¹ its historic linkages with Africa’s post-colonial governments and societies were limited and shallow, but also relatively untainted by perceptions of neo-colonialism. Closely related to this was the fact that geostrategically, Canadian interests on the continent were limited and largely derivative. From the perspective of Canadian defence and security policy, Canada’s core relationships were those formalized through the Western alliances of NATO and NORAD. Thus, for the first several post-decolonization decades, official Canada tended to view sub-Saharan Africa through the prism of the Cold War, and to manifest a particular sensitivity to the interests of its most important Western allies, including the UK, France, and the US. These motivations were both mitigated and facilitated by its dedication to the more inclusive manifestations of the post–Second World War multilateral order, including the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and, belatedly, la Francophonie. Economic linkages—the other critical dimension of what is traditionally construed as the national interest—have been consistently marginal in relative terms. Grant Dawson (2013, 15) has noted that trade with Africa remained between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of total Canadian trade in 1969, 1979, and 1989, and had declined to 0.5 percent by 1999, reflecting the dire effects of what was widely portrayed as Africa’s lost decade during the 1990s. Despite a decade of relatively rapid recovery and growth from 2000, marked particularly by the leading role of the Canadian extractive sector (see Chapter 7), Canadian exports to Africa still amounted to less than 1 percent of total exports in 2011, and around 3 percent of total imports (Schorr and Hitschfeld 2013, 139). Trans-societal linkages, through civil society organizations and, more recently, growing immigration and diasporas, were vibrant but secondary from the perspective of most political leaders and government officials. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most robust and consistent foundation for bilateral relations through the bulk of the post-decolonization era was development assistance or foreign aid, with Africa remaining the largest regional recipient of Canadian aid flows.

What is surprising, in light of this historical marginality, is the frequency with which Canada’s engagements in Africa have been seen as a top priority of Canadian governments, and/or as exemplars of Canada’s role and identity in the world. Yet interspersed with these exemplary moments were periods of what were widely perceived as disappointment, dereliction, and/or neglect. Both tendencies have been overstated in practice, but their consistent coexistence is at the root of the puzzle this book seeks to understand. In short, this pattern of consistent inconsistency can be identified both empirically and discursively, in mutually reinforcing ways.

Empirically, the most obvious instances of inconsistency can be located within Canadian aid policy. These have been reflected, above all, in the dramatic, medium-term swings in aid spending—from the major cuts of the mid-1990s, to the substantial reinvestments of the first decade of the twenty-first century, to the renewed cuts of the 2010s. Notably, these spending swings straddled governments of both Liberal and Conservative partisan stripes. Because Africa was, and remains, the most aid-dependent continent, the impact of these swings has been most acute in this region and the relationships it encompasses. But beyond these macro-level trends, there have been other, more routine inconsistencies: of thematic priorities, of country partnerships, and of administrative modalities (discussed at length in Chapter 5). The insidious impacts of these unstable priorities and practices mean that it is very difficult to arrive at a reasonable assessment of the long-term effects of Canadian aid to Africa—thus helping to fuel the persistent and corrosive debates concerning aid effectiveness.

Inconsistent practices are not limited to the aid domain however. There has also been inconsistency in Canada’s commitments to peace operations and peacekeeping training, most strikingly in the two decades from 1990 (see Chapter 6). Similarly, there has been a consistent inconsistency between expansive rhetoric in support of African human security (as seen, for example, in advocacy of the responsibility to protect and the related emphasis on civilian protection and the rights of children and youth), and the paucity of resources deployed to act on these priorities. Likewise, there has been a gap between various instances of short-term crisis response and the medium- to long-term imperatives of peacebuilding (for example, in Sierra Leone or northern Uganda).

Discursively, these practical inconsistencies have combined with inflated self-assessments and expectations to generate what is characterized in Chapter 3 as a kind of serial morality tale. In short, Canadian leadership on African issues (for example, apartheid South Africa, the Africa Action Plan adopted by the G8 at the 2002 Kananaskis Summit, or the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health) is widely portrayed as exemplifying our normal or best selves, marked by prominent instances of ethically oriented activism on the global stage. Conversely, these ethical exemplars have been interspersed with what have been widely seen as instances of dereliction or abandonment—for example, the peacekeeping failures of Somalia and Rwanda; the abrupt ending of bilateral aid programs; the amoral pursuit of trade and investment relations within and beyond Africa at the expense of commitments to human rights and security; or indeed the mundane indifference to the many acute human security and development challenges that never make it onto the popular and political agenda. Running parallel to this Africa-centric morality tale, meanwhile, has been a persistent alternative narrative within government circles and among some Realist commentators. In this realist internationalist view (Boucher 2012), Canadian governments have too often misunderstood or neglected their primary obligations, relationships, and interests by expending precious time and resources on remote and intractable African causes. The interplay of these alternative narratives has thus placed sub-Saharan Africa at the centre of debates concerning the inconsistencies and contradictions of Canada’s ethical role and values in the world.

The core purpose of this book is to understand the origins and repercussions of these inconsistencies.

Alternative Accounts of Canada in Africa

Remarkably, and in contrast to other major world regions (notably Latin America), there were almost no book-length scholarly analyses of Canada’s role in sub-Saharan Africa prior to 2012—despite the striking interest and controversy surrounding various manifestations of Canadian involvement since the beginning of African decolonization over fifty years ago. A handful of older works have provided relatively comprehensive but slim and/or conceptually limited discussions of Canadian policy at earlier stages in its evolution (e.g., Matthews 1976; Schlegel 1978; A. Clark 1991). More typically, previous contributions focused on particular cases or dimensions within Canadian policy, such as longstanding debates concerning Canada’s role in relation to apartheid South Africa (e.g., L. Freeman 1997; R. Pratt 1997) or Canadian development assistance (e.g., Pratt 1994; Morrison 1998). In the more recent past, new thematic and/or case-based studies have emerged to address various African situations, directly or indirectly. For example, Razack (2004) and Dawson (2007) have provided alternative accounts of Canada’s traumatic deployment of a large peacekeeping contingent to Somalia in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. A new cluster of works from critical, materialist scholar-activists have tackled various aspects of Canada’s role in the developing world, including the increasingly prominent role of Canadian extractive industries, rising militarism in the context of Canada’s protracted deployment to Afghanistan, and the contradictions of non-governmental development organizations (see, e.g., Gordon 2010; Engler 2012; and Barry-Shaw and Jay 2012). These accounts have provided important and provocative insights, but have difficulty accounting for instances of more genuinely solidaristic activism, and have not been focused on the way in which Canadian identity has been constituted through the narration of our engagement with Africa. Stephen Brown’s (2012b) edited collection on Canadian aid policy and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)—the latter folded into the new Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (DFATD) as of mid-2013—has re-energized the strong tradition of scholarship in this area, but it is exclusively concerned with aid policy thematically while ranging well beyond Africa geographically.

Two recent books have provided the first full treatments of Canada’s relations with, and role in, sub-Saharan Africa.² The 2013 edition of the long-running annual Canada Among Nations is focused entirely on Canada’s involvement in the continent. This wide-ranging collection has the virtue of thematic breadth and timeliness, but the characteristic limitation of such edited works in terms of limited theoretical focus or analytical consistency. The most substantial single-authored monograph to date is Edward Akuffo’s 2012 study of Canadian Foreign Policy in Africa. This important study was conceived and written in the shadow of the human security era, extending through much of the Chrétien-Martin years of Liberal rule. Its focus on Canadian involvement in African regional peace, security, and development innovations does not, therefore, provide a full account of the degree and logic of the changes to Canadian involvement in Africa under the Harper Conservatives. It is underpinned theoretically by a constructivist, non-imperial internationalist framework stressing the degree to which Canada’s moral identity in Africa is co-constituted through the engagement between Canadian and African policies and officials. This framework has some affinity with both the good international citizenship and the post-colonial frames developed in this book. It highlights Canada’s lack of a formal imperial role in Africa in shaping both the character of its involvement on the continent, and the relatively benign way it has been perceived by many African counterparts. Yet this focus on what is distinct about Canada’s African role