Jul. 28, 2010 - Issue #771: Young at Heart
Issues
Silencing dissent
Targeted cuts gut Canadian advocacy organizations
Last week the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) became the latest victim of the Harper government's war on civil society organizations that dare critique or recommend alternatives to government policy.
On purely strategic terms, one would think that CCIC is the kind of organization that the Harper Conservatives would want providing a public critique. The presence of multi-national organizations and conservative church groups make them far less radical and extreme than they could, or should, be. And so the recent CCIC decision speaks volumes about the degree to which this government is afraid of any dissent, even constructive moderate dissent.
The CCIC was established in 1968 by international development organizations to act as a coordinating body for their work overseas and in Canada. With over 90 members today, including groups as diverse as Save the Children Canada, OXFAM, World Vision Canada, the Canadian Red Cross, faith groups and labour unions, CCIC has grown to play a number of critical functions.
One of these functions has been to increase the effectiveness of civil society organizations by providing training and organizational development for its members. CCIC has been key in providing organizations across the country with the skills and knowledge to increase their transparency and accountability while minimizing waste of donor and government dollars.
At the same time, because of its broad and diverse membership and their experience on the ground in Canada and around the world, CCIC has been at the forefront of analyzing, critiquing and proposing foreign and development policy alternatives. In this arena it has been able to strongly articulate policy options based on the experiences not just of Canadians, but also of partner organizations on the ground in the poor communities that Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) purports to help.
And perhaps most importantly, through its nationally coordinated education, awareness and advocacy campaigns, CCIC has been able to genuinely engage hundreds of thousands of Canadians in a quest for more just and sustainable development alternatives. This same work has significantly raised our awareness of how our lifestyle, consumption and foreign policy choices actually serve to exacerbate poverty and injustice around the world.
It is almost certainly these latter two areas of activity that led International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda to announce on July 22 that CCIC would no longer be receiving funds from CIDA for its ongoing activities. Although minister Oda has not addressed the CCIC decision directly in public, she did release a statement that CIDA's new funding policies will "will streamline the application process and reduce the administrative burden for project applications, leaving more money for real development work on the ground" and "ensure [Canadians'] aid dollars go toward effective international development."
Surely, if your goal was increased effectiveness and a reduced administrative burden, you would want to keep funding an organization that did extensive research on what was working and what wasn't, coordinated organizations to minimize duplication and ensured that best practices and methodologies spread quickly throughout the entire sector.
As with other examples we have seen in the last couple of years, however, Ms. Oda's statement is clearly code for "we didn't like some of the things they were saying, so we are going to remove their ability to say those things."
Much of CCIC's work was spent critiquing government policy, researching and promoting alternatives. They saw their role as one of keeping government honest and ensuring that their policies and practices around the world were actually contributing to their goal of eliminating poverty and injustice. As such, CCIC was openly critical of such things as the lack of transparency and accountability in official aid, the role of the G8 and G20 in exacerbating global poverty and Canadian free trade with Colombia, a chronic and severe human rights violator.
The Harper government has shown time and time again that their preference is for a civil society sector that will nod blindly in agreement with bad policy, rather than one that will publicly critique bad policy in the hopes of making it better. Even less tolerable than that is a civil society sector that puts research and information in the hands of Canadians to enable them to tell the difference between bad policy and good policy, and teaches them how to advocate for the latter. Clearly this government would rather spend a billion dollars to silence the legitimate protests of its people than spend a small portion of that to ensure that those people are informed and engaged.
It's the same preference that has resulted in the partisan de-funding of groups like the Canadian Council on Social Development, Rights and Democracy, KAIROS, the Canadian Arab Federation and numerous women's groups across the country.
A government that is genuine in seeking out the best possible policy alternatives and ensuring that their decisions do no harm should welcome dissenting views and informed critique of those policies and decisions—to the extent of funding the organizations providing those views and critiques. Transparency, accountability and democracy depend on a multitude of voices and opinions, and it is the responsibility of government to ensure that those voices and opinions have the resources necessary to be heard.
The elimination of these voices from the public realm has resulted in Canada being a very different country today than it was just ten years ago. Isn't it time to stand up and defend our democracy while we still can? V
Ricardo Acuña is the Executive Director for the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan public policy research institute housed at the University of Alberta
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