The Mark Carney government can find billions in “aid” to prolong a brutal proxy war but is cutting assistance for global health. Ukraine highlights how Canadian “aid” is principally a geopolitical tool.
Enroute to meet Donald Trump Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stopped in Halifax Saturday. During a meeting with the prime minister, Carney announced $2.5 billion in assistance. The massive aid package adds to the staggering sums Ottawa has given to that country to weaken a geopolitical competitor. Alongside the so-called “Coalition of the Willing”, the new Canadian funding is designed to bolster Kyiv during difficult negotiations to end a war it is steadily losing with little prospect of reversing Russia’s territorial gains.
Since 2022 Canada has given Ukraine $22 billion ($15 billion for government/humanitarian support and $7 billion in arms assistance). A mid income nation, Ukraine has received probably twenty times more than any other country during this period.
The size of the latest instalment is notable as it comes only weeks after Ottawa cut $2.7 billion over four years from Global Affairs Canada’s $6 billion annual International Assistance Envelope. Reportedly, Carney will be cutting funding for international reproductive health.
Assistance to Ukraine demonstrates how the primary objective of Canadian overseas aid has always been to advance Western interests, particularly keeping the Global South tied to the US-led geopolitical order. Conceived as a way to blunt radical decolonization in India, Canada began its first significant (non-European) allocation of foreign aid through the Colombo Plan. With Mao’s triumph in China in 1949, the 1950 Colombo Plan’s central aim was to keep the former British Asian colonies, especially India, within the Western capitalist fold. To justify an initial $25 million ($250 million in today’s dollars) in Colombo Plan aid External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson told the House of Commons: “Communist expansionism may now spill over into South East Asia as well as into the Middle East … it seemed to all of us at the [Colombo] conference that if the tide of totalitarian expansionism should flow over this general area, … the Free World will have been driven off all but a relatively small bit of the great Eurasian landmass. … We agreed at Colombo that the forces of totalitarian expansionism could not be stopped in South Asia and South East Asia by military force alone.”
Two years later Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was even more explicit about the carrot and stick approach to defeating left wing nationalism (“communism”). In September 1952 St. Laurent explained “in South East Asia through the establishment of the Colombo plan not only are we trying to provide wider commercial relations but we are also fighting another Asiatic war against Communism in the interests of peace, this time with economic rather than military weapons. We Canadians know that in the struggle against Communism there are two useful weapons, the economic and the military. While we much prefer to use the economic weapons as we are in the Colombo plan, we know that we may have no choice but to use the military weapons as we have been forced to do in Korea [27,000 Canadian troops participated in a war that left 3 million dead].”
In other words, if some of India’s post-colonial population had not set their sights on a socialistic solution to their troubles — with the possibility of Soviet or Chinese assistance — Canada probably would not have provided aid.
The broad rationale for extending foreign aid was laid out in a 1969 background paper for the newly established Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA): “To establish within recipient countries those political attitudes or commitments, military alliances or military bases that would assist Canada or Canada’s western allies to maintain a reasonably stable and secure international political system. Through this objective, Canada’s aid programs would serve not only to help increase Canada’s influence within the developing world, but also within the western alliance.”
Historically, military intervention has elicited aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill Ottawa provides aid’ principle. From Korea in the early 1950s to Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq at the start of 1990s and the former Yugoslavia at the end of that decade, Canadian assistance has followed US/Canadian troops. In the early 2000s the top recipients of Canadian aid were Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti, which were all sites of foreign occupations. In a slightly different manner, Canada’s unprecedentedly generous recent disbursements to Ukraine highlight the link between aid and war.
In announcing the new $2.5 billion aid package Carney declared, “Canada stands with Ukraine, because their cause – freedom, democracy, sovereignty – is our cause.” But Ottawa has long undermined “freedom, democracy, sovereignty”. It is assisting Ukraine to weaken a geopolitical competitor.
In the platform for my campaign to lead the NDP we declare, “Stop fueling a conflict that sacrifices lives for NATO objectives” and “Stop supporting (materially and militarily) a U.S.-led Western proxy war aimed at exhausting a geopolitical rival. No more funds for the Ukraine war and keep Canadian troops out.”
Please email the NDP Federal Council to urge councillors to investigate the deeply flawed vetting decision to exclude Yves Engler and defend members’ right to decide.
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