Category Archives: Uncategorized

Official development and a liberation agenda

(Sept. 15, 2011)

Political debate in Canada about the future of this country’s development assistance programs is what pushed me to start writing about development.

Canada’s aid program has its roots in the 1950s. Cold War competition and fruitful interaction with a generation of new leaders in the Commonwealth led Canada into new relationships with many newly independent “developing nations.”

In 1960, the External Aid Office was created. In 1968, near the end of a period when Canadian governments found new roles in social policy, health care, human rights and international development, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was created to administer the bulk of Canada’s official development assistance (ODA) programs.

CIDA’s aim is“to manage Canada’s support and resources effectively and accountably to achieve meaningful, sustainable results and engage in policy development in Canada and internationally, enabling Canada’s effort to realize its development objectives. CIDA works in concert with its development partners, fragile states and countries in crisis, countries of focus, and the Canadian population and institutions.”

“God is Good,” says the broken-down water truck in Delmas, Port-au-Prince (2011)

Initially, CIDA administered the bulk of Canada’s ODA program in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia. “In 1995, CIDA took on the responsibility of administering Canada’s official assistance (OA) programs in Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (countries in transition) by supporting democratic development and economic liberalization.”

A liberation agenda

Some in the north sought to participate in official development programs while maintaining both a lively critique of the programs and advancing a liberation agenda. As the Canadian Interchurch Fund for International Development (ICFID*—an ancestor of KAIROS) was formed in 1973, its member churches provided a definition of development that served the churches for the next 25 years or so:

“Development is a process of continuous change by which any country, any specific population, or sector of population in its natural, cultural, or social milieu and at a definite stage in history, within a framework of international relations, seeks liberation, both material and spiritual, by:

  • transforming its structures of production;
  • establishing new social relationships;
  • acquiring for itself adequate political and administrative institutions;
  • recreating or strengthening its own culture for the purpose of achieving a better quality of life.”

* ICFID: Robert Fugere, “The Interchurch Fund for International Development,” in Christopher Lind and Joe Mihevc, eds. (1994), Coalitions for Justice, Ottawa: Novalis, p. 220.

A writer’s role

(Sept. 2, 2011)

“May those with pens expose all the crimes to the world”

As one who has a pen, I have sought to use it—and my computer—to share stories of people who hunger, thirst and struggle for justice.

I don’t remember where I heard the prayer cited above, but it stays with me as an incitement to write and speak.

I grew up in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, the western-most province of Canada. My parents grew up on farms northwest of Calgary, Alberta. Like the generations before, we moved around a lot. By the time we settled in British Columbia when I was ten, I had already lived in three other provinces.

Food—central to development debates—is perhaps what unites a family extended over time and space. Production, transportation and sales. My grandfather and an uncle were cowboys and ranchers in the Alberta foothills and in northern British Columbia. One aunt worked in the Burn’s meat-packing plant in Calgary. An uncle was a travelling salesman for Burn’s and another uncle was a salesman in the Safeway supermarket chain. My parents ran a small grocery store: that’s where I had my first job. My sister and her family raise Berkshire pigs in the Cariboo region of British Columbia.

At my grandmother’s dining room table, I remember arguments over something called the “Crow rate.” A subsidy to facilitate grain exports made shipping anything else prohibitively expensive, locking in a model of development that (arguably) protected Canadian sovereignty, grain farmers, Ontario manufacturers and the Canadian Pacific Railway for close to a century.

Beyond the mountains

I’m the kid who was endlessly curious about what was going on beyond the mountains. I wanted to understand the ideas that led people to do things in different ways. And I had found that I could write.

Visiting a batey near Villa Altagracia, Dominican Republic (1983)

Eventually, I passed through the School of Journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University. A few years later (in 1983), I found myself in the Dominican Republic and talking with people who made a sort of living from cutting sugar-cane.

I had gone to the “D.R.” to participate in a six-week exposure program for young adults sponsored by Youth Corps (a ministry of the Archdiocese of Toronto) and the Scarboro Foreign Mission Society (a Catholic religious order). The Dominican Republic Experience opened a door for me to the growing movements for social change in Latin America.

Over time, I will tell you more about what I learned from Haitian cane-cutters, and how their experience shaped the work I have done since then.