Abstract
Reviewing an edited collection always risks drawing the criticism often levelled against Canadian aid, namely that it is interested in too many things and, thus, spread too thin to be effective. The product of a conference organized by Carleton and Bishop’s universities and Global Affairs Canada, A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid employs the 50th anniversary of Keith Spicer’s A Samaritan State? to add to a historiography on Canadian aid that “remains a laggard” (1). The collection is organized along largely chronological lines. The first section explores the “messy, innovative” (25) early years of a Canadian aid shaped by the multilateral, bilateral, and domestic spheres. The second covers the “long 1960s” of Canadian official development assistance (ODA), assessing how aid was understood and instrumentalized by Canadian state actors. Part three’s exploration of the intersecting of aid and national identity departs (somewhat) from the chronologic path, although even here one finds Ted Cogan’s survey of how governments from the 1950s to the 1980s “framed foreign aid policy for their publics” (193). The march of time resumes in the closing section, “An exercise in contemporary history” (271), built around contributions of several political scientists. Exploring the period from the 1980s to the present, this section traces the decline of Canadian aid along with the bureaucracy responsible for its delivery. This includes Stephen Brown’s effort to assess the present-day relevance of Spicer’s book to Canadian aid efforts. Dominique Marshall, whose work looms large in the history of humanitarianism, deftly links the practice and historiography of development in the conclusion, staking out future research paths.
The collection is at its strongest when looking beyond Canada’s shores. This is apparent in Jill Campbell-Miller’s flipping of the aid script to show how India “provided a sort of apprenticeship to Canadian government and business about how to conduct aid programming” (29). David Webster uses the figure of diplomat and civil servant Hugh Keenleyside to situate Canada into the multilateral currents of technical assistance and to recount a broader international history of “development diplomacy” (91). Ryan Touhey situates Canada’s aid relations with Pakistan into an iconoclastic tale of imperial afterlife and Cold War calculations. The collection’s engagement with Latin America is a valuable contribution, ranging from Stefano Tijerina’s analysis of how the Canadian “promotional state” instrumentalized aid in Colombia, to Asa McKercher’s discussion of how Canadian ODA to Chile and Cuba in the 1970s intersected with the human rights revolution, to Laura Macdonald’s tracing of Canadian aid to Latin America from the 1980s to the present. Sonya de Laat offers an important exploration of how Canadian aid and its recipients are represented in the photo library of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and emphasizes the value of this library as a source for future critical inquiry.
There are geographic gaps in Samaritan State Revisited. Notwithstanding the dramatic expansion of Canadian aid beyond South Asia from the Diefenbaker era onward, Africa only makes its first appearance when Naississe Solomon explores Canada’s exceptional involvement in Ethiopian famine relief in the mid-1980s. The Francophone world—including Haiti, the primary recipient of Canadian aid in the 1970s—is all but absent save for fleeting mentions. This lack extends, regrettably, to Quebec’s complicated contribution to the evolution of Canadian ODA. Finally, it must be noted that the voices of those targeted by Canadian aid are virtually absent.
Such silences are partly a consequence of the fact that Canada’s aid bureaucracy is, to a significant extent, the object of study. This is apparent in Greg Donaghy’s bid to rehabilitate the early administrators of Canada’s aid program. Similarly, notwithstanding the references to CIDA’s work in Africa in the 1990s, David Black’s chapter is best understood as an administrative post-mortem of CIDA—albeit a useful one. Bureaucracy is also central to Kevin Brushett’s slightly hagiographical treatment of senior CIDA official Lewis Perinbam, although his chapter does explore Perinbam’s efforts to bring the non-governmental sector to the centre of CIDA’s work, and the tensions accompanying such efforts. Brushett’s chapter, along with Solomon’s take on the interplay between state and civil society amid Ethiopian famine relief, highlight a more general consequence flowing from the focus on bureaucracy: although civil society is present, it by no means occupies centre stage in this collection.
The co-editors offer no real explanation for organizing the collection chronologically, leading one to wonder what might have been yielded by framing discussion along functional lines, that is, the content of aid (for example, Canada’s participation in power generation projects). Section three also points to the advantages offered by a more thematic organization, not least in facilitating more critical interrogations of the complicated interweaving of the “altruistic” and “self-interested” strands of Canadian aid, as well as the construction of “federal government perceptions of Canadian interests [that] were the major influence on Canadian aid” (3). Among such themes could have been the legacy of empire, since despite the introduction’s claim that Canada was “neither … heroic do-gooder nor … imperialist exploiter” (17), empire’s afterlife and imperial dynamics are apparent throughout the collection. Donaghy’s discussion of Nik Cavell, for example, was a missed opportunity for a more sophisticated problematizing of an individual who travelled along imperial circuits, and the lessons this holds regarding the origins and evolution of Canadian aid. After all, the caricature Donaghy includes of Cavell, dressed in turban and dispensing aid dollars from a magic carpet, is not so much the “whiff of romance” (59) as it is the stuff of Orientalism and racialization. Similarly, one is struck by the dearth of women in Samaritan State Revisited, as well as the absence of engagement with how Canadian aid was gendered.
While such absences underscore how much remains to be done to explore the history of Canadian development and bring it into “global conversations on the history of development” (1), the contributions to this collection are proof that this important work is underway. Consistent with its co-editors’ objectives, A Samaritan State Revisited will both act as a signpost, marking what has been accomplished (historiographically) so far, and serve as a valuable reference point as the task of developing the history of Canadian aid—in all its manifestations and complexity—continues.
