If you think Canada's unimpressive response to resettling Syrian refuges is a sign the country is shrinking into a smaller role on the world stage, a new research paper suggests that decline has been going on for a generation, under both Conservative and Liberal governments.
Robert Greenhill, the co-author of the paper, calls Canada's response to the Syrian refugee crisis a symptom. In 1979, when Canada welcomed 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, it also spent far more of its resources – the equivalent of billions of dollars more – on development assistance for people overseas, he said. And more on the military, too.
The shrinking is a trend that has transcended party lines and become a generational decline in global engagement, he concludes in a working paper with co-author Megan McQuillan for Open Canada, an online foreign affairs forum of the Canadian International Council. When you compare combined spending on defence and development – the two biggest parts of any country's international-relations resources – to the size of the economy, Canada's global engagement has declined dramatically: from 2.4 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 1.2 per cent in 2014.
"A symptom of that is that we're not doing what we historically did in terms of helping refugees at home, we're also doing much less than what we did in 1979 for refugees abroad," Mr. Greenhill, former managing director of the World Economic Forum and a former president of the Canadian International Development Agency, said in an interview.
The analysis is food for thought in an election campaign. It shows a long, bi-partisan decline. The grand global rhetoric of politicians, whether it is promises to help Africa out of poverty or to make Canada a player in military missions, has not been matched by resources. If the Syrian crisis suddenly makes Canadians feel they are not living up to their standards of global engagement, this study suggests that is because Canadians have been deluded for decades.
"We're talking about having an influence in the world that Canada hasn't had in a quarter century," said Mr. Greenhill.
"If words were wallets, Canada would be having a much greater impact."
The paper used combined defence and development spending as an indicator of global engagement. Other things matter, such as diplomacy and trade networks, but they typically use fewer government dollars and are harder to measure.
The authors found Canada's global engagement, as a share of the economy – usually gross domestic product – declined dramatically, both compared to the past and to that of similar countries. Canada is last in the G7, tied with Japan, and last in a peer group of open, medium-sized democracies like Australia, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. Reaching the average in those groups would require spending $13-billion more per year.
The issue is not really partisan, either, Mr. Greenhill said. Differences between Conservative and Liberal governments were minor compared to the generational decline. Between 1975 and 1995, the levels of spending on global engagement were significantly higher than levels between 1995 and 2014, no matter which party was in government.
In fact, although Mr. Greenhill did not say this, it is pretty clear Liberals did not live up to their talk on foreign aid (Conservative governments over the past 20 years actually spent slightly more) and Conservative governments did not live up to talk on military spending, now at historic lows as a share of GDP.
The New Democratic Party has not held power in Ottawa. The question is whether it would change things given the general lack of public resistance to the cuts.
Spending on global engagement has been sacrificed more than most things to balance budgets, and the low points came after deficit-cutting in the1990s, and in 2014. But the long-term decline is more important: it fell by half.
It is not the same everywhere. Great Britain has reduced defence spending, but still meets NATO's goal of 2 per cent of GDP, while its development spending has increased to the UN-recommended 0.7 per cent of GDP – combined, more than twice Canada's total.
Not all spending is the same, of course. Mr. Greenhill argues that if spending had stayed at 1979 levels and the money been used to help destabilized countries, hundreds of thousands fewer people might now be fleeing, and thousands fewer dying. What is clear is that ambitious words have been mismatched with declining commitment for decades.
Campbell Clark