Canada needs to walk the talk on its new strategic partnership with the Caribbean

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Imran Bayoumi is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Wazim Mowla is the associate director of the Caribbean Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

While there has been a great deal of focus on Canadian foreign policy in the context of conflicts in the Middle East and a diplomatic row with India, a recent victory on the file has received much less attention. Last week, at an Ottawa summit that brought together nearly every Caribbean leader from the 15 member nations of CARICOM, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the Canada-CARICOM Strategic Partnership (CCSP) – which, amid a developing polycrisis in the Caribbean, could mark a new era in Canada-Caribbean relations.

The region is important for this country. Around 2 million Canadians travel annually there; two-way merchandise trade and trade services have reached US$1.8-billion and US$3.9-billion respectively; and Canada’s Caribbean diaspora is estimated to number around 800,000. Canada and the Caribbean both embrace multiculturalism, and the region is home to significant private investment from Canadian companies.

But the region has too often been relegated to the outskirts of our foreign policy priorities, with Ottawa largely following Washington’s lead and focusing mostly on Haiti. And while setting out a strategy is a good start, it does not always result in implementation; similar to Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy, the CCSP seems to rectify Ottawa’s past indifference toward the region, but beyond calls for a series of recurring and ad-hoc meetings, many of the actual issues remain undefined.

For the CCSP to be a success, it must be flexible enough to meet the changing needs of the region, but consistent and structured over the long term to develop tangible results. Focusing on three priorities – strengthening regional security, addressing climate challenges, and increasing access to finance – can make Ottawa’s engagement in the Caribbean a success for the region and Canadians alike.

Over the past few years, homicides in the Caribbean have spiked, with CARICOM members accounting for five of the eight highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. This stems from largely as a result of an influx of small arms, the proliferation of gangs, and limited capacity in regional defence and police forces; this, combined with the political and gang-violence crisis in Haiti following the 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moïse, risks destabilizing the region. These cascading crises have spurred waves of outmigration, made it more difficult for Canadian companies to see returns on their regional investments, and amplified additional security concerns such as drug-trafficking. The $3.2-million investment in the Caribbean Firearms Roadmap announced by Ottawa last week should help in curbing small arms trafficking, but to do more, we should explore the possibility of expanding the joint U.S.-Canadian Armed Forces Operation CARIBBE beyond its counter-narcotics trafficking mandate so that it can also counter weapons-trafficking, which would demonstrate an on-the ground commitment to the region’s security.

Meanwhile, no region has been as affected by both climate change and high energy prices as the Caribbean. Strong hurricanes, eroding beaches, and acidifying oceans are undercutting the region’s tourism industry, which has long been a major economic driver. Meanwhile, volatile oil and gas prices have also undercut economic competitiveness for countries that depend on imported petroleum.

But while the political will to create change exists, it is undermined by limited access to affordable financing options. A combined $64.5-million was announced at the Canada-CARICOM Summit to address the region’s climate and energy challenges in particular, but that sum is just a first step. Improving technical assistance, helping develop a project pipeline for clean energy projects, and overhauling regulatory and fiscal barriers should occur in parallel, ideally by encouraging private-sector investment and diversifying financing beyond grants from international governments.

International financial institutions have categorized nearly all CARICOM members as middle- and high-income countries in terms of per-capita income, which ignores the region’s broader development context and limits access to concessional and blended financing for major projects. As a result, the region’s financial institutions and governments face high borrowing costs, leaving them debt-ridden under severe fiscal restrictions. Worse, most of the region is dependent on imports for capital, food, fuel and medical services, meaning that the ebbs and flows of the global commodity markets place significant cost pressures on the region.

Canada has thus far been a helpful partner in advocating for removing restrictions on the region’s borrowing abilities. But to make CCSP a reality, Ottawa will need to work with the private sector and banks to create new financial instruments to unlock investment into the region, and – with the seriousness that it brought to its Indo-Pacific strategy – provide continuity and tangible benefits for all parties in the long run.