FARROW: What it looks like when queer priorities decide foreign aid programs

Have you heard the MAiD joke doing the rounds on social media? Its setup starts with a simple example of an intractable problem of modern life: migraines, call-waiting, credit-card debt. The punchline comes quick and hits hard: “Have you thought about MAiD?”Global Affairs Canada has implemented a foreign aid funding rationale that could elicit a copycat meme. “Does your country have problems? Need basic infrastructure, health care or agricultural equipment? If so, have you thought about using a condom?”A condom, a rainbow flag, a solar panel. The three could be mascots for an unlikely triad of foreign assistance priorities of Canada’s Liberal government: contraception, the queer-nexus (aka LGBTQI+) and climate. Forget tractors, water wells or basic literacy; progressive priorities have essentially become the face of Canada in the developing world.The setup to this ideological punchline goes back seven years, to a 77-page policy paper produced by then-Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau, entitled Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy. “Canadians are safer and more prosperous when more of the world shares our values,” Freeland wrote in her preface to the paper.But Freeland then performed a nifty conceptual shuffle by moving from the innocuous statement that “women’s rights are human rights” to an explication that those rights include “sexual and reproductive rights — and the right to access safe and legal abortions,” and then to the pronouncement that, “These rights are at the core of our foreign policy.” In Freeland’s world, Canadian values — and the values Canada seeks to transmit to other countries — are focused in very particular areas and skew towards a particular end of the ideological spectrum.Whatever your view is on contraception and abortion rights, labelled in UN and World Economic Forum circles as sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), the idea that these are top-tier Canadian values, should drive foreign assistance funding and lie at the “core” of the nation’s foreign policy should surely all be matters for serious public scrutiny and debate. But in Liberal-run Canada, they just happened.Soon after the policy launch, the clasp on the public purse snapped open. In 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would spend $14 billion to “support women and girls’ health around the world”, with half of the funds earmarked for sexual and reproductive health and rights. The funding envelope was to extend for 10 years. The $1.4 billion per year represents 9 percent of the approximately $16 billion Canada spent on foreign assistance in fiscal 2023 and 79 percent of the amount allocated to health.The Liberals’ most recent budget includes a further $4.2 billion over six years for the provision of contraception and abortion globally – referenced in a section entitled “Upholding Canadian Values Around the World.”Contraception and sex-ed for the developing world are not the only foreign development “priorities” receiving large sums of money. Several years ago, Bibeau announced $30 million over five years and $10 million in every subsequent year “to advance human rights and improve socio-economic outcomes for LGBTQ2 people in developing countries.”But as with foreign SRHR funding, Global Affairs itself doesn’t carry out the taxpayer-funded projects that emerge from these budget announcements. Rather, the government outsources the work to non-profit organizations that share the current government’s “progressive” outlook. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International (MSI), the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, and Rainbow Railroad are just a few of the multinational nonprofit organizations that have contracts with Global Affairs Canada.If you’re already struggling to comprehend how the promotion of sexual and LGBTI+ rights in developing countries advances Canadian security, there’s a third richly funded progressive priority: advancing the so-called green transition. According to Global Affairs, “climate-resilience” is also a Canadian value, and Canada is currently on the tail end of a five-year, $5.3 billion International Climate Finance Program.A portion of those billions was allotted to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, which received $35 million to undertake a project entitled “Nature Positive Food Systems for Climate Change Adaptation.” The project “aims to improve low carbon, climate-resilient economies in rural areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe for enhanced well-being of communities, especially women, girls, and other vulnerable groups.”In 2021, according to Statista, Mozambique had the highest share among African countries of its population living in extreme poverty, while in Zimbabwe, 42 per cent of the population live in extreme poverty. It is hard to square Canada spending billions of dollars to achieve “low carbon economies” in economies where most of the people do not have enough to eat and are dying — literally — for lack of affordable, accessible energy.Back in 2017, when Bibeau received pushback on her feminist aid policy, she noted, “Contraception and even abortion is only a tool to end poverty…So we shouldn’t look at contraception as the objective. This is not the objective. This is only a tool to reduce poverty and inequality and to make an impact in terms of development and peace and security in the world.”Which — going back to that joke about MAiD — has a perverse kind of logic. Just like dead people don’t suffer from depression or unpaid bills, unborn babies never go hungry.Anna Farrow is a Montreal-based journalist for The Catholic Register.The original, full-length version of this article recently appeared in C2C Journal.

FARROW: What it looks like when queer priorities decide foreign aid programs

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