It seems logical that International Development Week in early February would be a busy time for Canada’s Secretary of State (International Development). Indeed, Randeep Sarai’s itinerary had him zipping from Winnipeg to Ottawa to Vancouver to Whitehorse to Edmonton. Unfortunately, this busy schedule seems not to have left him any time to prepare to address the substance of a query during Parliamentary Question Period on a topic that should have seemed inevitable that week—the impact of the government’s billions of dollars in cuts to international assistance. His response never acknowledged the cuts at all.
These cuts are an understandably awkward subject. During his election campaign, Prime Minister Carney stated “my government will not cut foreign aid.” The Fall 2025 budget told a very different story, with cuts—distastefully spun not as cuts but as “savings”—of $2.7 billion to international assistance.
Particularly troubling is that the area explicitly singled out for cuts was global health. Such cuts began to bite just a few weeks later when, for the first time in its history, Canada cut its contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Moreover, Canada’s cuts came in the wake of other aid budgets being slashed earlier in the year, most notoriously by the United States but also by multiple European countries. The brutal consequences of those cuts were already very clear by the time Canada decided not to step up to help fill the gaps, but instead to follow suit in a race to the bottom.
Observers are awaiting further details of Canada’s cuts to global health with bated breath and gritted teeth. There are hopes that Canada will be less harsh to humanitarian aid for conflict zones and natural disasters, but the government remains tight-lipped even on assuaging fears about helping people caught in the most vulnerable of circumstances.
Instead, the Secretary of State (International Development) spent the week giving speeches about how Canadian development programs are “creating a stable supply of cinnamon for Canada for all our Canadian cinnamon lovers.”
Speaking as a Canadian cinnamon lover, and also as someone who works in the humanitarian sector, the government has yet to make a compelling case for why prioritizing being able to reliably sprinkle spices on lattes, whilst slashing funding for HIV drugs in the poorest countries, is the most effective development strategy for Canada. Development initiatives to create livelihoods and help ensure a poverty-free tomorrow are valuable, but so is ensuring people can access the food or medicines they need today. In fact, earning a livelihood is predicated on remaining alive.
The government has tacitly recognized that cuts to international assistance might not be universally embraced—according to the budget, the cuts would merely be “returning international development assistance to a pre-pandemic level”. But at a time when Prime Minister Carney stands on the international stage extolling how “middle powers” like Canada can respond to “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality,” it makes no sense to rewind the clock to 2019, particularly in an area that so closely associated with the sort of soft power Canada has traditionally coveted.
And even if one buys into the government’s increasingly transactional approach to international assistance, stepping back from global health is certainly not in Canada’s best interests. Aside from the fact the COVID-19 pandemic was a reminder that health is a truly global issue, it was also incredibly disruptive of global commerce—including the spice trade.
Canada cannot narrowly focus on cultivating new sources and markets for commercial goods and act like this will be sufficient to ensure that crises and their repercussions, from outbreaks of emerging novel diseases and resurgent older ones, to armed conflicts, to instability itself, can be neatly contained without spilling out into the rest of the world. Canada can spice up its ineffectually self-serving recipe for international assistance all it wants, but it won’t be enough to mask the bad aftertaste.
