Engineers Without Borders Canada

Publicizing failures may seem risky, but EWB believes it’s a necessary part of building better aid. “Of course there were concerns about widely publishing our failures,” says EWB’s Ashley Good, who heads AdmittingFailure.com, but EWB decided the benefits of disclosure outweighed the risks.

Calling it failure gets attention, explains Good, but it’s not what’s important. “We’re really talking about learning,” she says. Most endeavours involve success and failure; the point is to adjust when something’s not working. When organizations share their failures openly, everyone learns. Unfortunately, organizations aren’t used to showcasing what’s gone wrong.

While the development community has been talking enthusiastically about this fledgling “failure movement,” only a handful of organizations have submitted their own failures to AdmittingFailure. com. Aid workers and recipients are all too familiar with problematic projects, but organizations (possibly concerned about negative reactions from funders and the public) aren’t exactly rushing to fess up. At least not yet.

Good believes that as more organizations talk about their mistakes, they’ll make acknowledging failure more acceptable. After all, EWB didn’t lose donor support after publishing its Failure Report. “There’s a growing skepticism already, whether we’re talking about failure or not, that the aid sector is not working as effectively as it could,” she says, “Talking about [failures] only shows your donors that you’re honest and transparent.” The public, she adds, is also ready to accept that development is a complex undertaking with no easy solutions.

“I take failure quite seriously—failure has big implications on people’s livelihoods,” says Good. Still, she insists, “it’s time to change the conversation.” Solving the world’s problems, after all, is likely to require creative approaches that include trying new things, adapting to local circumstances, and adjusting based on what’s working and what’s not. “Having that conversation across organizations all of a sudden puts failure in a different light. There’s no blame; it’s about recognizing how complex the problem is and that we have to continuously be trying to improve and that means recognizing where we’re failing and improving on that.”

Haitian workers clear rubble from a street following the January 12, 2010 quake that devastated Haiti. Photo courtesy UNDP.

When the earthquake struck in Haiti, it changed Dominique Anglade’s life in Montreal forever. Her parents, Georges and Mireille Anglade, were the first Canadians confirmed killed in the aftermath of Jan. 12, 2010. They were crushed to death in their family compound in the Mont-Joli neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince.

Anglade, a 39-year-old management consultant and mother of two, was lost in grief for several months. But her parents’ deaths and the scenes of devastation from Haiti also steeled her in unexpected ways. She used her management experience to come up with a new model for delivering aid to Haiti. The organization, dubbed Kanpe (Creole for “stand up”), was already in the planning stages when the quake struck. Kanpe seeks to cut through the maze of aid organizations operating in Haiti by providing rural families with a guide: A Haitian caseworker that helps them assess their needs and find sustainable solutions. Kanpe tries to help Haitians help themselves, with an end goal of financial autonomy.

“Despite the pain I was going through, I thought of all the people in Haiti who don’t have parents or children anymore. People lost everything. And I thought, I can’t sit here in Montreal and feel bad about myself when there is such devastation in Haiti. I am probably in a better position than most who have been touched by this,” said Anglade, who was born in Montreal, but lived in Haiti for several years as a teenager before returning to Canada for university.

Kanpe’s model targets families, assessing their needs and formulating co-ordinated solutions. Its board includes Paul Farmer, the U.S. doctor who founded Partners in Health and Régine Chassagne, the Montreal singer from Arcade Fire whose parents emigrated from Haiti during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Kanpe is trying to raise $2 million to help 500 families in Haiti’s central plateau. Anglade has traveled to Haiti twice since the earthquake, to bury her parents, and to further Kanpe’s work. “People say there is nothing happening in Haiti. There’s not enough, but there are things happening,” she says. “I refuse to be discouraged.”

Cambodians protest their government's new law cementing its grip on civil society and aid. Photo courtesy LICADHO.

More than two months have passed since the Cambodian government released the second draft of the controversial Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations (known colloquially as the NGO law),and the country’s civil society organizations are still holding their collective breath.

The government has long called for an NGO law, though no one seems able to articulate exactly why it is needed. Official statements have been all over the map — some say it’s needed to control “illegal activities” among NGOs; other say it’s to increase transparency; some even say it’s necessary to combat terrorism.

But the release of the second draft of the law dramatically exposed the government’s phony rationalizations. The law, as highlighted in this analysis, is simply a transparent attempt to control independent civil society and stifle dissent. It’s also a blatant violation of domestic and international protections on association, assembly and speech.

Besides affecting local groups, the passage of this law would significantly undermine the efforts of international donors and NGOs working in Cambodia, including the Canadian International Development Agency. CIDA invested a projected $17.03 million into development programs in the country between 2009-2010.

Among other things, the proposed law imposes a burdensome and mandatory registration process onall NGOs and associations working in Cambodia, and outlaws those that don’t comply. Meanwhile, it gives authorities unbounded discretion to approve registration applications, with few substantive guidelines to steer their decisions. There is no appeals process if registration is denied.

In this way, the new law takes government confrontation of NGOs and associations behind the scenes, out of public view. One paperwork error, real or imagined, and the organization will cease to exist.

The proposed law is also sloppy — one example being its apparently unlimited scope. It’s unclear whether this aspect was intentional, but the International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) concluded that the law would require “every group of individuals who gather together with a differing level of frequency and perform the broadest variety of imaginable activities, from trekking and football fans, to chess and silk weaving groups,” to register. Failing to do so would be a violation of the law. (So would, apparently, founding an NGO or association without the required number of Cambodian citizen “founding members” required by the law — three and 11, respectively).

By impairing and even closing down local groups, the law will stifle information needed by funding bodies like CIDA, and make it more difficult to design, implement and monitor development programs. Local groups including informal networks and associations are often the best source for information on the human rights and development landscape. For example, one of CIDA’s main development goals in Cambodia is to help increase access to legal land titles, which would strengthen communities’ ability to fight land grabbing. Land grabbing is closely tied to government action and without politically independent partners, CIDA’s goals will be compromised. Moreover, CIDA endorses the idea that the promotion of civil society is vital in fostering respect for human rights and encouraging development in Cambodia.

Canada-registered NGOs working in Cambodia are also concerned. LICADHO Canada, an organization that combats land evictions in Cambodia, says that the draft law, in its current form, would mean that many of the community groups LICADHO Canada works with would be deemed illegal entities and their activities outlawed if the groups refuse to conform to registration requirements. LICADHO Canada is one of several NGOs in the region working to protect communities from land grabbing.

It may seem incongruous that the Cambodian government feels compelled to pass a specific law in order to strengthen its grip on civil society. This is a country, after all, where an activist was recently shot dead after helping his community protest a military land grab. Nearly 40 human rights defenders were imprisoned as of November 2010. The authorities are shameless in persecuting those who pose a threat to their grip on power and resources, even in the most minor cases.

But the fact that the government feels the need for new legislation indicates that they do indeed have an Achilles heel. Under current law, confronting NGOs is a messy and embarrassing business that often requires trumped-up charges. This tarnishes Cambodia’s reputation and threatens the two things that the government really cares about: Western aid money and the international legitimacy that comes with it. Cambodia’s leaders don’t want the country to become another Burma. (They also need the money; foreign aid still represents half of the national budget).

The government’s release of the second draft of the law on March 24, 2011, produced an uncharacteristically vocal and unified outcry from local and international civil society organizations. The draft law was universally condemned as the most significant threat to the country’s civil society in years. Even Cambodia’s major foreign donors chimed in, most notably the United States, which publicly stated that passage of the law in its current state could threaten aid money.

While it is too early to tell whether the outcry will ultimately impact the law, there is some reason for optimism. Many expected that the government would push the law through the Council of Ministers and National Assembly immediately after the release of the second draft, as has been done in the past with other controversial legislation. That has yet to happen.

It appears now that the backers of this law are regrouping. It is unclear what their next step will be, but this much is certain: continued opposition from Western donors, including CIDA, and international NGOs is key to preserving Cambodia’s independent civil society. Canadian taxpayers should also be concerned: if the law passes, the effectiveness of CIDA’s $17.03 million investment will be compromised by the Cambodian government’s total discretion over the operation of CIDA’s local partners.

The Cambodian government has played chicken with Western donors before, cynically manipulating their fears — China’s growing influence, the prospect of abandoning ordinary Cambodians, and the need to “engage” at all costs — in order to keep the money flowing. Too often it’s the donors who flinch.

This time should be different. Civil society teeters on the brink, and all of the proverbial chips are on the table. This is not the time to be timid; it’s time to call their bluff.

With today’s edition of Verbatim, we’ve got This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey in conversation with Liberal Party critic for International Cooperation Glen Pearson. You can hear the original podcast of this conversation, as always, on the podcast blog.

Nick and Glen discuss Canada’s humanitarian commitments past, present, and future, ranging from Darfur to Afghanistan to Haiti and Latin America. With the Afghanistan mission scheduled to end in 2011, Canada’s international development priorities are up for discussion again, but there appears to be little agreement in parliament about where exactly Canadian resources—attention, aid, military support—ought to go.

Q&A

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk about, first, the aftermath in Afghanistan, when the Canadian combat mission in Kandahar ends in 2011. What happens next?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s a great time to ask that question because up until two weeks ago I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen. Peter McKay the defence minister and I, we’re friends, but we discussed often, and I traveled to some of the NATO meetings with him in opposition, we talk about these things. He would say “Glen, pretty soon we’re wrapping up in Afghanistan, in 2011, and we need to consider where we go next.”

So he was thinking of three places in Africa, one was to maybe Darfur, which is a traditional one that people have looked at, one was maybe Somalia and one was maybe the Congo because of the UN declarations there.

So he’s asked me to do some thinking about it, and then I went off to Darfur and I just got back a couple of days ago. What happened between then and now is obviously Haiti. What you’re seeing with the Conservative government, and I’m not trying to be partisan, but they have tended to look at Africa as a Liberal construct and I’ve spoken to many people on the other side, on the Conservative side, and they want to find their own place where they can leave their own legacy and that will be in Latin and South America.

So as a result we’re opening up all these new lines of free-trade zones right there in Bolivia and Columbia and all those other things. As far as aid goes CIDA has now pulled out of eight African countries, mostly for its long-term development, and moved those funds over to places like Colombia, Haiti and other places. So that leaves defence, it seems to me that the Prime Minister and others over there wish to move the focus out of Africa—and I think Africa was the default position for two reasons: one is that it’s obviously the hardest pressed area in the world, and it’s kind of been a legacy here. Even with the Mulroney Government and the Diefenbaker government Africa mattered.

I think now that has begun to change. Now, it still was a default position and I think because of that Canada has made long-term commitments. We have donor nations who have agreed with Canada—United States, European Union and others—that Africa is the big thing.

So there’s the Millennial Development Goals and everything else. So I think I naturally assumed the default position would be Africa. But I’ve come to understand pretty well how the Conservatives think on things like aid and other things. I think right now there are more troops moving into Haiti then there are in Afghanistan at present. So I think if they ever wanted to make a move militarily to put some of their troops in various places, and I don’t mean battle type of things, but keeping security, peacekeeping, doing humanitarian aid, helping with various projects, now would be their time if they wanted to switch, because Haiti has given them the opportunity to capture the public’s attention and move them over.

It’s not like with Afghanistan, where that was a whole bunch of elites deciding that that’s where they were going to go. The public is already well ahead of the game about Haiti, so I think you’ll probably see the debate beginning to grow that the place for the troops to go will not be Africa. It will probably be a much larger enforcement group within Haiti and maybe in other countries, as well militarily.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How would that discussion happen? How would that commitment come about?

Glen Pearson: Well, probably secretly. I mean, this is one of the things that has bothered me a lot. These issues are so important that they should be part of parliament having a discussion, because our troops are sent by parliament, they’re not sent by their general or even by the Prime Minister. These kinds of things have to be passed by an act of parliament for anything that’s major. One would hope that they would sit down and come to their counterparts. The Liberals and the Conservatives have a vested interest in both Haiti and Afghanistan, it was the Liberals that first went into Haiti for instance and it was also the Liberals who first went into Afghanistan.

So we have a vested interest in cooperating together as parties, but we’re not being consulted. I think what you’ll see, it (the decision to move troops out of Africa, to Haiti and South America) will be by stealth. So you’ll suddenly realize the troop deployment in Haiti is now 3000, and then it might be 4000 and we’ve established and airbase. It won’t be, I don’t believe, by some big announcement that we’ve decided to move the construct as to where we’re going to go because that would fly directly in the face of most of the NGOs that do international development. It will also fly in the face of the commitments you have made to the G8, G20 and others that you would pursue the millennial development goal in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I wonder, would any commitment to Haiti militarily in terms of development hurt the Canadian commitment to Africa, which was made just a few years ago by the Liberals primarily? Is Africa going to be a forgotten continent again?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s very quickly on its way to becoming that within Canada. But I just finished meeting Mr. Obama’s key guy for U.S. Aid, his new person who he’s just appointed. They’re totally committed to Africa and they’re going to double their aid to Africa.

Gordon Brown, whom I’ve met and discussed things with, and also his assistant, they’ve just announced they’re going to reach their 0.7  percent  aid development target and that they’re going to do that in Africa. You’ve got places like China and Japan and others who are investing in Africa, not just in aid, but also in business and development. The European Union has a huge history in Africa, so obviously you’re not going to be able to wrench them away from it. So I think it’s going to be Canada that decides to now align itself with American foreign policy primarily. While Americans might be doubling their aid to Africa, their real interest is in the Americas. That’s where they want to be, for trade reasons and for other reasons, because there are lots of goods down there. I think it’s going to be difficult. My personal view is that it’s going to isolate us more from the world—just like Copenhagen did. You know, the formula we were supposed to follow and we never did and that was a Liberal problem and also a Conservative problem. But at the end of the day we’ve been isolated from the world environmentally. Now we’re going to be isolated from the world in the areas of Global Millennial development goals, which are supposed to be for the poorest of the poor. You can only measure them when you go to the poorest countries. Well, we just left those countries.

Now Conservatives will tell you: “No, we stayed in Africa.” But it’s emergency funding—it’s like Haiti funding. It’s not the long-term development goals that end up making the difference. That’s what’s gone wrong in Haiti; all this has become an aid economy. It’s an NGO-driven welfare state in Haiti because people didn’t really do development, they just kept doing aid every time a new natural disaster happened. There’s no long-term future in that. We need to get back to development and I just think that’s not going to happen and Canada will be isolated from the European Union and other nations.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What would you do if you were in charge?

Glen Pearson: Paul Martin and I do a lot of work together. Paul is helping to lead the African development bank. I just talked with him a couple days ago and he’s pulling together what he calls the African common market. It’s much like the E.U., he’s getting all these countries that now have certain benefits and certain growth patterns to begin to cooperate together to get world wide investment. He and I often get into fights about it because I’ll say: “Well that doesn’t help me in Darfur with the people who are trying to get water.”

He has agreed to that, so he and I are trying to put together a kind of plan that’s sky high for him and the people that he’s going with, but also how do we get markets and things like that to grow in places like Darfur or Nigeria or whatever. So I think what has happened in the last four or five years is that people have begun to realize that many countries in Africa have rounded the corner, but it comes after 50 years of investment and people are tired of it. So just as we are there, we’re suddenly moving on and I really fear that.

Haiti has been through that process as well, just as we’re getting somewhere we kind of pull out and it fell back to where it was. The biggest problem that I see in that is not the aid that would be going to Africa but environmental refugees. We’re told probably 160 million refugees will be coming from Africa, especially the coastal regions, over the course of the next decade. Where we are in Darfur, the rains came last year, but they didn’t come this year. So those people will move to the places resources can be. And they won’t move within Darfur, they’ll move into Chad, which then becomes an international nightmare.

Immigration legislation, refugee legislation, no country has anything to handle environmental refugees. You’re a refugee if you’re being persecuted. But what happens if you’re being persecuted by our own pollution.

I’m concerned about that and the second thing is I think Africa has huge resources. Not just natural, but people resources. Paul Martin has picked that up along with many in the World Bank, IMF and other and just as they see Africa now has the potential to also drive its own growth and it’s own interest we’re in the process of pulling out; that really worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So we’ve talked a lot now about Haiti and about Africa, what about Afghanistan? What do we do after the troops largely vacate Kandahar, how do we make sure that Afghanistan isn’t forgotten?

Glen Pearson: It’s just going to happen. I mean, I hate it, I hate telling you this, but it’s what we seem to do in the west. Like also, we have a tsunami so we pour a billion bucks into the place and so on and so forth, and it wasn’t invested well, it was wasted, projects were wasted and it’s because we moved on, we didn’t maintain our interest.

Already the public has moved on from Afghanistan and now I’m starting to notice politically—I’m one of the people in the Liberal party, and I’m one of the few, who feels we should stay on in Afghanistan militarily. I think we have to re-jig the mission somewhat to provide protection for development, but mine is not a popular view. But as a development person, all the work that I’ve been doing in Africa for the last 15 years, if all of a sudden you pulled out the security from those areas all the work that we’ve done over the years will just be run over. The leaders will be killed; the women’s leaders will be killed. And it’s going to happen in Afghanistan, the Taliban will remember who was helping to work with the Canadian projects, and who allowed the Canadian military to provide protection of their village and once we leave these forces will come in.

I think that’s a really major thing, it’s like bringing up a child, you can’t have a baby and just think it’s absolutely wonderful and when the baby is five you’re kind of tired of it and you move on. You can’t do that, development is not like that, development is a long time and a long-term waltz, very, very complicated. It takes a lot of compassion and you can’t just look to the public to give you the directions on where you should go because today it might be Darfur, tomorrow it might be Haiti. You have to have good policy that says where the neediest places in the world are, and says lets donate a half a century, a century to those places to help them grow.

So it’s interesting hearing the Prime Minister say yesterday that if we’re going to do anything we’re going to have to spend 10 years in Haiti, that’s very unlike him. He would rather do a temporary thing for a year and move on. Because his interest is in Central and South America, he’s willing to give them the 10 years, but he’s willing to pull out of Africa, it worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: It seems like you’re talking about a long-term plan. That doesn’t’ really exist here in Canada, we seem to go from country to country, problem to problem. How can that be changed?

Glen Pearson: I think it needs to be changed at the government level by smart thinking. I don’t think you can expect the public to know all of those things, but I hosted a dinner here last June at the parliamentary restaurant for all the former foreign affairs ministers of the Liberal party. There were eight of them that came and it was a great session, but every single one of them admitted they never had a foreign policy. Canada has never had one, it’s not like Israel where it’s fighting for its survival and therefore has to have a policy because its survival is at stake. Canada is very much protected by that, we have access to trade and other things and so therefore a policy isn’t so important.

The difficulty for them as they said, we inherited the policy was from the people before us, they just went on and did that. I think we need to have a foreign policy that says: “Here are our interests.” They might involve trade, you know business corporate, those things; it might involve environment; it might involve women; it might involve development and micro enterprises; it might involve the poorest of the poor in education. You know we have to have a policy that says wherever Canada goes in the world; these are the five things that Canada looks at.

So we can go to China and go ahead and do business with that and that’s fine. But, we’ll also look to a place like Africa and realize since our major responsibility is to help the poorest of the poor, that’s where we’ll be. But without somebody setting up that agenda, the Liberals will pick up where the Conservatives left off.

Let’s say I was chosen as a minister in the government, lets say I was chosen as CIDA minister. What do I do now? Do I go the Haiti and Bolivia and Columbia and say, “It’s been swell, but we’re gone because my personal preference is back to Africa.” So all these deals that have been signed from CIDA and all these things is it right for me to come along because I have a personal preference for Africa? To roll up the carpet from Columbia and head back over to Sudan? That’s no way to do foreign policy. So I think we need to have a bipartisan effort, a multi-partisan effort of determining what are our values that are sacrosanct to us and then our foreign policy will reflect that and very much as part of that will be international development.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: People like priorities though, they like to know that Canada is committed to Afghanistan, or Canada is committed to Haiti and if you try to spread troops or foreign aid around to much people will say “Canada has no priorities.” How do you balance that?

Glen Pearson: That’s why you need the policy, if the policy said “look we’re not just going to follow the Americans wherever they want us to go,” we’re a United Nations country, we’ve always believed in that. So if the United Nations has something, that’s part of our policy, we will go where they want us to go. But our policy should also be “If security is at stake and we regard that that is important, the public might want us to leave Afghanistan, but we don’t believe that that is the right thing to do because our European partners don’t want us to do it, the Americans don’t want us to do it, the UN doesn’t want us to do it, and definitely the Afghans don’t want us to do it.”

But then that’s the problem with democracy, it becomes an unpopular war because some 60 Canadian soldiers have been killed and when I go to an election I’ve got to try to sell people on the fact I’ve got to stay. People are going to say screw off; it’s not going to happen. People will vote us out of office.

So a much deeper amount of work needs to be done on how we preserve institutional arrangements and longevity of policy that can be better for any party so that we’re not at the whim of whatever is politically popular. Because if that is the case, we’ll always be in Haiti three months and then gone to the next one. It’s how we work.

Because we have everything here, we don’t understand about development and what it requires. So we just move on. The problem is not international development and the problem is not Haiti or Sudan, the problem is democracy. We have a citizenry that has probably everything that it wants, right? I realize there are sectors of the society that are really struggling, but overall we’re doing very well so we don’t have a development temperament. We don’t. As a result the Canadian image is going to continue to suffer.

We were in Cypress for something like 50 years, we’ve been in Africa since the end of World War II, and we’ve been in Haiti for something like 18 years. These things are important, it’s where our legacy came from that everybody respects and now we’re going to pull out of a bunch of those places. I think people are not going to respect that, it’s a problem, but the problem is democratic.

I’ll give you an example, I got $3 million out of the Prime Minister to build these women’s centres and also water centres for these refugees that came out of Darfur. That was two years ago, it was my first speech in the house. I spoke directly to the Prime Minister. I asked for the money, to my shock he gave it. It was given to the International Organization of Migration with us kind of parlaying that. This time when we went back in January we took a team of 15 people with us and we went in and they saw we had 130,000 refugees last year come out of Darfur into our area where we had been working for 10 years. Swamping over the area and we realized something had to be done. So that $3 million was given, it was given to the IOM and just four months ago they finished all their projects so we arrived a couple of weeks ago and I’ll tell you, I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Here’s the Canadian flag on water towers, water systems, women’s micro-enterprises, this is Darfur I’m talking about and now we’re building a high school there for Darfur refugees. You tell me a person in Darfur who ever thought they would get a high school education. All of these things are happening because it’s government money. It’s not the little NGO that my wife and I lead; it would take us 50 years to raise that kind of money.

When government decides to act it makes a massive difference if it’s invested wisely. So the team all sat around with me, and they’ve known me for years, they said “Glen, we just think it’s awesome you got that $3 million, it made a big difference, we got to keep it going.” And I told them the way you keep these things going is you should help me in the next election, like you should get involved politically. I don’t care which party it is, but if you believe Darfur is important or people like that are, you need to get involved politically and make sure that politicians keep focus on these things that matter to you. And every single one of them said; “nah, politics is a nasty business.”

We’ve so much turned people off of politics that the idea that the public would keep our minds set on the things that we believe in, I’m not saying the public couldn’t, it just doesn’t care. It just doesn’t think that we as politicians anymore are worth it. So we get 59 percent voter turn out in the last election. It’s terrible.

How can Africa remain a priority, or Haiti, I don’t care what it is: any kind of foreign policy. How can it remain a priority when the vast majority of people who need to vote to keep that priority in mind and hold governments accountable will not vote? That’s the big issue, the big issue is not priorities over development, the big issue is the expansion of the franchise of democracy and we’re doing a pitsy job of it as politicians, its abysmal.

Haitians awaiting relif supplies in Port au Prince, January 15, 2010.

The earthquake that devastated Haiti on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, viscerally illustrated the need for responsible, long-term, sustainable development. For many thousands of Haitians, poverty must be considered the true cause of death. The cost to Haiti in human lives is beyond measure, but the quake also destroyed the rotted foundations of the Haitian government and threatened its already fragile civil society. As the full horror of the disaster began to trickle out and the death toll rose to an estimated 200,000, aid agencies, governments, and ordinary citizens collectively pledged millions of dollars to support relief efforts.

Canadians can take some small comfort in knowing that we responded far out of proportion to our size and population: in absolute dollar terms, Canada’s total pledge of US$131 million is second only to the United States, and we gave more per capita than any other country. Following that outpouring of compassion and hard cash, it seems cranky to complain that it’s not enough. But it’s not.

Haiti was a disaster area long before the quake hit. This was simply the catastrophic climax of a centuries-long story of colonial oppression, financial exploitation, political meddling, and humanitarian neglect. From France’s astonishing 150 million-franc charge for its slave colony’s independence, to the murderous homegrown government of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, to the 2004 coup—the 32nd coup in 200 years—that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has suffered near-continuous calamity, much of it inflicted by outsiders—though there was plenty self-manufactured, too.

The world’s late-breaking compassion for the people of Haiti is still valuable. But the fact that it apparently takes the wholesale destruction of a country to grab any significant attention is a shame. It’s easy to open your heart and your wallet when the headlines are screaming. But the day-to-day truth is that Canada is nowhere close to meeting its long-standing target of contributing 0.7 percent of GDP to aid. We currently lag around halfway to that goal, which was first set by Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1969, renewed by a unanimous parliamentary vote in 2005, and has never once been met.

It’s currently trendy to dismiss international aid as condescending and ineffective, a waste of effort that props up dictators or kills entrepreneurial spirit or both—an idea that free marketeers have diligently worked at circulating. But the real waste is spending money to pick up the pieces after a disaster, rather than investing for the long term in projects that strengthen infrastructure, stabilize governments, and improve living conditions, allowing societies to better withstand sudden shocks. Haiti needs our help more than ever now. But the rich nations ought to be haunted by the thousands whose lives would have been improved—perhaps even saved—if we had fulfilled our pledges years ago.