Pierre Poilievre Wants to Slash Canadian Foreign Aid
A post-USAID world is set to be dangerous and dominated by China. Poilievre wants to make things worse.
“We will cut back on foreign aid to dictators, terrorists, and global bureaucracy,” Poilievre told some 4,000-odd supporters in Kingston last week, “to bring our money home.”
He repeated that notion again in Trois-Rivières on Friday: “I will be cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses,” he declared.
Poilievre appeared on Radio-Canada this week for a lengthy interview. There, Céline Galipeau pressed him on the absurdity of his position. Here’s how he responded:
I have spent the last few days trying to ask Poilievre to explain this position further — to detail why, in the context of America’s full-scale retreat from internationalism, Canada would follow suit. And to detail exactly how much he plans to cut.
Unfortunately, Poilievre’s press team has taken the unprecedented step of banning questions from journalists, except those pre-selected by the tinpot dictators who run his campaign. And I, dear reader, have not been selected thus far. I have shouted these questions at the Conservative leader, but I have been dutifully ignored.
When I followed up with his press team, they responded by sending a transcript of his Radio-Canada remarks — but underlining that “Canada’s funding commitments to Ukraine would be unaffected by our policy on foreign aid.” Everything else, ostensibly, is on the chopping block.
This is an extreme position. Poilievre seems to be promising to enact a $10 billion reduction in Canada’s foreign aid contributions, deeming it all “unnecessary,” aligning us with Donald Trump’s new isolationism and shirking our responsibilities to a world on fire.
It’s worth asking: What does the world lose if Canada cancels foreign aid?
On this Chaos Campaign, I want to talk about the dangerous game being played by the sloganeers and trolls who are using lies to discredit some very real, and very important, development work which happens abroad.
So let’s get to it.
The campaign to discredit USAID began quietly, and ended at an ear-piercing decibel.
In his first term, Donald Trump suggested slashing the US Agency for International Development, vowing to bring home those aid dollars and spend them on needy Americans. Again and again, Congress stopped him.
As Senator Marco Rubio argued then, “millions of human beings are alive today” because of American foreign aid to combat HIV/AIDS. American aid programs “are integral to our national security,” he argued, because they promote stability abroad. That, without American aid, the world would become a poorer, more dangerous, less stable place. “There is no alternative for America in the world today if America decides to withdraw from the world.”
After Trump lost the 2020 election and left office, his apparatchiks toiled in their think tanks and chat groups, pondering how they could lay the groundwork for a second term, unencumbered by nay-sayers like Rubio. And given their total failure at slashing foreign aid, somebody had to build the case against the United States Agency for International Development.
Enter Project 2025.
The effort brought Trump’s true-believers together from all corners of America, with Heritage Foundation in the middle. Their central policy book, Mandate for Leadership, was a sweeping gameplan meant to centralize power in the hands of a re-elected President Trump and dismantle the administrative state as we know it. In the book, they devoted an entire chapter to USAID.
“The Biden Administration,” writes Heritage egghead Max Primorac in Mandate for Leadership, “has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.”
The Project 2025 document spends more than 20 pages laying out reform plans for USAID: Some bad, some good, some terrible. The document argues that a second Trump administration should “reassess all programs of U.S. foreign aid to Latin America and terminate those that have failed to achieve results.” In Africa, a Republican administration “should aggressively ramp down its partnerships with wasteful, costly, and politicized U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and Beltway contractors.” In the Middle East? Washington should adopt the “goal of ending the need for foreign aid through development.”
The document previews a substantially scaled-down, more politicized, and more transactional version of foreign aid. But, critically, the document doesn’t call to abolish USAID outright — indeed, it recognizes some of the critical work that USAID does, in combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS and countering China’s new imperialism.
In making the case for these sweeping cuts, Primorac warns American foreign aid, all too often, was being “diverted to terrorists.” That it was being seized by “the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.” American aid, the document contends, “effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States.”
But Project 2025 did a masterful job in discrediting USAID. Too good a job.
In the first week of his second term, Donald Trump froze all foreign aid and began mass layoffs at USAID. In his second week, hatchet-man Elon Musk announced he would be shutting down the agency entirely.
Musk called USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” alleged that USAID helped fund the creation of COVID-19, accused them of being a “radical-left political psy op,” running meddling operations abroad, and taking food out of the mouths of needy people in America.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now, notionally, the head of the gutted agency. Once one of USAID’s saviours, he is now responsible for performing its last rites. USAID is gone.
The world has been thrown into tumult because of USAID’s closure. Calculating the effect of America’s total withdrawal of foreign aid will take years: But thousands will die of treatable illnesses, thousands more will die of starvation, and thousands more will die from inadequate responses to natural disasters. As a result, migration will increase, governments will become weaker and more corrupt, terrorism and organized crime will thrive, democracy will suffer, America will become less influential, China and Russia will exert more influence, and the world will become a more dangerous and less free place.
The annual global budget for development, public health, and security has been reduced by at least $60 billion in a matter of weeks. When it is all tabulated, the true reduction could surpass $100 billion-per-annum.
This is going to be a humanitarian disaster and a security crisis. Some impacts will be felt very quickly, others could reverberate for generations.
This didn’t need to happen. Trump could have, absolutely, reduced foreign assistance, targeted some programs more effectively, and focused more on things that demonstrably worked. But you can’t enacted reasonable reforms to an agency which you’ve declared is full of Marxists, terrorist-financiers, and deep state globalists. You can only set it on fire.
This couldn’t happen at a worse time. Fearful for its own security, Europe was already planning on cutting its own foreign aid budgets to put the money into their militaries.
The conversation in Europe, however, is turning towards how countries can step in and deliver the most-critical aid immediately to blunt the worst externalities of America’s frenzied withdrawal. This could take on a ‘hybrid’ approach, which blends investment with aid. We could also see the rise of new internationalists, like Japan, who aspire to become more influential regional partners by promoting stability and good governance in their neighborhood.
Canada can, and should, be at the forefront of that conversation. We’re not. But Poilievre is promising that we retreat even further. Poilievre is suggesting we follow Trump’s lead.
Canada is a free rider on foreign aid.
We are not, as we once were, a country which funds peacekeeping, underwriters development efforts, and finances good public health work. No, we are one of the most miserly rich countries in the world.
Annually, Canada contributes just $11 billion in foreign aid, about 0.38% of its GDP. (A slightly inflated figure, as it includes ample foreign assistance to Ukraine above its regular aid baseline.) Canada, as a share of its GNI, gives less than half what Germany does.
It didn’t used to be this way. Canada used to contribute 0.5% of GDP to foreign aid, particularly at a time when few other countries cared. That made us an incredibly influential and effective country, particularly on the continent of Africa. But steep cuts to our foreign aid at the end of the austere 1990s basically relegated Canada to the class of aid laggards.
Today, however, we are having an extraordinary conversation about our place in the world. Everyone agrees that we’ve got to get tougher, more engaged, and more concerned about what goes on beyond our borders.
And yet the actual plans on how to do that have been lacking. There is some good language on trade and defence, but preciously little curiosity about how Canada — and the West more broadly — can expand their presence in the Global South.
The NDP says they want to up aid spending to 0.7% of GNI. Good. The Green Party wants more, and has some ideas about improving internationalist institutions. Ok. The Liberals have, thus far, been silent on this question. Disappointing.
And there are the Conservatives, who want to “bring our money home.”
So let’s talk about it: Does all Canadian foreign aid go to globalist bureaucrats, terrorists, and dictators?
In service of this grand claim, Poilievre provides just two examples: Canadian funding for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; and a $250 million cheque for infrastructure-building in China.
On UNRWA, Poilievre is not exactly wrong. Given it is the only agency capable of working on the ground in Gaza, its organization has troubling ties with Hamas. (Which was, recall, the government of the Gaza Strip until the war began last year.) Israel has long alleged that UNRWA operates as cover for Hamas. After the October 7 attacks, Israel submitted the names of 19 UNRWA employees who, they say, were involved in the attacks. A UN investigation confirmed that nine of those employees bore some responsibility for the deadly terror attacks, and fired them.
This is bad. UNRWA is the agency which delivered humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Without it, that aid would either need to go directly through Hamas, which is notorious for stealing aid for its own purposes; the Palestinian Authority, which has had little footprint in Gaza in recent years; or Israel, which has choked off aid from Gaza and simply cannot be trusted to provide aid for the Palestinian people.
Given that, it is infuriating that UNRWA would allow itself to become an easy target for Israel. And this isn’t a new thing: UNRWA has allowed itself to become politicized and co-opted for years. But it also means that UNRWA cannot simply be defunded without a staggering human cost.
And while UNRWA should be held responsible for its staff’s ties to October 7, that negligence does not excuse Israel’s malice in blockading, isolating, bombing, and starving Gaza. Israel could, tomorrow, ensure a place in Gaza for other aid agencies: But it is Israeli policies that limit the activity of these other developer workers.
Hamas deserves ample blame for Gaza’s current reality, but so too does Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. UNRWA, for its egregious faults, is still trying to save lives.
If Poilievre has plans to alleviate the humanitarian and public health crisis in Gaza, and how to stop the real prospect of genocide, we haven’t heard them. Instead, he is parroting smug slogans.
On that premise alone, Poilievre’s position is morally bankrupt. But worth considering that we are not talking about billions, nor hundreds of millions. Canada sends UNRWA $25 million per year — a figure that’s been roughly double over the past year, given the extent of the human suffering. That is just a fraction of its total $11 billion foreign aid envelope.
What about this $250 million in foreign aid we’re sending to China?
Poilievre is right that Ottawa made the bone-headed decision to chip in a quarter-billion bucks into the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, an initiative that was ostensibly supposed to build infrastructure in China, the Global South, and, potentially, in Canada — but which, in reality, was a tool of China’s new debt colonialism.
But the AIIB isn’t part of Canada’s foreign aid programme. It is, as its name suggests, a bank: A source of capital from infrastructure projects. The Bank is meant to post returns, and its members are shareholders, not benefactors. Canada is already reviewing its participation in the organization, and may yet pull out its capital investment. (It should.)
So Poilievre has identified a single grant, 0.0005% of Canada’s foreign aid spending, that he deems problematic; and another initiative that has nothing to do with foreign aid.
What about the other 99.9995% of our foreign aid spending? What else would Poilievre cut?
We have a $5 million program in Mali which, amongst other things, provided family planning to 270,000 women and trained 140 health workers to provide care to survivors of gender-based violence.
We have budgeted $500,000 to help Bangladesh to help the 4.6 million people affected by Cyclone Remal.
We have put up more than $12 million, over five years, to finance the embattled police services in Haiti, which is teetering on the brink of total collapse.
We have contributed shy of $2 million to improve biosafety and biosecurity in Laos, so that scientists there can study novel virological threats safely.
Another $2 million has gone to North Africa, where we have helped nab 70 suspected terrorists — and, at the same time, helped dismantle several criminal networks which trafficked guns and stolen cars.
Do we fund some dumb projects? Does some of our aid go to unsavoury actors? Could we do better? Yes, yes, yes.
But Poilievre is not arguing that Canada needs to improve its foreign aid delivery. He’s saying we’re wrong to spend any money at all.
It is easy to say that we should do nothing for people over there when people are suffering here, at home. But that position is both morally hollow, practically wrong, and entirely self-defeating.
Rest assured, if we yanked that funding tomorrow, we would feel the consequences. We would see more refugee claims from Haiti, we would see more victories from the Islamic State in the Sahel, we would see less global growth — and we would see more human suffering.
The entire rich world invests, collectively, to promote development and alleviate suffering because it is the right thing to do. Our nations are rich, to varying degrees, because of sacrifices made by the Global South — capitalism extracts the labour and natural wealth from less developed nations and transfers it to individuals, corporations, and nations in the developed world. This is simply a fact. The promise of global cooperation was always that those prosperous nation-states should, through various means, invest in the growth of those less-developed countries. Wealth is not a zero-sum game: Indeed, the 20th century saw an extraordinary reduction in poverty across the world, just as our collective wealth and standard of living rose significantly.
Good foreign aid generates more prosperity: Which, in turn, generates technological innovation, entrepreneurship, new markets and consumers, and it promotes health, safety, and sustainability.
This is why USAID existed in the first place. It was a recognition that America had the moral authority and moral imperative to do this development work, that it would stabilize economies and governments around the world, and that it would reduce armed conflict and terrorism.
Finally, foreign aid was recognized as a smart proposition because it was so damned cheap. America spent even less on foreign aid than Canada, at just around 0.33% of GDP, yet it invested so much on a dollar basis that it achieved the eradication of deadly diseases, kept populations from the brink of famine, and helped combat the effects of climate change.
Pierre Poilievre knows all this, just as Marco Rubio knows that dismantling USAID will be a security and humanitarian nightmare. But both men are pursuing these plans because it serves as a useful rhetorical narrative.
They are lying to the public and selling simple truths because they trust that voters are too stupid to know the difference.
That’s it for this Chaos Campaign dispatch.
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I've been trying to find out how much foreign aid is "in kind" - i.e. stuff we buy domestically and ship overseas as aid. Recent stories suggest that American farmers stand to lose more than $2 billion per year with the demise of USAID, I wonder if Poilievre has considered the Canadian equivalent in his calculations.
As the the US retreats from foreign aid and its soft-power value, china and russia are stepping in to fill the void. I’d rather it be Canada. The long-term gain would serve us well, I’m certain of that.