Canadians like to see themselves as global benefactors, but in fact they have been pinching pennies on aid and defence

WHEN heart-rending images flashed across the world of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old from Syria who drowned off the Turkish coast, people everywhere were appalled. But the pang of conscience was especially acute in Canada.

That was because Alan, his five-year-old brother, Galib, and their mother, Rehan, all of whom perished, might possibly be alive now had it not been for a tightening in Canadian immigration policy. The boys’ aunt, who has lived in Vancouver for 20 years, had been trying to secure entry for her two brothers and their families. That was a very painful thought for a country which rightly or wrongly loves to think of itself as being a “helpful fixer” of the world’s problems.

As an immediate result, refugees became a bone of contention in campaigning for Canada’s general election in October. The drowned family meant that “Canada has failed”, Tom Mulcair, leader of the centre-left New Democratic Party (NDP), declared. He is challenging the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper.

As well as arguing over who bears responsibility for the Kurdis’ fate, the prime minister and his challengers have been bickering over what to do now. In mid-August Mr Harper said that if re-elected his government would take another 10,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq by 2019, on top of an earlier pledge to accept 11,300 Syrians and 23,000 Iraqis. This week he declined to change that policy although many mayors and four provincial premiers would take more Syrians. Mr Mulcair wants 10,000 refugees to be accepted immediately and another 9,000 per year between now and 2019. Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, advocates taking an extra 25,000 from Syria this year.

Numbers aside, Mr Harper’s critics have been urging him to recover the generous spirit which the nation showed during one of the nobler moments in Canadian history: the welcome extended in 1979-80 to 60,000 boat people from Vietnam.

But that was a very different era. As a new study for the Canadian International Council, a think-tank, shows, Canada’s self-image as a contributor to solving the world’s problems is out of date—by a couple of decades. Before 1995 governments of all hues pursued a generous foreign policy, even when Canada’s own finances were so rocky that this was hard to afford. Since then the country’s economy has improved but its external policy, reflected in defence and aid spending, has grown far meaner. “Over the past 20 years, Canada has never contributed its fair share to international engagement, whether compared with what Canada committed in the past or with what other countries are committing today,” conclude the study’s authors, Megan McQuillan and Robert Greenhill, a former head of the country’s aid agency.

The report was uncomfortable for politicians of all stripes. Mr Harper’s Conservatives vow to keep the country’s armed forces in good shape, whether for global action or to guard the country’s strategic north. The slogan they have coined in the run-up to the nation’s 150th birthday celebrations in 2017 is “strong, proud, free”.

A different internationalism is propagated by the NDP, which has never won national power but might do so next month, and the Liberals, who have formed many governments and are closer to the political centre. They see Canada as a country whose vocation is to dole out aid and uphold peace agreements.

But the hard facts suggest that neither vision is very realistic. Both in defence and development spending, Canada has done poorly compared with its G7 partners, and even with other middle-ranking countries with open economies, the study finds. Indeed, far from being a selfless spreader of peace and security, Canada tends to piggy-back on the foreign-policy efforts of others, the authors reckon.

Some reasons for their gloomy conclusions are obvious. Mr Harper’s government has cut official development aid as a percentage of gross national income by 27% since 2008, (see chart 1) and it has never come close to NATO’s defence-spending target of 2% of GDP. Last year’s defence spending, at just below 1% of GDP, was the lowest in the G7, and the lowest among its middle-sized peers apart from neutral Switzerland (see chart 2).

But this is not a partisan issue. Between 1995 and 2006 the Liberals slashed aid and defence outlays. As a proportion of GDP, their spending on development during that decade was slightly less than that of the Conservatives who have held power since then. Canada did once behave as a kindly fixer—between 1975 and 1995 when Liberal and Conservative governments alike were active in supporting the UN, fighting apartheid and lobbying for environmental causes. “The difference in commitment to global engagement between these two eras is ten times greater than the difference between parties within each era,” the authors say. It is true that the global profile of the country’s forces rose during a painful engagement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, in which 162 uniformed and civilian Canadians were killed and up to 2,000 were wounded. On the other hand, defence procurement has been dogged by quarrels over money and specifications, with naval vessels and Arctic patrol ships far behind schedule. The study’s authors call the Afghan mission a “temporary surge” within a broad strategic decline. Now, as the parties put the finishing touches to their manifestos, the country’s policy towards Syria and Iraq promises to be a more contentious item in electoral debates than the Afghan mission ever was. For Canadians, the Middle East is both a domestic issue, affecting immigration, and a strategic one for the armed forces. Canada plays a small role in the American-led campaign against Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, having sent six fighter-bombers, two surveillance aircraft and 600 support personnel plus 69 members of the special forces who help the Kurds. This effort is expensive—it will have cost C$500m ($380m) by next March—and its effectiveness, especially over Syria, has been limited. The NDP and Liberals say Canada should stay out of the region’s fight. Mr Harper retorts that stemming the outflow from Syria must involve military action as well as aid.

The one thing no party can realistically propose, says the study, is rapid action to make Canada the extrovert power that it dreams of being. Last year, the authors say, Canada’s spending on global engagement, defined as aid and defence, amounted to 1.2% of GDP. To reach the average level of its G7 partners, or of its economic peers, the figure would have to rise by half, and for Canada to be a leader in world affairs it would have to double at least.

In a country where voters care about balanced budgets as well as refugees, that will not happen. Any rise in Canada’s profile will have to be made in selected areas. Despite cutting aid to some poor places, the country has led UN efforts to improve the health of mothers and infants; that may be a good start. And whatever they choose, Canadians should remember a warning back in 2001 by a former foreign minister, John Manley: they will lose their place in elite global clubs if “when the bill comes [they] go to the washroom.”