Canadian International Development Agency

In the spirit of devil’s advocacy, Colby Cosh lays out the defence case

Don’t tell the PMO they helped him, Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth May and The Queen, the Emperor and Obama

POTTER: “A rare case of Tory ideology actually aligning itself with sound public policy”

If Mugabe were to accuse Canada of meddling in Zimbabwe’s domestic politics, he’d have a point

“Funds will be disbursed in the near future”

Colleague Aaron Wherry points to an op-ed by University of Ottawa professor Nipa Banerjee, who ran Canada’s aid program in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006, in which she alleges that the United Nations and bosses at the Canadian International Development Agency chose to ignore and suppress reports of fraud and incompetence at an NGO and aid project Canadians were financing rather than do anything to fix it:

For five years, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, co-founded by McGill international law professor Payam Akhavan, has chronicled human rights abuses committed in Iran since 1979. The centre’s work is based on the conviction that an eventual transition to democracy will not be successful unless a culture of human rights and democratic governance is cultivated, and gross violators of human rights are held to account.

Last November, I published a story about an Iranian exile by the name of Behnam Vafaseresht who claimed to have been jailed at the Evin Prison in Tehran at the same time that Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi was held and eventually murdered there. Vafaseresht said he had information implicating Saeed Mortazavi, the prosecutor general of Tehran, in Kazemi’s death.

Longtime readers of this blog may be familiar with my ongoing battle with the Canadian International Development Agency over an access-to-information request I made in April 2007. I wanted to know about CIDA programs in Zimbabwe, but when CIDA claimed such a supposedly broad request would require thousands of dollars in “research fees,” I narrowed the request to one phase of one program – in other words, nothing too broad or onerous.  

The Canadian Newspaper Association released its fourth annual Freedom of Information Audit. The report reveals what anyone who has tried to access information from Canadian governments and institutions already knows: just because you pay their salaries and fund their projects doesn’t mean many of them feel obligated to explain what they do. The Canadian International Development Agency wasn’t tested with access requests during the report’s research, which is probably just as well. The CNA likes to update these audits every year, and the last access request I made to CIDA, in April 2007, still hasn’t been fully answered.