A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid ed. by Greg Donaghy and David Webster (review)

Maligned for doing too little, too much, or the wrong thing altogether, Canada's foreign aid program has long faced critiques and often-contradictory expectations from across the political spectrum. As early as 1966–less than two decades into Canada's official development assistance efforts–Keith Spicer's A Samaritan State? argued that foreign aid should not be undertaken for solely altruistic reasons, nor should there be unrealistic expectations about the ability of foreign aid alone to catalyze significant economic growth or flourishing democratic institutions in recipient states. Rather, he argued, aid should be undertaken in concert with other diplomatic efforts to secure goodwill abroad while advancing the Canadian national interest. A Samaritan State Revisited promises an engagement, more than a half-century later, with Spicer's arguments. Although some authors in this edited collection engage directly with Spicer's book and others more broadly with the concept of "the Samaritan state" and what the editors describe as Canada's "ambiguous position" as neither a "heroic do-gooder" nor an "imperialist exploiter" (17), the result is a compelling history of the evolution of Canadian foreign aid. All chapters are thoughtfully argued and well-supported with archival research and interviews, and the book as a whole maintains a level of coherence and quality that is difficult to achieve in edited collections.

The book is organized chronologically, though with a not-entirely successful effort to assign themes to each section, highlighting development, diplomacy, and trade in the early years of aid, imagery and symbolism in the middle years, and political economy from 1980 to the present. This presentation allows the reader to easily trace the development of Canada's foreign aid bureaucracy over time. Overarching themes that connect the chapters include the rise and fall of CIDA and DFAIT, the lives of many of the "great men" who were the initial architects of these institutions and programs, and the ways that political priorities of successive federal governments shaped, for good or for ill, the direction and outcomes of foreign aid. The book's greatest strength, then, is the close, careful history it offers of the institutional and organizational development of Canada's foreign aid program. In so doing, it focuses primarily on formal politics, including the inside story of personality and political debates within the federal aid bureaucracy, and the efforts on the part of the Canadian state to persuade the mass public to support foreign aid initiatives. With respect to the latter, two stand-out chapters are those by Nassisse Solomon and Sonya de Laat, both of whom trace (through Ethiopian famine relief and CIDA's photo library, respectively) the concerted effort of federal bureaucrats and politicians to convince Canadians that foreign aid spending was not merely politically expedient but morally desirable, socially just, and a cornerstone of Canadian national identity. Through these chapters we see the historical construction of a narrative about Canada's own benevolent identity, the identity of the imagined Third World Other who was assumed to be the grateful beneficiary of foreign aid assistance, and, particularly in Solomon's chapter, the fraught and contingent nature of Canadians' commitment to aid efforts.

The book's greatest strength is also, in some ways, a limitation. With the exception of brief mentions of broad-based public support for famine relief in Solomon's chapter, and references to the role of domestic civil society pressures in shaping Canada's development assistance to Latin America in Asa McKercher's and Laura McDonald's chapters, the book maintains a largely top-down narrative that emphasizes the role of political and bureaucratic leaders in shaping Canada's aid agenda. There is limited attention given to the role of civil society actors, either as sources of domestic political pressure or as aid actors in their own right (whose aid work both predated the era of official development assistance by the Canadian state and...