From $16 orange juice to $25,000 meet-and-greet
By Jennifer Ditchburn, The Canadian Press - Thursday, January 31, 2013 - 0 Comments
OTTAWA – One of Julian Fantino’s first orders of business last summer as the new minister for international development was to order up a meet-and-greet for his bureaucrats — to the tune of $25,000.
Fantino directed the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to organize a town hall meeting with employees in September and include the minister’s handpicked motivational speaker.
“My purpose today is simple, to meet you, pass on my early impressions, to thank you for efforts in helping me with my transition in this role and to begin to chart our path to the future,” Fantino told the employees.
Documents and a recording of the town hall were released to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
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Idea alert
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 7 Comments
Glen Pearson lobbies for accountability in foreign aid.
The Harper government presented its first annual accounting report on the Aid Accountability Act to Parliament two weeks ago, and many waited with keen anticipation to see if the government would continue hiding CIDA within a cloak and dagger operation or if it would finally use such a solemn occasion to finally treat the issue with a hoped for trait of transparency. I worked with a team of NGOs, large and small, to analyze the paper once it was presented and, sadly, it was unanimously agreed that the accountability inherent in C-293 is not being accurately reported – the smoke and mirrors remain…
We examined the new report in comparison with the accounting the British version of CIDA (Department For International Development) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development must undertake each year. While CIDA’s accounting for $3.75 billion comprises only six pages, the other reports run in the dozens of pages. In the area of health, where the other reports are expansive, CIDA’s report offers the reader no idea of the details of the Canadian programs, their overall impact, or even the location where those programs took place.
