The malaise in Canada's international development programming and in its main protagonist, CIDA, has been the subject of many studies, parliamentary reviews and media articles over the years. Two recently released studies have addressed the problem head-on.

The first, Reinventing CIDA, was published in May by the Canadian International Council and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. The second, Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked Age, was published in June by CIC alone. Reinventing CIDA focuses entirely on Canada's international development assistance, while Open Canada discusses the full range of Canadian interests abroad.

Both describe CIDA's historical weaknesses: too many masters; too many changing priorities; widespread geographic dispersion; a top-heavy administrative burden that requires 43 months for a project to reach approval; and, apparently, not much to show for the billions of dollars that have been spent over the past 40 or 50 years.

On the latter point, CIDA is perhaps its own worst enemy. Its minuscule public affairs budget - less than half of what World Vision spends each year on fundraising in Canada - can hardly be expected to explain much to Canadians, besieged over the years with two basic messages about foreign aid.

The first is paternalistic: By giving or volunteering or sponsoring a child, you can make a difference. The second is pessimistic: None of it gets there, nothing works, they are all corrupt.

Neither message talks about what has worked-and lots has. Neither says much about how or why $5 billion a year-only four times what we devoted to G8/G20 security in three days-is spent. And neither of these new reports goes into much detail about the large volumes of foreign aid that our politicians have diverted over the years to political, commercial and strategic interests.

Reinventing CIDA recommends an explicit purpose for Canadian aid: "poverty reduction through economic growth." Poverty reduction, however, has always been a well-articulated and explicit purpose, with "economic growth"-the old trickle-down approach so beloved of economists-the implicit vehicle. This has not prevented five decades of aid hijacking for other purposes. Open Canada sees the objective of Canadian assistance as "economic independence," whatever that means.

In programming terms, Reinventing CIDA is much enamored of competition, market incentives and payments to foreign partners only after they meet their targets. "Straighten up, and then you'll get the money," it says, as though nobody anywhere at the end of our bank transfers can be trusted. It is as though we didn't know until now that the dictators of years past might squander our aid, as though politics had nothing to do with it, as though "market incentives" could actually work in some of our largest aid recipient countries-Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti and Iraq.

Open Canada, on the other hand, has little to say about programming beyond an enthusiasm for a further reduction in the number of aid recipients, an endorsement of the government's shift of aid funds from Africa to Latin America, and "using our digitally savvy generation of young people to apply technological solutions to old problems."

Both reports move on quickly to the business of rearranging the deck chairs. Reinventing CIDA argues in favour of transforming CIDA into a Crown corporation with its own Act of Parliament and the creation of a separate home for humanitarian assistance. Open Canada would divide CIDA into two Crown corporations, one for "human development" and one for "economic development." A third agency "specializing in humanitarian and stabilization assistance" would be run out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The problem with these options is that they treat foreign aid much as it has been viewed in the past-as a voluntary add-on to Canada's real purpose in the world. They betray a lack of understanding about how emergency assistance must dovetail with longer-term development, and they would isolate Canadian aid even more from mainstream government policy than in the past.

There is another way. When Canada is at last ready to become serious about the impact of poverty, conflict and environmental degradation on the global polity and our own future, then we will stop treating our aid program as a slush fund for commercial, military and political interests and a place where feel-good maternal and child health "initiatives" can be parked for as long as they have some PR value. We will make development assistance a central plank in our foreign policy, not a sandbox for ever-changing junior ministers with ever-changing junior ideas, and not an isolated crown corporation or two that can be left to their own devices.

In 1997, Britain's Labour government put the country's weak and compromised aid program under the authority of a full cabinet minister. Poverty alleviation in poor countries became a central government policy, and the new Department for International Development (DfID) began to devote serious time, resources and people to learning, remembering and applying what they were learning. Within a few years, DfID became one of the world's most effective and respected aid organizations.

Today's new British government remains committed to the structure and purpose of its predecessor. The new government has also held fast to Britain's financial commitments on foreign aid, which, on a per capita basis, is almost double Canada's. That is no mean achievement in a country where the recession hit much harder than it did here, and it demonstrates the centrality of international development in British purpose.

So far, sadly, both the centrality and the purpose are lacking in Canada.

Ian Smillie, an Ottawa-based development consultant and writer, is the author of Freedom from Want. He is a member of the McLeod Group