With a federal election in Canada likely this spring and the Conservative Party leading in opinion polls, civil society organizations (CSOs) need to think seriously about how they will engage with a possible new Conservative government on key public policy issues.

These include natural resources, the environment, (im)migration and human rights. A particularly notable example is likely to be international development policies.

In this area, valuable lessons – both strategic and cautionary – can be learned from the Muskoka Initiative for maternal, newborn and child health, enacted by the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper as the signature initiative of Canada’s 2010 leadership of what was then the G8.

The Initiative was an unlikely and controversial policy aimed at the Global South, and some of Canada’s most prominent CSOs – CARE Canada, PLAN Canada, RESULTS Canada, Save the Children Canada, UNICEF Canada and World Vision – played key roles in bringing it about.

Helping mothers and children through compromise

However, as we argue in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, advocacy for the initiative also reflected significant compromises and contributed to deep divisions among civil society organizations that should prompt serious reflection today.

In 2010, the Harper government held a minority in Parliament and was focused on day-to-day survival. It had demonstrated deep skepticism about Canada’s international aid program and outright hostility to many CSOs – clearly expressed through funding cuts to organizations that criticized government policies. The effect was a powerful chill that led many of them to withdraw from public policy engagement.

The Harper government was grappling with the lingering effects of the 2007-08 financial crisis and searching for ways to cut spending. Yet, a small, focused coalition helped convince it to commit $1.1 billion in new funding and significant political capital to this global maternal, newborn and child health initiative.

The Muskoka Initiative was controversial, especially because it did not include funding for safe and legal abortions. Then, as now, lack of access to safe abortions was a leading cause of maternal mortality around the world.

However, proponents of the initiative saw it as a win. They stressed its role in enhancing support for key maternal, newborn and child health interventions, thereby contributing to a 34-per-cent decrease in global maternal mortality rates between 2000 and 2020, and sustaining the momentum of a 60-per-cent decrease in under-five mortality rates between 1990 and 2022.

They argued, moreover, that it paved the way for the eventual inclusion of access to safe abortion and other sexual, reproductive and health rights under the Trudeau Liberal government after its election in 2015.

These strategic lessons for effective advocacy were highlighted in Policy Options in 2017.

Those include a policy “ask” that was specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound; effective use of medical evidence; careful consideration of the government’s political needs; the presentation of the ask as a solution to challenges facing the government, both domestically and globally; and a willingness to make significant compromises.

Other civil society leaders also emphasized the importance of a laser focus on a single set of issues (maternal, newborn and child health) that contrasted with a much longer shopping list of advocacy asks for the Muskoka G8 meeting by other international development groups in Canada.

Finding common ground

Significantly, the coalition was willing to work with, and publicly support, the Harper government at a time when many CSOs were either criticizing it or had abandoned efforts to influence federal policy.

In the end, the coalition demonstrated that it could influence policymaking within a government that many other organizations perceived as hostile or disinterested. Its strategy was to set aside ideological differences and demonstrate a professional willingness and capacity to work with the government to craft a policy that both sides could see as a win.

However, the coalition’s strategy also entailed significant costs and risks. The most visible and controversial was the willingness to compromise on the exclusion of support for safe and legal abortions.

Most of the coalition members accepted that the Harper government would never support a policy that included abortion and argued that pushing to include it could derail the entire initiative. So, they focused pragmatically on other interventions they felt were realistic in the political context of the day. Many other CSOs could not make that compromise and one organization left the coalition to remain true to its principles.

Most coalition members and supporters argued that even without support for abortion, the Muskoka Initiative generated big improvements in other areas for women and children. They also noted that abortion was illegal in many of the countries where the initiative would be rolled out, so it would make little difference what Canada’s policy was.

Nevertheless, some critics felt the compromise on abortion was too big a step backward for women’s rights and that it could alienate their core supporters.

Stop thinking of foreign aid as a tool for global influence

Cutting foreign aid comes with a strategic cost

The split between organizations willing to make pragmatic compromises and those that prioritized principled commitment to women’s rights deeply divided the international development sector in Canada, training relationships and undermining possibilities for collaboration on other issues for many years.

With the benefit of hindsight, some organizations concluded that the policy win was worth the internal divide, which eventually healed. But in 2010, there was no way to know how things would turn out.

The coalition’s strategic emphasis on evidence-based arguments that highlighted the return on investment and accountability appealed strongly to the Conservative government, which was otherwise perceived as highly skeptical toward international aid.

From a pragmatic perspective, the evidence-based strategy made sense. However, the focus on it and the return on investment also meant that human rights arguments were sidelined. As other research highlights, there are serious dangers in abandoning a focus on human rights.

As Canadian CSOs strategize today about engagement with a possible new Conservative government, they have important decisions to make:

• Are they willing to compromise on principles to influence policies? If so, which ones?
• Are they willing to work publicly with a government with which they disagree on many issues?
• Are they willing to focus on policy issues that appeal to the government and set aside other demands?
• Are they willing to risk divisions with other organizations that could undermine future collaboration?
• Are they willing to set aside an emphasis on human rights to speak in terms the government will take seriously?

Hindsight suggests that both pragmatism and principle played important roles in the development of Canadian policies on women’s and children’s health worldwide.

Pragmatic engagement with the Harper government by some civil society organizations made possible the initial policy commitments.

However, it was ongoing principled critiques by other organizations that helped push the Trudeau government to expand that policy to include support for a wider range of rights, while retaining the initial focus on maternal, newborn and child health.

Dilemmas and strains are inevitable for Canadian CSOs if the Conservatives win the next election. The question is how to balance and mitigate them.