Canadian Ambassador satisfied with Martelly government's performance

Washington and Ottawa have worked closely together over the past decade in Haiti to further mutual goals, ranging from their backing of the 2004 coup d'état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to support for key policies of the current government of President Joseph Michel Martelly.

Today, the U.S. and Canada are pushing hard for a Permanent Electoral Council that would further entrench the practices of excluding certain political parties from Haiti's electoral processes, and they are encouraging foreign investors to come to the country, particularly in the domains of mining (in the case of Canada) and assembly industries (the U.S.).

Haiti’s post-earthquake disaster is setting powerful social forces in motion towards change

Tectonic Shifts: Haiti After the Earthquake; editors Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales; Kumarian Press, 271 pp, January 2012

This review was first published in the August 2012 issue of NACLA (quarterly print journal and website).

Tectonic Shifts is a vital account of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The book is a collection of 46 articles and essays by leading Haitian and international activists, scholars and writers who are on the front lines of the struggle for meaningful relief and reconstruction.

Recently resigned Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda was a symbol and point person for many of the harmful policies of aid and international relations that mark the Conservative government of Prime Minister Harper.

As Green Party MP Elizabeth May has noted, Oda may have been more of a hand raiser than policy and decision maker. Regardless, during her tenure, the government cut aid to some of the poorest countries in the world in Africa, it tied aid funding ever more closely to the interests and promotion of Canadian business abroad, and it cut funding to respected NGOs such as KAIROS that do not follow its foreign policy line.