Bill on Foreign Aid Won’t Include Blanket Exemption for Humanitarian Workers, Public Safety Minister Says

Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino speaks at a news conference in Ottawa on Sept. 26, 2022. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said that a bill on foreign aid will not include a blanket exemption to terrorism laws for humanitarian workers in areas such as Afghanistan.

“Our government considered all possible remedies, including the possibility of a humanitarian exemption to the existing law. However, a statutory carve-out would not provide in our submission the same security checks and balances and would risk greater abuse of the permission,” Mendicino told the House justice committee on Monday.

“The approach outlined in Bill C-41 best mitigates those risks by potential terrorist groups.”

“Bill C-41: An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts” would allow Canadian aid workers to carry out their duties in areas controlled by terrorists without being prosecuted for inadvertently funding the groups. Canada’s Criminal Code does not currently include any exemptions to facilitate the delivery of these duties in these areas.

Following the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Taliban in August 2021, several countries like the United States, the UK, the European Union, and Australia issued blanket exemptions to humanitarian aid workers, allowing them to continue working in the country. Canada’s legislation, meanwhile, allows aid workers to apply for exemptions to help people in specific geographic areas controlled by a terrorist group.

Mendicino said the proposed bill would provide “clarity and assurance” for Canadian organizations that they are not committing a terrorism offence in providing aid to countries. “We need to strike that balance, and do it in a way that promotes transparency, accountability, but with the sense of urgency that I think all parliamentarians are united behind, in getting that aid to Afghanistan,” Mendicino said.

NDP Says Bill Will Create Barriers to Humanitarian Aid

NDP Heather McPherson, who worked in the international development and humanitarian sector before becoming a politician, said she was disappointed by the bill. “After 18 months of waiting for this legislation, I was expecting something good. And, unfortunately, that’s not what I see with C-41,” she said.

The foreign affairs critic said the law will create barriers to delivering humanitarian aid, making it more difficult for “over-stretched and under-resourced Global Affairs Canada to do this to work.” She also questioned why the bill did not propose a humanitarian carve-out when countries like the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland had.

“Why did Canada choose not to go with humanitarian carve-out, when other countries that know exactly what they’re doing on the ground that has respect for humanitarian assistance, did? But yet Canada is the only one that put barriers up for humanitarian organizations, instead of making it easier for them to be on the ground doing work helping Afghans,” she said.

When Mendicino replied that a number of aid organizations are “broadly supportive of this regime,” McPherson replied that they have “no other option” if they wanted to “take the crumbs that you’ve put on the table.”

“I would not characterize the approximate $4 billion that we have put into Afghanistan since 2001 as ‘crumbs,’” Mendicino replied. “And what you are characterizing right now as barriers, I see as potential risks to our national security and risks to the security of the Afghan people. These are not barriers.”

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis repeatedly asked Mendicino whether the bill only provides exemptions in areas controlled by terror groups listed by Ottawa, or other terrorist groups that haven’t been listed by Ottawa. Mendicino did not indicate whether that would apply.

Mendicino also did not indicate when the legislation would apply, only saying that applications for exemptions will be processed quickly once the system is in place.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.