How many sex toy exhibits were funded? They couldn’t tell me.

Opacity on the Mission Cultural Fund is eroding trust in Canada's diplomatic efforts.

Every year, Canada's federal government spends millions on a fund that purportedly assists with Canada's diplomatic efforts abroad. Given the current state of geopolitics, this could be a reasonable expenditure.

The problem is that Canadians have no real way of knowing, because there is precious little information regarding how this particular fund selects projects, is managed, and how success is measured. And this problem grew this week via a bizarre response from the government following a formal request for information.

First, a little background on the fund itself, which has been plagued by a history of controversy.

Last year, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly made blunt comments emphasizing Canada's lack of military power. She stressed that the federal government's current strategy is to continue relying on “soft power" as the government's primary tool to influence other nations. Enter the concept of cultural diplomacy, the formal term for the notion that soft power can be exerted by sharing values through food, visual art, music, and literature. 

And one of the federal government's primary vehicles regarding cultural diplomacy is the opaque and questionably managed Mission Cultural Fund.

In recent years, the fund's projects have made headlines, but not for showing Canada's culture positively. In 2020, reports indicated that the fund was over budget by millions of dollars. Other reports have also shown that the fund was used to fund, at a high cost, things like flying a chef to a banquet in the Dominican Republic, a sex toy exhibit in Germany, sex story shows, and sending a jazz band on an all-expenses-paid tour of South America.

Much has already been written about the value for money - or lack thereof - that Canadian taxpayers get from these events. And more has been written about the provocative nature of some of the events that have been funded. But the bigger issue is the government's muted and closed-door response to both of these issues. Very little has been said by the Liberal government to defend the program or to describe how the fund is furthering broader diplomatic goals.

For a government that loves nothing more than to loudly honk about spending money, their relative silence on this fund raises many questions. First, if the fund is yielding impressive results, why hide them? Why not brag about how much has been spent, as they do with so many other programs? Why not disclose where were expenditures made, and what they accomplished? What criteria were used to select projects and recipients of contracts?

The government should be able to provide this information and rationale for any eyebrow raising projects. But the wall surrounding the fund's details grew thicker this week when the government responded to an Order Paper Question - a formal tool parliamentarians can use to get information out of the government - regarding those questions. The government's response to my query stated they could not provide a comprehensive response in the time allotted for the initiatives funded through this fund. In short, translated from bureaucratese, please kindly fudge off; we're not telling you.

This is a piss-poor response for many reasons. First, as the federal government's current foreign affairs strategy relies heavily on soft power as a primary tool in influencing other nations, the public should understand what initiatives are funded and why. And the fact that the fund has come under a great deal of scrutiny from media and taxpayer advocacy groups without a substantive response from the government risks further eroding trust in the government's efforts abroad. 

Given how unstable the global geopolitical situation is and the level of debt the country is currently in, the public should be able to hold the government to account for any expenditures related to securing Canada's place in the world. So yesterday, I wrote to the Parliamentary Budget Officer to request a report regarding the fund. 

We have a right to know what the government is spending our money on, and this fund is no exception.