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<\/p>\nThe federal government is pursuing a 15 per cent budget cut to most government agencies. It\u2019s also committed to a strategy that calls for more engagement with African countries with young populations set to produce an economic boom.<\/p>\n
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On July 17, the Canadian Armed Forces announced it was pulling most of its peacekeepers out of Africa in order to focus on other regions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese changes will better align CAF resources with current defence priorities, including defending Canada, supporting the Euro-Atlantic region, and contributing to Indo-Pacific stability,\u201d the military wrote in a news release.<\/p>\n
The military plans to pull out all nine peacekeepers in the United Nations Mission in South Sudan and the same number from a UN stabilization mission in Congo.<\/p>\n
Canada is also reducing its peacekeeping operation at the Egypt-Israel border zone from 40 to 10 armed forces members. It\u2019s sending home all five peacekeepers in Kosovo and the lone officer stationed in Cyprus.<\/p>\n
The Canadian Armed Forces said while the affected peacekeeping missions involved small numbers, they were staffed with some of its most experienced officers to provide \u201cleadership, judgment and institutional experience\u201d to peacekeepers from other countries.<\/p>\n
The move has drawn criticism from former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and Canada\u2019s former ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae.<\/p>\n
South Africa has repeatedly praised Canada\u2019s efforts to end the former apartheid regime, which involved Ottawa lobbying other Commonwealth nations to pressure and sanction the government of the day.<\/p>\n
Shaik said Canada\u2019s voice matters and its decision to remove a few dozen peacekeepers could make it easier for other countries to pull out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve always seen Canada as a reliable partner in multilateralism,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a good signal when a power like Canada starts to withdraw from global security issues, global security matters. Because then it justifies other powers doing such,\u201d he added, pointing to American foreign aid cuts that prompted Canada and others to pull back.<\/p>\n
Shaik suggested Canada\u2019s peacekeeping pullout contradicts the message Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. In his speech there, the prime minister called on middle powers to forge tighter economic and security ties to counter coercion by great powers.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeacekeeping missions are incredibly important. If you want to produce stability, you\u2019ve got to silence the guns,\u201d Shaik said.<\/p>\n
He said he doubts Ottawa will save money by removing peacekeepers from Africa while maintaining a large contingent of troops in Latvia as part of the NATO alliance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is a retreat fundamentally into the NATO club,\u201d Shaik said. \u201cThe world is larger than that and we trust that Canada\u2019s heart is larger than that as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Canada also abruptly closed its embassy in South Sudan this month. Global Affairs said on its website that Canada \u201chas temporarily suspended its operations\u201d there without explaining why.<\/p>\n
In a binder prepared for Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand\u2019s Nov. 27, 2025 testimony to a House committee, Global Affairs noted that it will merge some diplomatic offices to meet budget targets and will not entirely pull out from countries where it has a presence.<\/p>\n
Ottawa also reversed a staffing decision that would have led the high commission in South Africa to focus more on bilateral relations by relocating positions that remotely cover other countries.<\/p>\n
A March 2025 government briefing note said this measure would support \u201cstrategic engagement with South Africa as one of the continent\u2019s big players.\u201d Ottawa overturned the change in January, citing budget cuts.<\/p>\n
Shaik said his country understands that diplomats and peacekeepers are expensive at a time of government austerity. He said he\u2019s waiting to see if the transition from Justin Trudeau to Carney means a drop in Canada\u2019s interest in Africa or budget cuts across the globe.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfrica has in particular paid a price for that, whether it is in a security cut-down of deployments, or whether in opening of new embassies, or in reallocating of responsibilities, I can see. But I would want to believe that we were not the only area that paid the price,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoing more with less eventually leads to burnout, leads to institutional rigidity, it leads to institution complexities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The One Campaign, which advocates for global health and African economic empowerment, said Ottawa has yet to clearly earmark funding and make plans to diversify trade with African countries the way it has for the Indo-Pacific.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe signal that this sends is that Africa is just not a priority for this government,\u201d said Elise Legault, the group\u2019s North America senior policy director.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t have a stronger relationship with Africa while reducing resources and missions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Legault said Canadian exports to African countries could double to $13 billion in a decade if Ottawa takes useful steps like leading trade missions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Canada is not at the table right now, we will miss out on this opportunity, and we will be left out of a lot of the key trends that are going to happen in the next decades,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Anand recently opened a high commission in Benin and said she has tasked the foreign service with drumming up economic opportunities on the continent.<\/p>\n
Canada also has cut its funding for global health initiatives and implemented visa bans on Ebola-affected countries, breaching World Health Organization guidelines.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 14, 2026.<\/p>\n
Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The federal government is pursuing a 15 per cent budget cut to most government agencies. It\u2019s also committed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-857717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}