COVID-19 vaccines and global health diplomacy: Canada and France compared (original) (raw)

2023, Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly and Michael de Percy, eds. COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 222-245

This chapter compares Canada’s and France’s policies and practices regarding COVID-19 vaccines. It asks to what extent they advance domestic interests versus international ones and what the impact is on their influence in the world. The two countries both have a history of global health diplomacy and share a desire to play an important role on the world stage. The COVID pandemic provided them with an opportunity to exercise that commitment. Both countries quickly embraced, at the rhetorical level, the need to address the global crisis via multilateral channels, including to ensure an equitable distribution of vaccines. How they acted, however, differed considerably. The Canadian government took a strong “Canada First” position, in spite of verbal and some financial support for multilateral responses, and impeded patent waivers that would increase global vaccine production. By taking actions that would prolong the pandemic at the global level, Canada also behaved to the detriment of its global “soft power”. France, on the other hand, acted more multilaterally and strategically from the perspective of soft power, and reversed its initial self-interested position on intellectual property rights. We argue that Canada’s and, to a lesser extent, France’s domestic policy objectives undermined their global health diplomacy efforts and ultimately acted against their own interests, both in terms of health outcomes and being able to exercise influence in global affairs, especially in the Global South. By emphasizing approaches characterized by selfishness and charity, rather than equity and justice, they are also, along with their counterparts in the Global North, undermining the credibility of Northern aid donors more generally and the legitimacy of the aid regime.