Diplomacy, peacekeeping cuts weaken Carney’s middle-power vision: South African envoy

OTTAWA — South Africa’s envoy to Ottawa says Canada’s decision to remove most of its peacekeepers from the continent doesn’t align with the Carney government’s pledge to get middle powers working together.

“I am saddened by the fact that the budget cuts (are) appearing to be a kind of withdrawal of Canada’s commitment towards peace in Africa,” High Commissioner Rieaz Shaik told The Canadian Press.

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“You don’t withdraw from the global commons and then say you want to build a middle-power alliance.”

Shaik’s comments come as Canada plans to recall peacekeepers from Congo and from South Sudan, where Ottawa has suspended its embassy. The foreign service is also reversing staffing changes that were meant to foster closer ties with South Africa.

The federal government is pursuing a 15 per cent budget cut to most government agencies. It’s also committed to a strategy that calls for more engagement with African countries with young populations set to produce an economic boom.

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.

“These changes will better align CAF resources with current defence priorities, including defending Canada, supporting the Euro-Atlantic region, and contributing to Indo-Pacific stability,” the military wrote in a news release.

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.

Canada is also reducing its peacekeeping operation at the Egypt-Israel border zone from 40 to 10 armed forces members. It’s sending home all five peacekeepers in Kosovo and the lone officer stationed in Cyprus.

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 “leadership, judgment and institutional experience” to peacekeepers from other countries.

The move has drawn criticism from former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae.

South Africa has repeatedly praised Canada’s efforts to end the former apartheid regime, which involved Ottawa lobbying other Commonwealth nations to pressure and sanction the government of the day.

Shaik said Canada’s voice matters and its decision to remove a few dozen peacekeepers could make it easier for other countries to pull out.

“We’ve always seen Canada as a reliable partner in multilateralism,” he said.

“It’s 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,” he added, pointing to American foreign aid cuts that prompted Canada and others to pull back.

Shaik suggested Canada’s 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.

“Peacekeeping missions are incredibly important. If you want to produce stability, you’ve got to silence the guns,” Shaik said.

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.

“That is a retreat fundamentally into the NATO club,” Shaik said. “The world is larger than that and we trust that Canada’s heart is larger than that as well.”

Canada also abruptly closed its embassy in South Sudan this month. Global Affairs said on its website that Canada “has temporarily suspended its operations” there without explaining why.

In a binder prepared for Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s 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.

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.

A March 2025 government briefing note said this measure would support “strategic engagement with South Africa as one of the continent’s big players.” Ottawa overturned the change in January, citing budget cuts.

Shaik said his country understands that diplomats and peacekeepers are expensive at a time of government austerity. He said he’s waiting to see if the transition from Justin Trudeau to Carney means a drop in Canada’s interest in Africa or budget cuts across the globe.

“Africa 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,” he said.

“Doing more with less eventually leads to burnout, leads to institutional rigidity, it leads to institution complexities.”

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.

“The signal that this sends is that Africa is just not a priority for this government,” said Elise Legault, the group’s North America senior policy director.

“You can’t have a stronger relationship with Africa while reducing resources and missions.”

Legault said Canadian exports to African countries could double to $13 billion in a decade if Ottawa takes useful steps like leading trade missions.

“If 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,” she said.

Anand recently opened a high commission in Benin and said she has tasked the foreign service with drumming up economic opportunities on the continent.

Canada also has cut its funding for global health initiatives and implemented visa bans on Ebola-affected countries, breaching World Health Organization guidelines.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 14, 2026.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press