OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is headed to Africa as her government assembles a long-delayed plan on how to engage with the continent. Joly is heading to Ivory Coast today before visiting South Africa for two days starting Wednesday. Her office says the trip to Ivory Coast is aimed at exploring shared counterterrorism priorities and affirming Canada's ties with both English- and French-speaking countries.
It says the stop in South Africa will see Joly discuss the economic partnership between the two countries and mark 30 years since the end of Apartheid. The trip comes just days after the Liberals launched consultations for what they are now calling their approach to Africa, such as where to best station diplomats and what issues to focus on. The Liberals have been assembling what they first called an Africa strategy for nearly three years, but they downgraded the project last year to call it a framework.
In April, a senior bureaucrat said there was no longer a noun being used to describe the plan, which as of this week Ottawa now calls its "approach" to the continent. Experts in public administration have previously pointed out that strategies are multi-year plans that often have funding allocations, while frameworks are a generic set of principles. In 2022, senators on the foreign-affairs committee warned that Canada was falling behind both peers and adversaries in forming economic ties on the continent.
Africa is bucking a global trend of demographic d.