Canada announced additional support for the Kenyan-led security mission in Haiti in 2024, building on its previous deployment of navy vessels for intelligence gathering and its role in training peacekeepers in Jamaica. The Canadian contribution reflected the country’s historical engagement with Haiti, its large Haitian diaspora community that maintained political pressure for action, and its position as one of the countries that had been most active in imposing sanctions on Haitian individuals connected to gang networks.
The Canadian support package included funding contributions to the mission’s operating costs, training and equipment for the Haitian National Police, and continued intelligence support from the naval assets that had been deployed in previous months. Canada also maintained its sanctions regime against Haitian political and business figures with gang connections, using the leverage of financial accountability tools alongside the security mission support.
Haitian-Canadian community organizations in Montreal and other Canadian cities had maintained sustained advocacy for Canadian action on Haiti through months of crisis, and the government’s support for the mission was partly a response to that organized community pressure. The diaspora’s role in maintaining Canadian political attention to Haiti was one of the more concrete examples of diaspora advocacy producing policy results.
Canada’s support, while meaningful, remained below the scale that some advocates felt its historical relationship with Haiti and its capacity as a middle power warranted. They called for Canada to take a more prominent leadership role in coordinating international support for Haiti, arguing that CARICOM’s facilitation of the political transition demonstrated what engaged regional leadership could accomplish and that Canada had both the capacity and the responsibility to play a similar role on the security and humanitarian dimensions.