This episode of Do Justice features Dean Dettloff, Research and Advocacy Officer for Development and Peace, discussing the Jubilee 2025 campaign to turn debt into hope. Building on the successful Jubilee 2000, Dean explains why systemic changes to the global financial architecture are needed to address persistent debt crises in the Global South. He highlights the power of ecumenical collaboration and grassroots movements in achieving justice and inspiring hope.

This is Season 10 episode 2 of the Do Justice podcast. 

Chris: Well, hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Do Justice. My name is Chris Orme, and today I'm really excited to be joined by Dean Dettloff. Dean is the Research and Advocacy Officer for Development and Peace with Caritas Canada and he collaborates there with global partners to address systemic injustices through a global solidarity movement. Dean holds a PhD in Philosophy with research focused in Christianity's role in colonization and liberation. Now, Dean also teaches at ICS—the Institute for Christian Studies—and writes for publications like American Magazine, Sojourners, Bridging Social Movements, Academia, and Journalism. Dean, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to get into this conversation with you.

Dean: Thanks for the invitation, Chris, you've made me sound very impressive. More than I feel [both laugh], so I'll lean into that energy for our chat.

Chris: It's all part of the service we provide here [both laugh]. So thank you so much, though, for taking the time. Now Dean, we're an agency and a ministry of the Christian Reformed Church in North America and the Christian Reformed Church is part of KAIROS and the Jubilee 2025 campaign that's aimed at turning debt into hope. You're a part of this campaign, as well. And this campaign really builds on what happened during the Jubilee 2000 campaign, so let's jump into it. Can you tell us more about the initial campaign and then go into what's happening now?

Dean: Yeah, I'd love to. It's great to have the support of the CRCNA in this campaign. As you said, I teach at ICS and I did my graduate work here as well and just have been always very grateful for the voice of a kind of creative reformed tradition. It's nice to continue to hear that voice in this Jubilee campaign. Folks listening to this show, I'm sure, might have a strong living memory of the Jubilee 2000. It's often remembered as the most successful campaign, period, not just faith-based, but the most successful campaign of grass-roots mobilization in Canadian history. It managed to get well over 600,000 signatures on a petition that was calling for debt justice at that time. In the late 90s into the early 2000s there was this recognition that the world was plunged into a debt crisis, especially in the Global South. Countries were struggling to pay their debts. And at the same time there was this strange juxtaposition because it was also the new millenium, so there was all this sense that there's going to be a new century, a time to turn things over, but at the same time there was this real sense that the future had already been mortgaged, in a way, by debt. People were going to be continuing to pay that debt down. Over the course of the 90s there was a groundswell of political education, economic education, and theological education thinking about that concept of Jubilee in the Bible as a big alternative way of thinking about our economic relationships. By the time we got to the year 2000 and then the few years following, in Canada in particular, there was a big ecumenical push to find out: what could Canada do to address that situation, with all of that Jubilee stuff in the background? So the campaign had some help from some high-profile voices. Pope John Paul II, at the time, and Bono, and all that kind of stuff. But the real success story was not getting the ear of those folks, but getting the ear of thousands of Canadians, who did manage to succeed. I'll just say briefly what some of the successes were. They managed to convince Canada to cancel quite a lot of its own bilateral debt, so the money owed to the government of Canada. Over time, through an initiative at the IMF and the World Bank, there was over $130 billion cancelled in debt for now thirty-six countries, heavily indebted countries. So lot's more to say about it, but those are the headlines and it was a really exciting moment 25 years ago.

Chris: You mentioned that this was an initiative that was ecumenical in nature. What's the strength of working ecumenically?

Dean: That's a good question. Every Christian denomination seems to have its own emphases on what it means to be a Christian in the world. Like I said, for example, I was educated by lots of great Reformed folks who taught me a lot of useful ways of encountering scripture and the Bible, in particular, and enlarging my own sense of what it means to be a Christian engaged in culture. I'm Roman Catholic, we've got lots to do with culture as well, but we don't as naturally come to the connections between what it means to really read the Bible and figure out how to close the gap between our cultural participation. At the same time, for example, a big strength of our tradition in the Catholic Church is that we have these voices of moral authority, for better and for worse. The bishops, the Pope, etc. We lean on those voices to help us think through what it means to be a Christian in our contemporary moment. The Catholic Church has brought forward that tradition of Jubilee. Every 25 years in the Catholic Church we have a Jubilee on schedule, it's called an Ordinary Jubilee, it's on our church calendar. So we spent every 25 years thinking through those themes in both a spiritual and material way. What does it mean to really focus on grace in those Jubilee years? And sometimes we have Jubilee years in between. 2015, I believe, or 2016—one of the two was an extraordinary Jubilee called by Pope Francis. But anyway, this one we have now and the one in 2000 were Jubilees on schedule, so to speak. I think the strength of being in such a high liturgical tradition gives us that reliability of planning and our global reach in a global church, and at the same time lots of other Christians in the mix bring their sensibilities, connections, passions, careisms, etcetera to a campaign like this one. We can always do more together. There's obviously a numbers game here, but I also think that there's a real sense that the more Christians talk to each other the more we also discover the richness of the Jubilee tradition and how we can bring that to bear on global realities today.

Chris: I'm wondering, too, what the movement looks like now? You did a really great job of painting the picture of what led up to this, but what does this movement look like in this current setting?

Dean: I mean, there's always a big question around: we did all of this advocacy work around cancelling the debt 25 years ago, so why are we doing it again 25 years later? I think that's a really important question to ask. There are lots of things that have changed in the last 25 years and also a lot of things that have not changed. One weakness or blind spot of the campaign 25 years ago is that, while we did achieve those big, eye-watering numbers of billions of dollars cancelled in debt, the systemic reasons for debt crises didn't really change in a fundamental or structural way. While that debt cancellation did offer some really significant relief—so not to disparage it, it was huge—nevertheless, when the world got more complicated through a variety of factors—the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, a wave of inflation around the world, and so on—all the structural features started to kick into gear again and they really rapidly shocked that debt back to the fore for many, many countries in the Global South who didn't have a resilient economy to meet those challenges, also for long historical, colonial reasons. So 25 years later, now, we are again campaigning for debt cancellation, but also campaigning for the more long-term solution of a reform of the international financial architecture, that's the fancy way of putting it. You may as well just say: the rules of borrowing and lending internationally. Those rules are very unfair and they're also very precarious and dangerous. The idea is that not only do we need that cancellation again, but we need to rethink: what does the economy do, who does it do it for, and can we provide long-term relief to the people that really need it the most?

Chris: I'm going to ask you to put on an anticipation hat, if you will. Some people might thoughtfully ask worried questions about what it means to eliminate debts. There are a whole bunch of reasons why people might aim in that direction and ask those questions, a whole lot of reasons fueling that. How do you respond to those questions of concern? Talking about debt elimination with people that may say, "Hey, what's this all about and why are we doing it for this group and not this group?" and addressing some of the complexity that might arise in these conversations.

Dean: I think that's the beauty of the Jubilee. It's a moment to ask those kinds of questions about debt. We live in increasingly debt-based societies, so it's good to let all of us take a moment and really process those questions. There's lots to say about it, and maybe I'll start and at some point I'll pause and you can decide if we keep talking about it because there is so much to be said about it. The first thing to say is that the Turn Debt into Hope campaign that we're talking about now is really focused on international borrowing and lending. Sometimes we draw these analogies between country budgets or international budgets and household budgets. It might seem obvious to do that—it's all debt. But national economies are really qualitatively different from the way that I might manage my household budget. So sometimes when we talk about fiscal responsibility or how to balance a budget and all that kind of stuff, it's really tempting to read the habits we might want to have in our own household budgets onto a national economy and we have to avoid that. There are lots of complicated reasons why that might be, but maybe we'll get into that later. I think one of the big things, when we talk about debt these days, is a kind of moral assumption. We feel if anybody borrows from anybody else, whether it's a country or a person, the burden of responsibility is really on the borrower. That's the story we tell about debt: if you take the money out, you should pay it back. What we fail to recognize when we tell that story are, I think, two big structural problems. One is that a borrowing relationship is always between two parties. There's a borrower, but there's also a lender. We assume that the borrower takes on all the risk, but in fact, technically, that's not true. The creditor takes out a risk when giving out a loan. The risk for the borrower is obvious: they won't be able to pay back the loan and so there will be financial consequences. The risk of the lender, something that we don't always focus on, which is that the lender may make a bad bet. Maybe they lend money to somebody or an entity that fails. That's a bad loan. And they should also be expected to bear the brunt of that risk. In our global economy it doesn't really work that way. Technically, it's a mutual risk when somebody lends. In fact, the global system really only ever punishes the debtor without recognizing that it might be irresponsible of a lender to lend. We would argue in the campaign, for example, that over the last decade and a half there's been lots of irresponsible lending going on. Creditors giving money to countries that they know will likely never be able to pay it back. The question about: should whole populations really be on the hook for what might rightly be called a failure to assess the risk on the part of the creditor? That question is one we really have to ask, with some stark realities in play. There's also a good moral question around: at what point does the creditor have to relent or maybe accept a loss? So that's one piece. One other piece, and then I'll just pause. In many cases, debt grows by virtue of interest and that interest compounds and so debts continue to grow and grow and grow and they become unsustainable or unmanageable. In a lot of cases countries have already paid back not only the principle of their loan, but also quite a lot of interest. But because the debt has run away, they are trapped in a cycle of payment that they'll never get out of on their own. I think that raises good questions, too, about how we talk about debt. At what point does a debt become a bit too greedy or a bit unjust and is a result of baking injustices into the loan in the first place? When we talk about debt cancellation we like to say that it's really not that radical of an idea. We're just saying that in a variety of cases it's only reasonable, really, to cancel the loan, and it would be unreasonable to demand continued payment on those kinds of loans.

Chris: That's really helpful. I feel like you're pulling the curtain back on the global economic system and making it digestible for me, especially, because this is listening to a bit of a foreign language for me. But it's fascinating and I want to pick up on something that you had said in the beginning of that section. I think you were alluding to the scope and scale, when we talk about this kind of debt, and why my household budget, I can't really translate that into this understanding. Can you say more on that? I think that's something that I hear in public discourse, you know, "I balance my budget, why can't..." Those types of questions. They're valid questions, but it seems like categorically we're talking about two different things. We're not talking about the same thing. Can you say more about that?

Dean: Yeah, that's right. It's always an opportunity to talk more about those complications. And it does sound like a foreign language, so you're right to feel that way. I feel that way, too, myself. When we talk about national budgets, I'll even add one more complexity into the mix. For nations in the Global North—so, Canada, the US, Europe—debt is even less of a problem. It's not that it's not a problem at all, but it's less of a problem than it is for countries in the Global South. So, for example, we just had a Canadian election, the US just had an election, and you see this kind of rhetoric all the time. People say, "Our countries are underwater. They've taken on so, so much debt. Isn't that absurd and awful and a recipe for disaster?" I'm in my mid-thirties and I've heard that story my whole life and these economies are still going. They're still moving along, so it's important to interrogate these stories a little bit. When we talk about national budgets, in the Global North, especially, lenders like to lend to those governments because they feel stable. A national economy is taking in an aggregate of lots and lots of productive power. Every factory, every firm that offers goods and services, etcetera, all of that contributes to the purchasing power and the economic power of a country. When I talk about my household, my small apartment in Toronto, I don't have that kind of productive capacity and I also don't have the kinds of options that governments have that allow for the economic flexibility to respond to my situation. If I lose my job I have to find another new job or I'll be in big trouble. And that's kind of my only option. In a government, if your economy starts to stall in one direction, the government might have a variety of tools available to it to change that economic situation, whether it's through raising or lowering interest rates at the bank. That's something we've seen Canada do quite a lot. Whether it's subsidizing other industries or trying to grow things or raising or lowering taxes, there are many, many, many tools available to a government that are not available to you or I in order to balance our budgets. So when we talk about the Global South, especially, the question becomes even more complex because their options are even more limited than those in the Global North. It's not that they're more similar to a household budget, but they have less space to maneuver. They have less freedom to change their economic situation and address the reasons they're underwater. Often the only option a country in the South really has is to borrow more to pay down other loans. So they get trapped in the cycle of borrowing and lender. They'll borrow, let's say, from a private creditor like Blackrock, or they'll have bonds bought by a private creditor, and then in order to pay down that debt they'll borrow again from the International Monetary Fund. So now they've paid back the private creditors but now they owe money to the IMF. All these other kinds of cyclical problems rear their head. All of that to say, to circle back here, when we talk about our household budgets, we have lots of things to think about when it comes to debt and I think the Jubilee is a good time to talk about the injustices in household lending, too, don't get me wrong. There's a lot going on there, right? Exploitative mortgages, a credit-based economy, paying too much for healthcare in the US or education, etcetera. So lots of good, critical questions to ask on the household debt issue, too, but when we talk about international debt, we're talking, as you said, at a scale that is so much more complex.

Chris: Thank you, that is a great explanation. I wish I knew that months ago in the midst of some of these ongoing conversations that we're having, particularly with World Renew. But super helpful, thank you. I want to shift gears a bit, Dean. In your work, how have you seen hope and abundance emerge in situations that seem really defined by scarcity or crisis?

Dean: Well, I'll say a couple things about it. The first is that I find hope challenging to come by and I think it's important to say that. I think that we live in a time where it is very hard to generate hope and sometimes we reach really quickly for the naive comfort of hope in a way that distracts us from the fact that it is pretty rough in our global situation right now. That being said, Pope Francis wrote a document called Laudate Deum ahead of COP29 talking about the climate crisis. Man, if you really want to challenge your hope, look at what is happening around the climate crisis in these COP processes. It's meeting after meeting of world leaders who are not agreeing to do what we need to do to address the climate crisis. It's a tough place to have hope. So Pope Francis wrote this letter, and it's a very crabby papal letter. He has a crabby tone in it. And one thing that he says, when he's gotten through chastising international leaders for their inability to confront this crisis, is that even though there is a kind of multi-lateralism from above where world leaders meet together, Pope Francis says there is also a multi-lateralism from below where people and activists from different countries manage to find one another and amplify each others' voices, and in some cases do that so successfully and so loudly that they compel decision makers to deliver on a number of items. Pope Francis says that's the place where he finds hope, in particular, and he has this great phrase where he says, "Social movements are able to create hope where it appears that there is none." I really like that piece—that hope is a renewable resource or the kind of things that we have to build ourselves, and that it doesn't come necessarily from above. Don't get me wrong, I hope that people above will listen and do the right thing and I think that they can and often do, and Jubilee 2000 is one case where we say that happened, this great merging together of these two kinds of above and below points of pressure. All of that to say, my own hope is in that multi-lateralism from below and that's what the Jubilee campaign this year is about. It's about connecting the dots and the voices here in Canada with our friends and brothers and sisters in the Global South.

Chris:  Dean, from your own faith journey, what has encouraged you or what encouragement do you have for others as they seek to care for their global neighbor and consider getting involved with Jubilee 2025?

Dean: I have found this campaign to be a really challenging and inspiring campaign. We work as an international solidarity movement at Development and Peace, so we're often in touch with partners in the Global South who show us all the time the power and creativity that people have when they get together and start talking about their problems and strategize about how to deal with them. What I've seen in this Jubilee campaign is a willingness to really work together and share across those global regions in such a way that it feels like we're multiplying our capacities. We're sharing the strategies that we find useful, effective, interesting, creative, fun. It's been great to see, for example, here in Canada, one of my colleagues Emily Lukasik who does our programming for under-18s, had this really clever idea to help folks who are under eighteen connect with the debt issue by creating a piñata. Each time, as she's explaining what's going on in the global financial system, they'll put something in the piñata and then finally they smash it. The piñata looks like a big piggy bank. We're sharing this around and it's kind of taken off in other countries who are doing it similarly, and vice versa. We've gotten some great symbols and rhetoric and language from elsewhere. That's been really exciting, that this campaign is a unique way to get in contact with what's going on all over the world as folks are trying to reckon with the fact that we do have a very unfair financial system but that we also have a lot of people who are doing the hard work of learning that foreign language of international finance, and also learning our own languages about how to talk to each other about those issues. I think that's really exciting.

Chris: For folks who are sitting on the wings and looking to get involved or learn more about the work that you're doing, where can people go to find up-to-date information about you and about the work with KAIROS and beyond?

Dean: There's maybe two places to go, and perhaps even more. But two places right away. One is KAIROS, which as you mentioned is coordinating this campaign, pulling together lots of us so that we can work together and share those abilities, capacities, etcetera. On their website they've got loads of resources for people who want to learn more, who want to get engaged and connect with other folks in the coalition. On our own website, as well, at Development and Peace, which is devp.org/debt, you can find lots of stuff that we've produced trying to help people speak that language. There's an FAQ there that goes into what we mean by unjust debt, what makes a debt unjust, for example. You can find answers to questions like, "Won't cancelling debt increase corruption in other countries?" All of these hot questions that I'll just leave as a teaser for now. You can go to the website and find the answers there. Most importantly, in either of those places, KAIROS or the DevP website, you'll find a link to a petition. There is a virtual petition. My challenge I give to your listeners is not to take the easy way out of signing that virtual petition and instead to print off the paper petition that's available there and take the printed petition to wherever you find folks who gather who would care about justice. It may be a church, a school, a community group, whatever. Get those folks to sign the petition and turn that in to either KAIROS or to us and Development and Peace. That petition is the main tool that we want to use to tell those decision makers, "Look how many people are willing to do the hard work of understanding global finance such that they want to see you take action." So that's the challenge. Print off the petition, get it signed, and return it to the rest of us so that we can keep showing those decision makers exactly what Canadians want in this world, in particular.

Chris: Dean, thank you so much for pulling back the curtain on a topic that seems so huge. You really made it accessible. It made it accessible for me, I appreciate that. We will be sure to post the links in the description to this episode. Our guest today has been Dean Dettloff. Dean, I really appreciate you taking the time. God bless you and the work that you're doing. Thank you so much.

Dean: Thank you.