The Harper government is shortening the list of beneficiaries of Canadian foreign aid. Without explaining the rationale on which the Harpies cut the winners from the losers, the new focus will be on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, the Caribbean, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Mali, Mozambique, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Vietnam and the West Bank/Gaza.
International Co-operation Minister, "Odious Bev" Oda said the idea is to get the greatest bang for Canada's buck rather than handing out dribs and drabs to many needy states.
This could be an excellent opportunity to restructure Canada's foreign aid along, let's say, environmental lines. After all, we're per capita next only to the US in carbon emissions and anthropogenic global warming is already afflicting a number of nations, particularly in the Sahel. So why don't we take half the money and send it to the global warming victims of our excess and leave the other half to help innocent victims of war in places like Darfur, the Congo, Afghanistan and West Bank/Gaza.
It just seems to me if we're trashing peoples' livelihoods in far off lands, the least we can do is give them first dibs on our foreign aid assistance.
Hillary Clinton visited South Korea this week and said at a question and answer seccession that China is the biggest polluter in the world....now hows that for living up to North America's reputation. All politians do is "lie".
ReplyDeleteHi AM. China is the biggest polluter - overall. But comparing China to the US is like comparing the US to, oh I don't know, Denmark. China's per-capita CO2 emissions are a fraction of America's (or Canada's) but their population is vastly larger and we've exported many of the biggest carbon emitting jobs to China. Neither China nor India is prepared to play the American game.
ReplyDeleteInteresting list of countries. Some observations:
ReplyDeleteEthiopia played proxy army for the US when it went into Somalia a couple of years ago in support of an "interim" Western supported puppet government.
Ukraine is another staunch US ally in Eastern Europe as are Colombia and Honduras in Latin America.
Ghana, Mozambique and Vietnam are "poster childs"/countries for World Bank/IMF model behaviour.