Juno News - September 10, 2019


Here's an issue politicians won't talk about during the election

Topics
foreign aid conversation foreign aid questions foreign aid conversation
“Mr. Trudeau, tear down this house!” What on Earth is this election about？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

192.75

Word count

1,012

Sentence count

66

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the growing amount of Canadian foreign aid to other countries, and why we should be asking the question, "Why do we need to be giving billions of dollars to countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Cuba, and Haiti?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Before the writ is dropped and the election campaign gets formally underway,
00:00:12.780 I'd like to take the opportunity to bring up a couple major public policy issues
00:00:17.200 that should be discussed during this election and in the broader Canadian political discourse,
00:00:22.640 but we know they won't be.
00:00:25.120 Now one big one I've always felt we need to have more of a national conversation about
00:00:28.720 is foreign aid.
00:00:30.500 To what degree should we be doing it?
00:00:32.540 How much should we be contributing?
00:00:34.620 What should we expect out of countries that we give money to?
00:00:38.040 How should the whole conversation unfold?
00:00:40.680 Canadians probably aren't even aware of just how much foreign aid we contribute
00:00:44.380 and I didn't have the number off the top of my head.
00:00:46.860 I sort of guessed it and was right within a billion dollars,
00:00:49.980 but had to look it up to see the latest numbers.
00:00:51.820 In Canada as of 2018, that's the last date we have numbers for, the last final fiscal year,
00:00:56.840 we gave just over six billion dollars in direct disbursements to other countries for their foreign aid.
00:01:04.440 Now that's gone up quite a bit.
00:01:05.880 In 2001, it was first three billion dollars and it's doubled in those intervening years.
00:01:12.220 Now a lot of that steeply happened during the Paul Martin years
00:01:15.560 and then we saw minor increases throughout the Stephen Harper years
00:01:18.600 and throughout the Justin Trudeau years,
00:01:20.440 but no one politician is responsible for that big leap.
00:01:24.280 It's just been a gradual one over the years.
00:01:27.280 What do we get out of that and what specifically are we giving?
00:01:30.100 Well, some of the contributions we give are perhaps a bit more understandable than others.
00:01:34.720 For instance, Afghanistan is a country where the Taliban is back sort of on the rise,
00:01:40.440 but Canada was involved, Canadian forces were on the ground,
00:01:43.440 and we were really helping to build schools and really stabilize society.
00:01:47.080 So you can appreciate why we give a significant amount of money there.
00:01:50.240 And Afghanistan actually is one of the largest single beneficiaries.
00:01:53.200 We gave them $254 million last fiscal year, back in 2018.
00:02:00.160 You can also see why Haiti is a country that we give substantial amounts of money to.
00:02:04.340 There are a number of cultural connections between Canada and Haiti,
00:02:07.540 and they have been ravaged by a lot of problems recently, including natural disasters.
00:02:11.980 We gave them $122 million.
00:02:14.860 Then there are some other cases where people are really going to go,
00:02:17.580 hold on a second.
00:02:18.360 I'm not sure I feel too good about this at all.
00:02:21.860 For instance, Pakistan getting $72 million of Canadian taxpayer dollar last fiscal year.
00:02:27.980 What's the deal with that?
00:02:29.340 Pakistan, I mean, a number of countries are calling them state sponsors of terror.
00:02:33.500 Do we really want to be doing this?
00:02:35.540 Or is our $72 million going and stopping these sorts of horrible things from happening in Pakistan, 0.99
00:02:41.100 and that is in love of us ever having to do, heaven forbid, some sort of military engagement involving shenanigans happening in Pakistan?
00:02:48.560 I don't know, but those are the questions we should be having about it.
00:02:52.840 There are other cases where we just look at it and go, yeah, I really don't feel good about this at all.
00:02:57.280 Such as $7 million given in foreign aid to China, which is currently turning the screws against us.
00:03:02.900 To China, really?
00:03:04.400 Really?
00:03:04.880 Why do they even need that money? 0.88
00:03:06.280 Now, it's probably a part of some special project that is consistent with some other planning initiatives the government has done,
00:03:12.200 but Canadians will likely frown upon that.
00:03:15.280 What about Cuba?
00:03:16.360 Cuba receiving $14 million from Canada.
00:03:19.700 Well, hold on a second.
00:03:21.200 I thought the magical socialist government of the Castros just made money on a tree and they took care of themselves.
00:03:26.880 That's why they have this healthcare system we're always bragging about. 0.60
00:03:29.260 I thought their system was perfect.
00:03:30.980 If so, why do we have to give you money?
00:03:33.360 Now, look, there are probably detailed answers to all of these questions about foreign aid and why we're making what choice in those specific countries.
00:03:41.420 I remember once on a television program, I put the question to what is the whole point of foreign aid in the first place to a senior bureaucrat who was involved in doling out of the money.
00:03:50.140 And she was pretty upset that I even asked the question. 0.84
00:03:52.800 She was very livid that people would not accept as an established fact that foreign aid was inherently good.
00:03:58.520 But I think part of the problem why people would want to be asking those rudimentary 101 questions on the topic is we just don't talk about it all that much.
00:04:07.400 We don't report on it.
00:04:08.840 Politicians don't mention it.
00:04:10.600 There's no kind of airing out about what exactly is this money doing?
00:04:14.580 What is the value for money?
00:04:16.440 And even if we can look at one project here, another project there and go, you know what?
00:04:20.340 I'm okay with that.
00:04:21.240 I support all of that.
00:04:22.680 The bigger question is, do we want to be giving $6 billion to this?
00:04:26.820 You can argue that's a lot of money.
00:04:28.420 You can also argue it's a little bit of money, not that much, given how big our federal budget is.
00:04:33.000 It's about 2% of the federal budget.
00:04:35.540 But then again, you hear various domestic groups within Canada saying we need $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, what have you,
00:04:43.940 so we can retrofit our schools, so we can have safe infrastructure, so we can deal with the opioid crisis and so forth.
00:04:51.160 Bringing us to the original question of should we be taking care of our problems at home here before we go on to spend billions of dollars helping people with their problems abroad.
00:05:02.440 Now, obviously, this requires much more of a deep dive conversation into all of this.
00:05:06.540 But to my point, we're just not having the conversation at all about foreign aid.
00:05:11.240 And I think we should.
00:05:12.740 Although I don't expect we will.
00:05:13.940 This election season.