Juno News - March 19, 2021


O'Toole pledges not to cut foreign aid

Mentioned
Andrew Scheer
Sticking to Your Guns Locked Down： Canada’s failed approach to COVID-19

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

221.96

Word count

1,338

Sentence count

—


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss the controversy surrounding foreign aid and what it does and doesn't do, and why it might be a good or bad thing for Canada. I also discuss some examples of other types of foreign aid that might be considered "good" or "bad" in the eyes of some critics.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 so about a year ago erin o2 put out a tweet that said foreign aid can wait right now the
00:00:11.000 truder government should prioritize canadians now this was in the context obviously of the
00:00:15.200 beginning of the pandemic we didn't really know anything about covid and there was a lot of
00:00:19.260 discussion over canada sending ppe to different countries or should canada support financially
00:00:23.640 maybe some countries that are having difficulty with tackling covid or stopping the spread of
00:00:28.240 the virus and again this is all about a year ago so hindsight is going to be 2020 on this one
00:00:31.960 and so now we have a bit of a different opinion and erin o'toole has stated that a conservative
00:00:39.080 government if elected would not cut foreign aid so that's simply off the table nothing is going to be
00:00:44.360 cut we can't let bad actors be the ones handling the rollout of the response to the pandemic this
00:00:50.000 is quite in sharp contrast to andrew sheer again the previous conservative leader who proposed about a
00:00:54.360 25 foreign aid cut and said that we should instead be redirecting those funds to kids in conflict
00:00:59.780 zones it's also in very sharp contrast to maxine bernier who said that we should basically stop all
00:01:05.140 foreign aid and so there's a lot of different opinions here between um sheer previously and
00:01:10.380 bernier and now between o'toole and bernier so a lot of different things now the couple questions on
00:01:15.540 this first of all is this a smart move politically well that's really up to you guys what do you guys
00:01:19.200 think is this a smart move for a tool to be taking up is that something that would cause you to support
00:01:23.880 him or to possibly not support him again what are your thoughts on bernier in this issue so that's
00:01:29.100 really something for you guys to decide and to let me know in the comments very curious to see what you
00:01:32.320 guys think but the overall question is the idea of foreign aid and what are some examples of foreign
00:01:38.240 aid that might be good or bad and a couple of different ways to think about it because i think it's a
00:01:42.520 little bit more complex than simply writing checks to other countries now there have been a lot of really
00:01:48.660 crazy examples of people giving foreign aid for different projects different things but one of
00:01:54.240 the places i would recommend you check out is candace malcolm's documentary green hypocrisy there's a
00:01:59.360 whole series there and it's produced by true north and candace who is great really recommend you check
00:02:04.520 that out because it talks a lot in certain segments about canada supporting or giving funds for other
00:02:10.380 countries to support them in their battle against climate change so that's one of the streams of
00:02:14.800 foreign aid but i want to tie in something else that is maybe not the traditional foreign aid that
00:02:20.480 may be thought of something as maybe the good kind of foreign aid again if you even support this idea
00:02:25.280 of foreign aid and that is something called operation impact now i spoke about this on a previous video
00:02:30.360 and operation impact is basically a canadian forces operation where we are supporting the militaries of
00:02:36.280 countries like lebanon jordan iraq and kuwait really helping them build capabilities to enhance
00:02:41.500 security in those countries maybe to combat extremism or things like isis in iraq and that ties hand in
00:02:47.340 hand with the nato mission in iraq which canada is supporting and is going to be winding down
00:02:51.560 eventually handing over really a lot of that role from canada to denmark so that's foreign aid but i
00:02:57.560 think a lot of people really get confused when they think about foreign aid they tend to think of
00:03:01.160 it as just writing checks to other countries or sending money abroad but there's other types of things
00:03:06.180 which could be considered foreign aid and i want to bring this to your attention and see what you guys
00:03:09.620 think so this military aid now this is going to cost canada money so it's going to cost us money
00:03:14.620 it's going to potentially put canadian forces personnel at risk especially in a country like
00:03:18.900 iraq which might be considered in some parts of war zone an active war zone or even a semi-active
00:03:23.060 war zone so that is sort of the cost to us but on a certain level the idea with this type of mission
00:03:30.520 is to help the iraqi military to combat isis or extremists now it's possible that some of these
00:03:36.600 extremists might want to commit a terror attack in canada and so really the question is is that
00:03:41.880 something that is of benefit to canada right we're supporting a mission in iraq where they're going to
00:03:46.800 be better equipped and better able to tackle isis and that will theoretically stop a terror attack
00:03:52.120 here so is that maybe an example of foreign aid what do you think that fits into foreign aid and if
00:03:56.960 you do is that a type of foreign aid that you agree with other types of foreign aid that not maybe
00:04:02.960 directly cash related would be maybe the justice department sending some retired justices or judges
00:04:07.840 or someone to assist with the justice department or justice system in another country maybe that is
00:04:13.860 something that again it doesn't really it result in us sending over a check costs money maybe that's
00:04:19.540 beneficial maybe it's canada trying to get some kind of votes at the un we tried for un security
00:04:25.620 council seat it was not clear why we really needed that seat or what the focus was or what it was even
00:04:29.680 going to cost canadians at the time but you know maybe that's something that you would support maybe
00:04:34.240 you think it's a good idea for canada to be involved in a sort of you know i will support you on this you
00:04:39.720 will support me on that kind of thing is that maybe something you would support does that color your
00:04:44.160 idea of foreign aid now these are all sort of different questions and i think it's important to
00:04:50.160 think about foreign aid in a lot of different levels because obviously we have a number of ways we
00:04:55.300 can think about it the last one that i want to bring up before we wrap it up here is the sort of
00:04:59.360 idea that politicians are looking at this in a very different way than we are because their
00:05:04.400 timeline is is really shorter than ours right they really are looking at the next couple of years
00:05:10.180 maybe two four eight years right so trudeau wanted to get that un security council seat that's a
00:05:15.460 fairly short-term goal that's not necessarily going to affect what canada is doing you know 10 20 30
00:05:20.640 years from now but maybe if we give foreign aid to a country and we build up a trade relationship
00:05:24.840 maybe it will pay large dividends 10 20 30 40 years from now but is that something that politicians are
00:05:30.740 looking at is it something that we should be looking at is it something that we should be
00:05:33.600 forcing our politicians to look at a lot of really deep stuff and i think there's a lot of really
00:05:38.000 interesting stuff to discuss here so let me know in the comments what do you think about foreign aid in
00:05:41.600 general what do you think about maybe different types of foreign aid do you think that there should be a
00:05:45.380 political calculus on foreign aid a lot of really big questions and really curious to see what you
00:05:49.900 guys think i know the audience here is very engaged i always really enjoy reading your comments so
00:05:53.880 definitely let me know what you think so again for true north i'm sam ashkenazi thank you so so much
00:05:58.760 for watching this video let me know in the comments and i'm excited to read them take care