The Truth About Canada (35 page)

Every hour more than 1,200 children die away from the glare of media attention. The causes of death will vary, but the overwhelming majority can be traced to a single pathology: poverty. With today’s technology, financial resources and accumulated knowledge, the world has the capacity to overcome extreme deprivation. Yet as an international community we allow poverty to destroy lives.…

In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday, and more than 1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than $1 a day.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has inflicted the single greatest reversal in human development. In 2003, the pandemic claimed 3 million lives and left another 5 million people infected. Millions of children have been orphaned.

Meanwhile children die from malaria for want of a simple anti-mosquito bed net.
¹⁴

As Nelson Mandela put it in 2005: “Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.”

No indicator captures the divergence in human development opportunity more powerfully than child mortality. Had the progress of the 1980s been sustained since 1990, there would be 1.2 million fewer child deaths this year.

Over the next 10 years the gap between … [the United Nations’ established] target and the current trend adds more than 41 million children who will die before their fifth birthday from the most readily curable of all diseases — poverty.

The UN projection for 2015 offers a clear warning: “To put it bluntly, the world is heading for a heavily sign-posted human development disaster. That disaster is as avoidable as it is predictable.”

What could be done about the appalling numbers of children dying in poor countries? The 2005
Human Development Report
is clear:

Child mortality is an area in which small investments yield high returns. Recent cross-country research on neonatal mortality identifies a set of interventions that, with 90% coverage in 75 high-mortality countries, could reduce death rates by 59% saving 2.3 million lives. The $4 billion cost represents two days’ worth of military spending in developed countries.

What could be done? The
Human Development Report
sums it up precisely:

Measured in 2000 purchasing power parity terms, the cost of ending extreme poverty — the amount needed to lift 1 billion people above the $1 a day poverty line — is $300 billion.… This sounds like a large amount. But it is equivalent to less than 2% of the income of the richest 10% of the world’s population.

What could be done? In 2003, military spending by OECD development donor nations amounted to $642-billion. Their official development assistance totalled only $69-billion. The United Nations puts it this way:

No G-7 country has a ratio of military expenditures to aid of less than 4:1. That ratio rises to 13:1 for the United Kingdom and 25:1 for the United States.

This 10:1 ratio of military spending to aid spending makes no sense. On any assessment of threat to human life there is an extraordinary mismatch between military budgets and human need.

Just about 3% of the increase in military spending between 2000 and 2003 could prevent the deaths of 3 million infants a year.
¹⁵

What could be done? Since 2000, per-capita G7 military spending has increased by just under $170. Foreign aid spending has increased by only $11.

As I pointed out in my last book,
Rushing to Armageddon
, only 8 percent of current global military expenditures could properly fund universal programs in health, education, literacy, and AIDS reduction and substantially lessen the death of children and human suffering.

What could be done? In 2003, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said that there is adequate arable land capable of providing everyone with a healthy diet and that would still be the case if the world’s population increased as much as five times the current level!

What could be done? A
Globe and Mail
editorial has it right:

The best way to bring the world’s poorest countries out of their endless cycle of misery and reduce their dependence on foreign handouts is to bring down the barriers that block free access to developed markets for farm products, stop subsidizing farmers in wealthy countries, and end, once and for all, the egregious practice of dumping rice, cotton and agricultural goods in the Third World.
¹⁶

From the president of Brazil: “Hunger is actually the worst of all weapons of mass destruction, claiming millions of victims every year.
Fighting hunger and poverty and promoting development are the truly sustainable way to achieve world peace … there will be neither peace nor development without social justice.”
¹⁷

In 2006, OECD foreign aid assistance fell by over 5 percent. For the University of British Columbia’s David R. Boyd,

It appears that the world’s wealthy nations were just blowing smoke when they made their grand promises while thunderous speeches were delivered and great expectations created as the Millennium Development Goals to reduce the effects of world poverty were set.

Official development assistance from the wealthy nations fell over 5 percent in 2006 and was forecast to fall again in 2007.

For Canada the numbers are even worse. Canadian aid fell 9.2 percent in 2006 to a miserly 0.30 percent of gross national income, well below the OECD average.

To make matters worse, Canada’s proportion of administrative expenses (nearly 9 percent) is the second highest in the OECD, behind only Greece, and more than double the average, and Canada’s proportion of tied aid is among the worst in the entire OECD, at more than 40 percent.
¹⁸

The Harper government’s 2007 budget promised an increase in our foreign aid, but an increase that would leave us mired down at only 0.272 percent of GDP for the 2007/2008 fiscal year. In late 2007, with great fanfare Harper announced new foreign aid initiatives “to save a million lives.” But, it was simply a repackaging of assistance provided to UNICEF every year, with no increase in Canada’s overall foreign aid.

According to Boyd, “Canada is breaking promises and breaking hearts.”
¹⁹

Bob Geldoff, speaking during the June 2007 G8 meetings, which discussed development assistance, said, “Canada is blocking a meaningful communiqué from the meetings. I think it’s a shame for Canada
to take that role.”
²⁰
And at the same time Jeffrey Sachs said, “Canada is nowhere to be found on this commitment at all.… There’s no life in Canada’s efforts. It’s a huge surprise for those of us who believe in Canada’s role.… We don’t hear Canada’s voice on major issues.”
²¹

Makes one really proud to be a Canadian, doesn’t it?

In October 2007, Unicef reported that aid was indeed having a positive impact, with the number of child deaths falling below 10 million, to 9.7 million, in 2006, while under-five mortality rates were down by over 50 percent from 1960. There was much rejoicing when Unicef released the new estimates, especially when so much of the improvement came from relatively low-cost solutions such as mosquito netting. This said, the death of 9.7 million children in a single year is a terrible tragedy that could have easily been prevented.

I’ll leave the final words in this chapter to Stephen Lewis:

The ongoing plight of Africa forces me to perpetual rage.… I have spent the last four years watching people die.… Whenever I travel in Africa today, it feels as though everyone is hungry — hungry to the point of starvation. Hut after hut yields a picture of a mother, usually a young woman, in the final throes of life.

The AIDS pandemic has taken a devastating toll.… I was visiting the adult medical wards. There were two people in every bed, head to foot and foot to head, and in most instances under the bed on the floor, each in an agony of fullblown AIDS.

On the ten-hour night shift, to take care of sixty to seventy patients — every one of whom would have been in intensive care in a Canadian hospital — there would be one nurse.
²²

You might want to keep all of this in mind when you read the next chapter.

32

DEFENCE, THE MILITARY, THE ARMS TRADE, PEACEKEEPING, AND THE ARCTIC

“Dying in Afghanistan for a cause we cannot win”

I
hope you will be able to read this chapter right after you have read the preceding chapter on foreign aid.

In 1985/1986, defence spending in Canada passed $8-billion for the first time. By 2005/2006, it had increased to over $15-billion, and it will be $18.24-billion in 2007/2008, the 13th highest in the world.

For years, many critics, the military, the defence contractors, the Americans, and many Canadian academics and journalists have complained that Canada wasn’t spending nearly enough on defence, or perhaps what can be more accurately categorized as the military.

Current projections are that defence spending will soon surpass $20-billion and exceed Cold War levels. Steven Staples, who heads the Rideau Institute on International Affairs in Ottawa, says that today,

Most of the money is being spent on American — not Canadian — military priorities to allow our forces to become much more capable of performing war-fighting missions with the United States.

This transformation from a peacekeeper to a war-fighter is happening almost without any public debate at all.

The Americans have continued to strongly pressure Canada into increased military spending.

For example, he says, “Canada spent $1 billion on old British submarines only because the Americans wanted us to do so, so they could use the diesel-electric subs, which they no longer had, for target practice.”
¹
Hard to believe, but true.

It’s interesting to note that a 2005 public opinion poll showed that almost 70 percent of Canadians said that they wanted the same or a more distant military relationship with the United States. Very few Canadians wanted a closer relationship.

In its 2005 budget, the Martin government promised to increase military spending by $12.8-billion over five years. That fall, the U.S. journal
Defense News
said that Canada was already the 14th highest military spender in the world and the seventh largest military spender among the 26 NATO members, only marginally behind Germany as a percentage of GDP, although for years we had been near the bottom of the list in the ratio of spending to GDP, and well below the NATO average. Mind you, many NATO countries have regional conflicts and historical reasons for their high military spending; for example, Greece, at 4.1 percent of GDP, and Turkey at 4.9 percent.
²

Canada is now 10th on a per-capita basis, and our per-capita spending is over twice the world average, while we’ve recently moved up to the sixth highest military spender among the 26 NATO countries
³
and, as Steve Staples has shown, we now outspend the lowest 12 NATO members combined.

And please note, not included in our defence or military budget is well over $10-billion spent each year for “security.”

Even with our worrisome and controversial presence in Afghanistan, public opinion polls continue to show that Canadians place increased military spending well down the list of their priorities, which are invariably topped by the environment, health care, post-secondary education, poverty, child care, and more recently the economy.

For yet another indication of how out of touch our Canadian Senate often is, in 2005 Senator Colin Kenny of the Senate’s National Security and Defence Committee called for defence spending to be increased to
$25-billion, with a further target of a huge $35-billion a year by 2012. The senators on this committee are some of the same senators who constantly appeal for even more and even larger tax cuts.

In the millions of words written about Canada in Afghanistan, I think it’s difficult to top Thomas Walkom’s perceptive column in the
Toronto Star
about Colin Kenny and his Senate defence committee’s 2007 report.

There is a bizarre disjunction in the Senate defence committee’s useful — and remarkably frank — analysis of Canada’s military role in Afghanistan. It’s as if the 11 senators on the committee, having successfully outlined the near insurmountable problems associated with the Afghan war, couldn’t bring themselves to accept the logical conclusion of their own analysis.

On the one hand, their 16-page report convincingly paints a picture of a war that cannot be won. The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, it states bluntly, routinely shakes down its own citizens. Its army and police are, in the words of committee chair Colin Kenny, “corrupt and corrupter.”

But … optimism is hard to square with reality. In fact, they say, Canada’s military presence in the southern province of Kandahar has not made the lives of Afghan citizens any better. It has made them worse. “Life is clearly more perilous because we are there,” the report concludes.

As for what Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay calls Afghanistan’s advances in women’s rights, democracy and education, the senators are dismissive. Afghanistan, they conclude, is a medieval society that “does not want to be rebuilt in Canada’s image.” To suggest that our efforts will somehow miraculously create a modern, liberal state is to engage in the grossest kind of illusion.…