Daily Blogger - Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Posted on 15 May 2008 by Jack
The Politic | Sending money to China and Burma — why?
Shame on Ignatieff for using the horrifying plight of the poor people for talking points. I certainly have a lot of sympathy for the victims of the natural disasters in China and Burma but I object to sending money to their governments. It makes no sense to me. Foreigners just sent tons of aid to Burma immediately after the cyclone hit and the Burmese military junta stopped it all at the airport. What is wrong with that picture?
Now that money is involved, Michael Ignatieff gets in a tiffy:
“Australia is giving $25 million, the British $10 million, why aren’t we giving more when we can clearly do so,” Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff asked.
Clearly do so? We could clearly flush all of our money down the toilet too but we clearly do NOT do so. Ever think why?
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May 15th, 2008 at 10:36 am
I blogged on this yesterday as well. I believe that what Iggy did was in line with a typical Libera. Announce big spending without any plan just to look good and score political points (hello Kelowna Accord… I’m talking to you). It’s more important to a Liberal to be able to say “we spent the most money on that,” than to actually get results. What good does it do to announce massive amounts of aid dollars if the Myanmar government won’t let us in to spend it? But hey, we’re committed to spending it and that’s what counts right? Not actually helping people who need it.
And as I sum up on my blog post… alot of the money the Canadian government committed to tsunami relief went to the Canadian Red Cross. They raised $360M but today have over $200M left unspent. Money we gave them to help people but they’re earning interest on.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:46 am
This is a difficult situation, there is no good answer. Canadians want to help the less fortunate, which is a good thing, but sending money to dictatorships to help prop up the regime is not so good. I think the best thing to do is send money to private orgs, I sent some money to Salvation Army, and let them figure it out.
I agree with Reid when looking at Liberal motives. They want to appear to be doing something and damn the consequences. Ignatieff will not look good at the international meetings and the like if Canada does not pony up some cash. It does not matter that the people who need it won’t see a dime because all the money will have gone to the generals and their minions.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:12 am
There is no reason to give Aid money to China or Burma.
China has hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign currency and other liquid forms of capital that they can use for disaster relief.
Burma is a communist dictatorship.
Unless we are handing out the Aid ourselves,without Burmese government interference,you might as well dump the Aid into the ocean for all the good it will do.