Canada gives up on Haiti, freezes foreign aid

Michaëlle Jean, Stephen Lewis, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the 1000s who do well out of doing good... Colour them astonished! Mouths were agape in Ottawa, Paris and New York (wherever the lovely and fragrant Ms Jean is these days), and of course Port-au-Prince, when Canada's International Co-operation Minister said today that Canada will stop funding new aid projects in Haiti until Ottawa finds a better way for the struggling nation to, errr, help itself. Imagine that!

In an interview with La Presse, Julian Fantino said he was "disappointed" with what he considered the lack of progress he saw -- or rather, didn't see -- during his November visit to the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

So great was the consternation in the homes and offices of the chattering classes, that Canada's lamestream media [meaning the Globe and Mail. Ed.] asked its token francophone if perhaps there had been some error in translation. Or was it possible that the minister was just making it up as he went along? Speaking out of his ass, as the French say? After all, this sort of thing would normally be announced in the House of Commons, and some sort of notice would usually be given to the agencies and dips involved.

But not this time. Fantino indicated that Canada has poured $1,000,000,000 ($999 million in real money) down the Haitian rathole since 2006. And as a former chief of both the Ontario and Toronto police forces, Fantino knows how quickly money can disappear when you have a potent mix of ignorance, incompetence and corruption. Nevertheless, he said, his department will continue to fund programmes in Haiti that are already in progress, provided that even the most minuscule signs of life can be detected.

Minister Fantino, who took over the portfolio from "Limousine Bev" Oda last year, said Canadian taxpayers cannot take care of Haiti's problems forever. (Hey, they can't even take care of their own!) Fantino also compared Haiti's terrible state with much-better conditions in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Fantino remarked about the filth and garbage he saw during his recent visit to Haiti. He wondered aloud how a country with so many unemployed people had not found a way to clean it up, like the neighbourhood shown in the picture.

The Canadian International Development Agency said Mr. Fantino would not be available for further comment until he gets his prescription refilled.

Further reading, highly recommended by Walt: 'Most everything went wrong': Three years after an earthquake devastated Haiti, the reconstruction has barely begun - from the New York Times and National Post Wire Services. It's quite possible Minister Fantino may have read this [with his lips moving? Ed.] before giving his bombshell interview to La Presse.   And here's the interview: «Nous ne sommes pas une oeuvre de charité», dit Julian Fantino. For all the Canadians (especially readers of the Niagara Falls Review) who don't speak French, that means "We aren't a work of charity" says Julian Fantino. Indeed.

Have you given yet to help Somalia? Don't!

Have you been moved by the pictures of the starving children in famine-stricken Somalia? Have you sent your widow's mite to World Vision or Oxfam? Do you think your contribution is going to improve the lives of those poor (but somehow attractive) kids you see on TV? Before you reach for your credit card, think again.

Back in November 2009, in "Foreign aid: hurts us, hurts them", Walt talked about the bureaucratic mess that is USAID and its Canadian counterpart, CIDA. I've forgotten which impoverished hellhole was the "victim of the month" at that time. That was before Haiti, wasn't it? So perhaps it was Rwanda or Somalia, or some other African hellhole.

The same countries keep appearing in the Top Ten Aid Recipients. The droughts and famines recur again and again. And guilt-ridden white westerners -- the Volvo liberals, I call them -- keep raising money to throw at the problems of the Third World, money which is for the most part wasted, misappropriated or stolen by the corrupt and venal dictators and warlords who rule the world's poorest places.

Today's case in point is Somalia, where famine is officially widespread. The United Nations implores the rich countries to forget about their own problems and send billions of dollars to feed the hungry in the Horn of Africa. Just as we did about 20 years ago, the last time Somalia was the biggest basket case.

Michael Maren writes of his experiences in Somalia (and other sandpits) in The Road to Hell (The Free Press, 1997). The subtitle says it all: The ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. Here are a couple of pertinent paragraphs.

Aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. [Aid organizations] are paid by the U.S. government to give away surprlus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food [they] give away, the more money they receive from the government to administer the handouts.

Food aid attracts people to refugee camps, where they die from dysentery or measles or other diseases they wouldn't have contracted in the bush. Is there really a food shortage when anyone with money can find all the food he wants, when the aid workers themselves enjoy meals that the locals could never get even in the best of times? And why does it always seem that a group of local elites finds a way to get rich from the disaster? Are we contributing to the problem by dealing with the businessmen-politicians who lease Land Cruisers and homes to the aid agencies and who provide trucks to transport food?

Maren goes on to make the connection between famine and dictatorship.

No country was ever transformed from being famine-prone to food self-sufficiency by international charity. As Harvard economist Amartya Sen has shown, famines always occur in authoritarian states, when the government mismanages the economy. Famines disappear when those countries become market-sufficient. India, for example -- the epitome of the famine-afflicted land when I was a child -- no longer suffers famines despite its huge populations.

And some targets of charity get worse. Today, after huge infusions of international aid, Somalia and all its formerly self-sufficient neighbors are chronically hungry and dependent on foreign food. It becomes increasingly difficult for aid workers to ignore the compelling correlation between massive international food aid and increasing vulnerability to famine. "Our charity does not overcome famine, and may help to prolong it", someone will always lament. Those who spend the time to study the local economies see that the people have now geared their own activities not to returning to their old lives but to getting their hands on aid.

The emphasis above is mine. Please keep in mind, dear reader, that Maren wrote those words in the mid-90s. Has anything changed in Somalia as the result of the billions of dollars of our money -- yours and mine -- poured down that rathole in the 15-20 years since the last "crisis"? Evidently not.