There’s been a lot of analysis in the media about the new federal budget, but what is missing is a real acknowledgement of the cuts to CIDA. Everyone must share the burden is the justification, but the consequences for these cuts are far, far greater than any other.
It is unconscionable to deny a child a two-cent vitamin A pill that could keep her from going blind. There can be no justification for withholding $20 worth of drugs that would save a mother of five from an agonising death by TB. There is no room for so-called “austerity” when millions of adolescent girls are forced out of school because there are no toilets for them.
One can argue forever where cuts should happen and how, but there can never be any rational, ethical, or moral justification for one of the richest countries in the world claiming a lack of money when cutting help to the poorest. It’s like a Wall Street banker not giving to the United Way this year because the cost of operating his Rolls Royce fleet has gone up.
The Harper government is counting that Canadians don’t give a damn.
They think that we only worry about our own backyard, not the enormous suffering that will occur as a result of these cuts. Yet if we let this pass, Canadians will have become the global one per cent: pitiless and arrogant fat cats looking down on the world’s poor and flicking our cigar ashes in their faces.
Nathaniel Poole
Victoria