There has been discussion as to whether the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) should have been sent sooner. Hmmm...let’s consider this. A shortage of potable water and DART has some Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Units. (ROWPU) A need for medical care and DART has a medical unit. It seems pretty simple but when you ask Bill Graham, it’s not. According to CBC, “On Wednesday, Graham reiterated that they must look at whether sending DART is appropriate, whether the affected countries need it, and whether it's worth moving the unit, which would cost $15 million to $20 million.
"We do not send it without first ascertaining whether or not it's going to be useful on the ground and whether the countries can absorb it and use it," he said, adding that no country has yet requested the DART.”The DART is now being sent to Sri Lanka, but there is no reason why arrangements could not have gotten underway sooner. Even if the destination wasn’t finalized until the situation became clearer, having the people and the transport ready to go would have saved valuable time.
It also isn’t reasonable to expect countries in the midst of a massive crisis to request something that is deployed so seldom that few even realize that it exists. It is even less reasonable to expect them to come begging. I can’t speak for Bill Graham and Paul Martin, but my parents taught me that you offer help to those that need it, then give help if they accept the offer. No strings, no equivocating. You don’t stand around waiting for them to ask while calculating costs versus benefits in your head.
Canada’s response to this disaster was slow and both money and physical aid seem to have been given only grudgingly. That we’ve now upped the money to $80 million and are finally deploying the DART is good, but it took more than a week and there are apparently no mechanisms or guidelines in place to decide when and how much aid should be given in emergency situations.
Canada is, at this point in history, not equipped to deal with emergencies of any magnitude. This is at a time in the world’s history where there are more people at risk of being devastated by natural disasters because, as our population grows we have more people living along coastlines, in mountainous areas with volcanic activity and in areas prone to earthquake. These areas are spread throughout the world, including the wealthy nations of the north and west, yet contingency plans and mechanisms for putting these things into place are haphazard at best.
The wealthy move to or vacation in such areas because they like the view or can practice pastimes not available to them in other areas. The poor move to such areas to earn a living, whether that is through tourism and acting as servants to the rich, or fishing, or because it is the cheapest place they can live. They have very little choice in the matter.
This migration to potentially vulnerable areas leaves us more and more open to large-scale disasters. Scientists, as anybody who has watched the disaster shows on Discovery and The Learning Channel can testify to, have been warning of the impact of this increased vulnerability for years. It has also been noticed by the United Nations. Kofi Annan has been trying to get the message out for years and a major UN report was released about a year ago detailing the challenges that lay ahead, what we were doing right, and what areas we were failing in.
The biggest area we are failing in is aid contributions. That sounds petty considering the massive outpouring of aid going to Asia right now, but the truth is that the wealthy countries of the north and west give next to nothing when our immense wealth is taken into consideration. The United Nations goal is for wealthy countries to contribute 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product. Not a huge amount of our national income and very much an investment in the future. Countries that receive sufficient aid are less likely to breed terrorists or engage in civil wars, more likely to become trade partners, and as the aid leads to sustainable economies, they will become contributors to aid programs instead of recipients. Those are the very real goals and benefits of humanitarian aid, yet Canada gave only 0.26% of GDP and was lagging behind even that low number before the tsunami struck. Whether the additional aid we are giving to victims of the tsunami will bring us up to 2003 levels is questionable.
I would propose that Canada meet the 0.7% of GDP for yearly aid to the UN so it can be applied to ongoing programs and use 0.3% to establish a civilian aid agency to deal with emergency situations, bringing our total up to a full 1% of GDP. The benefits would outweigh the costs in the long run.
The non-emergency portion of the aid package could sustain the civilian agency for long-term aid of the type that south-east Asia is going to require for the next few years, as well as providing food and cash through existing programs. The 0.3% of our GDP reserved for emergencies would be available to send aid and aid workers for emergency disaster relief. The establishment of such an agency would free up our military, including the DART, to concentrate on peacekeeping operations and aid missions where a military presence was required.
A civilian aid agency would give us the opportunity to train people in a variety of portable skills that are valuable in a variety of professions, as well as serving as a place to gain experience for those who wish to move on to working for NGOs. As an expression of soft power few things are as powerful as providing aid to those who need it. Aid, in all forms, encourages trade, cooperation on international issues ranging from human rights to the environment, and an overall spirit of goodwill and cooperation. The less tangible benefits such as reduced terrorism and fewer conflicts may be difficult to quantify, but many who study world affairs have made the connection between help for developing nations equalling a lower incidence of such violence on several occasions.
Canada can once again become a world leader if we put the resources into a civilian aid agency and increase our overall spending on aid. Such actions tend to encourage other nations to follow suit, so it could greatly benefit the world over and above what we contribute. Canada is a wealthy nation, we can afford to help others. There is no need to be stingy.
Stumble It!
But let's look at the tsunami. Obviously we cannot bring back the dead. The money is for the suffering and the reconstruction. Canadians are as willing as anybody to look elsewhere, put their money to good use and feel good about themselves. What we don't do is look at the timber in our own eyes. If you've ever been to a native reservation (not all it's true, but a lot) then you will notice similar problems. The people are suffering from lack of clean water, inadequate housing, polluted landscape, etc. For the tsunami we have seen a literal miracle of organization, grassroots have sprung up to get all kinds of donations and people have forgotten every bad thing they've ever heard about any of the organizations there to help (government run aid organizations are notoriously corrupt and often self defeating-not to be confused with many of the non-profit NGO's who often do important works). However, when have you EVER seen one commercial or one organization launch a nationwide program for native programs, most of which have been slashed by the federal government. You always see children from Africa on television looking for sponsors, yet many native children live in the exact same conditions, plus a harsh canadian winter and I don't think I've ever seen a single aid organization doing anything remotely similar. Of course, canadians like to think such things are 'taken care of' by the government, which shows an appalling lack of education in native issues, an ignorance that canadians are more than willing to foster. The price of the bureaucracy of the Department of Indian Affairs (which employs few natives) would make every native in canada practically a millionaire if it was just given to each native (while now most reservation native must live on welfare-something much more difficult since most reservations are rural and the cost of living is so much higher). Native poverty is far easier to deal with than the immense organizational monster necessary to build up Sri Lanka, however, it appears that the board in our eye blinds us to the fact that it's there.
Foreign aid is still a powerful need in this world though and, by most indications, that will only get worse. We do need to deal with native issues, but that does mean we can turn our backs on the rest of the world either.
I'm not saying that we should do away with the military participating in aid operations, but that we should have a civilian agency as well as the military.
Natives, of course, constantly complain that the only press they get is bad press (unless they are 'being good' and acting like us). Go back and try to find a story during the Oka crisis that even mentioned the blatant idiocy and racism of building a golf course over a burial ground. Or more recently, when the government cut off funding for the Burnt Church reserve's legal defense when they tried to defend themselves against a government which itself was acting illegally. There was virtually no mention of it. For natives it involves no money at all, just pressure on the government to abide by it's own laws.
Finally, just as a note, I think it's a horrible idea to try to upgrade our military for such work as in Sri Lanka. Not that it isn't useful, but such international work should be done through the United Nations, that's what we are paying for. You would have to have a whole new bureaucracy created just to do with the environmental disasters taking place. What about man made ones? How big is a disaster to warrant moving in? Who is in charge? The questions are really endless.
One final point, the one thing missing from all this talk. We've seen school kids, people, groups, churches, and governments all putting up money, where are the richest organizations in the world? The corporations.
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Zachary Whalen
That's why I think it's important to get funding levels up and establish a way of delivering aid that doesn't depend on what's hot in the media.
1) The 0.7% of our GDP going to international development was acuatually put in place by Lester B Pearson so you would somehow expect us to at LEAST be giving that much
2) Since the Tsumami hit 260,000 people have died in Africa from PREVENTABLE causes, AIDS, Malaria, lack of clean water, hunger, etc.
3) One Tsunami hits Africa every week. (though I do not know the death toll for these, if there is one, but if anyone knows a post would be appreciated)
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Dave Ruston
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Or... it may be just too recently that I read the book, The Final Empire: the collapse of civilization by William H. Kotke. Also, it is available as a download on the web at <br />
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<a href="http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/index.html">http://www.rainbowbody.net/Finalempire/index.html</a> <br />
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Very worth the time, but out of print in book form, unfortunately. <br />
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POTS
Saw where you got that info, one tsunami hits Africa every week in a figurative sense, no tsunami, no one dies.