Making A Difference

As a wealthy country, generously endowed with natural resources, and a well educated and hard-working population, Canada has an obligation to assist when and where it can, to make life more palatable in those under-developed parts of the world where people barely subsist. We do see it as our social responsibility. There are many within the country who claim we don't do enough, not having lived up to a promise within the United Nations to reach .7% of the GDP in international aid.

And while there's much to be said for that inability of lack of will to pull ourselves into that generous range of aid-giving, we're not doing all that badly. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program has recently visited Canada for the purpose to trying to lobby for ongoing and additional support. She has professed gratitude to Canada for our support in the past, but intends to try to persuade the current government to increase that support. Citing dire hunger from Haiti to Ethiopia, Afghanistan to Sudan.

The simple fact is that when humanitarian catastrophes or natural catastrophes of dire proportions occur, the collective Canadian conscience is expressed in several ways; through the swift response of our government, and through individual Canadians making their own donations to aid in response to worldwide disasters through the auspices of national and international aid groups. Through CIDA, the government's international aid arm, Canada reaches out to the world to reduce poverty, promote human rights and support sustainable development.

Canada was one of the first to respond to the World Food Program's appeal for support, and remains the fourth-largest donor to the WFP. Canada was the first to establish sustained funding to the WFP school feeding programs, and the first to donate cash instead of surplus food. The country also 'untied' is giving, for greater flexibility in finding appropriate means of assistance to the indigent world wide.

We're doing fine, thank you very much. The needs are overwhelming, unpredictable and life-shattering for so many segments of the world's populations. Through the failures of their own often-corrupted governments, victimizing the people living under dictatorships of one kind or another, and through the happenstance of life in geographic areas of the world struggling to feed their own. Nice to be acknowledged by outside agencies who depend on our collective conscience.

Nice to know that we can help; nicer yet to know that our efforts impact positively. It's psychically therapeutic.