Foreign aid, schmorin' aid

In a world of media inattention, kids die

In 2020 and 2021, many people in Canada’s media were instant experts on foreign aid.

In those COVID years, when the American media gorged on a presidential election and the racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops, the Canadian media acted like a cluster of hungry kids watching through a window as rich people dined in a fancy restaurant. Canadian politics was so utterly boring.

Eventually, they found something to whip up, a bogus scandal that ended up killing a student summer job program and the country’s most vibrant aid organization. WE, a charity that raised money from youth volunteerism rather than pester people with late night TV ads, junk mail campaigns and paid fundraisers, was collateral damage.

A crew from the CBC ‘s The Fifth Estate went to Kenya and did some bizarre performative reporting (including a bogus claim of being chased from the country) that has landed them in court in Washington, DC. Unlike people paid to cover the news, I have been following this case, and it doesn’t look good for the CBC and for Canadian taxpayers. The CBC has no libel insurance and American courts can hand down crippling judgments. This was the court that handled the Dominion Voting Systems case that cost Fox News $787.5 million.

The Globe and Mail, which has been almost mute on American and Canadian cuts to foreign aid, had a guy in South Africa speculating the Kenyan government would throw WE out of the country. (South Africa and Kenya are both in Africa.) Pierre Poilievre used WE and the “freedom convoy” to snatch the Conservative leadership from Erin O’Toole, who probably could have won the last federal election. A House of Commons committee spent a little time on the student job program before a second committee began an absurd examination of WE Charity. It brought in a rogue’s gallery of renowned idiots to testify to MPs who were more interested in politics than fact-finding.

The committees didn’t hire charity law experts or people with knowledge of charity management to give it advice on the “social entrepreneur” model that seemed so baffling to Charlie Angus, Poilievre and the press gallery. It’s a model used by the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity and the Mennonite Central Committee. Social entrepreneurship — having a business generating money for charitable work — helped pay for the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. John Ross Robertson left his business to a charitable trust, and that trust generated a flow of profits to the hospital. The business was the Toronto Telegram.

“Holy Joe” Atkinson also tried to leave his company, the Toronto Star, to a similar trust that would generate cash for social justice charities and activists. That was thwarted by the Ontario government. I tell the story in my 2022 book Big Men Fear Me, a biography of Globe and Mail founder George McCullagh and the newspaper wars that he fought.

I bring all this up because we are in a foreign aid crisis that is killing people. Cuts to foreign aid announced by the Canadian government aren’t getting the attention they deserve. They come after Trump butchered USAID, which a Harvard research team has found to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported the Trump administration is blackmailing Zambia, saying it would cut off life-saving HIV drugs unless Zambia hands over its mineral wealth (no paywall).

In 2021, Canada’s leading media stars were experts on foreign aid. They ripped apart a charity that built schools, dug wells, trained nurses and empowered women in developing countries. They said, wrongly, that the charity would be prosecuted for illegal lobbying. That was false. They said it violated conflict of interest rules. It didn’t. They implied it broke American tax laws. That wasn’t true, either. They reported that the RCMP was investigating the charity. They didn’t bother to tell people the RCMP found nothing wrong. They quoted Tory donors who ran a miniscule charity rating agency as experts. These people trashed WE. Canada’s newspapers and TV networks failed to report that the world’s best charity rating agency gave — and still gives — WE Charity its top rating.

If I could find this stuff, so could the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the CBC, and anyone else who claimed to be a competent journalist.

To get back to the point. It’s time media, politicians and voters took foreign aid seriously. It’s not just one of the ways Canada built a good reputation in the world. It saves lives and helps make the world safer by raising people out of poverty.

It’s time that the lives of Black and Brown people were as valued by Western media politicians as those of White people. And for media to stop seeing life as a game and develop some empathy, even if undertanding seems to be beyond the capacity of so many journalists and their managers.

The media can’t just give a damn when they can embarrass the government. Foreign aid should be like clean water: a necessity that journalists scream about when something goes wrong. And what the Carney government is doing is terribly wrong.