During the next year, as Canada’s foreign policy is reviewed by the new government, a part of the country’s soul also will be under scrutiny.
The question will be simple: In these deficit-dominated times, how much money are Canadian taxpayers willing to send abroad each year to help the less fortunate?
As one of Canada’s most generous aid-giving communities and the source of much of the grain sent abroad each year to hungry, poor nations, it is a very relevant question for Prairie farmers.
Aid spending was hit for reductions by both the former Conservative government and the present Liberal government.
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At budget-cutting time, it is a large (more than $2 billion) and easy target to hit because there is no powerful Canadian constituency to defend it.
The arguments in favor of even further cuts will be straightforward, put by the Reform Party and others – in a budget-deficit crisis, you cut where you can and Canada no longer can afford to be the world’s brother’s keeper.
Emergencies that produce the stories and pictures of starving children always will elicit enough sympathy to justify aid.
The longer-term help to chronically-poor or under-achieving areas will be a harder sell.
Yet there is another side that speaks more to the spiritual nature and moral core of mankind than simply a dollars-and-cents debate.
It centres on a bit of folk wisdom repeated so often that it has become a cliche: It is better to teach a hungry person how to fish than to give him a fish for dinner.
Yes, yes, it is one of those mushy, feel-good sentiments from another age, not in keeping with the grim, angry, competitive Nineties.
But there is also some hard-nosed logic in it.
In Ottawa last week, the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported that up to 27,000 square miles of productive African land is lost to agriculture each year because of poor cultivation practices or inadequate knowledge and funds to fight natural soil degradation.
Imagine that – 27,000 square miles. That’s 27,000 sections of Prairie land, 750 Saskatchewan townships.
The result is sharply reduced food production, growing hunger and often civil unrest or war.
IFAD president Fawzi Al-Sultan is convinced that much of the soil loss can be stopped by relatively low-cost investment and training among rural, poor populations.
He says tens of thousands of hectares of African land have been reclaimed during the past nine years through an investment of less than $80 million per year.
More could be done if more money was invested.
Pay a little now or pay more later through costly emergency food shipments or even peacekeepers, not to mention the millions of lives at stake.
It is an argument at least to be considered as the budget-cutters take centre stage in the foreign aid debate.
