And why is Canada following suit with the US here?
Moreover, Canada’s cuts came in the wake of other aid budgets being slashed earlier in the year, most notoriously by the United States but also by multiple European countries.
It kinda looks like a bunch of countries used the noise from the headlines the American cuts generated to quietly cut funding too. Fucking shameful.
Looks like aids is going to have a big come back.
Not looking forward to that.
The aid was for HIV meds. They already had HIV.
We are getting squeezed by the US, we cannot afford $2.7B in debt spending for aid.
You know hiv turns into aids right ?
So you have nothing useful to add.
Just for your information, a person can be HIV positive under meds and never have AIDS.
But how about we get to the point of a country in pretty severe debt spending spending $2.7B outside the country. Where do you think that money comes from?
So we spent $2.7B in this aid, but yet, in Canada, we spend less than half that on all research for all diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
I’m not saying keep throwing money at a foreign problem. But that foreign problem will directly lead to the spread of hiv and aids to your country.
Also the HIV is more likely to turn into aids without the drugs.
Here is a big part of the problem that’s solvable.
The pharmaceutical companies are bleeding your country dry on the prices they charge for these drugs.
You all could just make them yourself. And essentially take proprietary ownership of the drug.
Why not?
The drug companies have been compensated beyond what they should have been.
These drugs were developed with tax payers money.
The people/state should own drug formulas.
Companies should not be able to withhold health care in this way. They literally are choosing profit over lives.
Take the formula. Make your own drugs.
In the U.S we have some law that lets the government do this. Though it’s not been used appropriately. It should be used all the time for drugs like insulin and cancer drugs.
Take that 2billion and invest in infrastructure to produce these drugs yourself and for your own people.
Eh, in my view this isn’t really a huge surprise, nor is it all that out of line with what was put forward at Davos, contrary to what the article seems to imply.
One of the key themes of the Davos speech is that the international rules based order is dead, and by extension the international organisations that rely on that rules based order are likely due to wither and die. Another key theme was that trade deals had to be practical and pragmatic, limited in scope (especially regarding ‘values’ differences between nations), and a win-win to each trading partner. Fewer grand “We are in alignment culturally, and have opened free trade between our nations, strengthening our shared bond through alignment with the trading rules setup by the WTO”, and more “We got some lumber for sale, who wants to trade us some computer chips? We don’t care how you made em, that’s your business”.
A chunk of Canada’s aid funding was done via proxy in USAID, which is now dead, and (from what I recall at least), there were potentially funds intended for foreign aid that got ‘lost’ as part of the USAID dramatic shutdown – so invested aid dollars lost due to the US abandoning the area. Canada itself doesn’t have the same funding/aid network available, which means any aid given is going to come at a higher ‘cost’, even at the outset.
But more than that, those aid programs are fundamentally not in alignment with those two key themes from Davos. Foreign aid programs rely typically on international organisations (who historically relied heavily on an international rules based order to operate), and the money invested doesn’t typically have a clear “this for that” type of exchange. There’re reasons to continue certain foreign aid initiatives – such as foreign food aid, where Canada pays its own farmers to over-produce certain agricultural products for foreign relief efforts, but the broader purpose is to ensure that Canada maintains a sufficient agriculture sector as part of disaster preparedness for Canadians.
Something like funding HIV prevention in a foreign country is a much more difficult one to peg the direct benefit to Canada. People can see/touch and consume cinnamon.
I think there are a number of tangible benefits, from public health to promoting Canada’s image and creating good will with trading partners. It’s also good for Canadian morale, where we can see ourselves as producing positive change in the world.
That said, we do need to invest in ourselves and create more positive change within our own country too, and maybe prioritize it more. But just because the US abandons soft power and diplomacy doesn’t mean we should too.
I’d disagree that it’s promoting morale and public health, though I do acknowledge there are tertiary benefits. Like expanding the AI centres by adding something like 2000 jobs or whatever, means that there “should” be 2000 more income tax statements with higher salaries sending money to Ottawa. But those jobs are going to almost definitely be 90% for a specific ethnic demographic because they’re tied to an India-owned parent company that can staff the sites with TFWs and Indian nationals.
However the services provided by that site will be entirely at the whim of the Indian government, as the parent company is headquartered in India, and the majority of revenue will exit Canada. It will be beholden to Indian laws, again due to the parent company, and if those laws say “show us everything you have on Canadian sikh people”, the AI company will comply. India’s privacy regime is not like Canadas (companies that outsource private information there ‘should’ likely be getting in trouble from our privacy regs, but our privacy regs are generally powerless – like “Why do we get so many indian scam calls? It couldn’t have anything to do with our major telcos handing all our private data to a country that doesnt respect privacy, could it???”).
More broadly, getting that AI deal to me, is like getting a deal to “bring netflix” into a country’s media – it doesn’t really benefit the country’s media, the vast majority of the revenue leaves the country, and your media becomes dependent on foreign streaming availability as the traditional carriers die. New local companies can’t develop, because the market position of foreign providers is too dominant. Like, rather than them just investing in increasing Indian owned AI company’s presence in Canada, why didn’t Carney and them secure deals to provide Canadian AI company services to India? He’s basically adding foreign competition that’ll drive down local revenue/salaries.
By FAR the majority of the $$ in the announcement is just Uranium and Coal to India, for money to the private companies that produce those resources. The headliner being Cameco, a company that’s known for having dodged significant taxes, with Swiss accounts and Accounts in Barbados – the courts did eventually rule in Cameco’s favour, but while what they did was ‘technically’ legal, it wasn’t ‘morally right’, and the courts in this case failed to get justice for Canadians. They’d mine Uranium in Canada, sell it to their foreign subsidiary for an unbelievably low price, paying Canadian tax on that low revenue; then they’d resell the Uranium from their Swiss company at a far higher price, paying the lower Swiss business tax. We’ve now rewarded the stockholders of that company, and its sketchy tax dodging patterns, with a really nice payday. I wonder if there’s anything in those deals to prevent Cameco from selling India Uranium from its other non-Canadian subsidiaries, to ensure that announced revenue will actually enter Canada. Bet there isn’t. Morale is so high!
you just wrote a long shpiel about AI datacenter jobs none of us want in response to a topic about cuts to soft power and preventing the spread of an epidemic that killed millions in the 1980s
