McQUARRIE – What’s the real reason behind demands to stop foreign aid?

IT’S LIKELY YOU’VE SEEN these on your social media news feeds. I’m referring to posts that urgently demand we stop giving money in support of foreign aid and instead spend it on those in need in our own country. The homeless, veterans and pensioners are always included in that list.

Those felt to be undeserving of our help or shelter are refugees, including: Victims of war, famine, drought, flooding and other catastrophic events. Of course, anyone not looking Canadian, having a religion that doesn’t include our designated hitter from heaven or speaks funny, is also lumped into the mix of the undeserving.

So how does one become a refugee, as I doubt it is ever by choice? The answer is appallingly simple. The creator of the vast majority of refugees is war and in most cases it is a war either led or assisted by the West.

The U.S., NATO (including Canada) or the UN (including Canada) are included as active participants and/or arms sellers to at least one side. And Russia and Israel often profit from being involved as well, whether it be through arms sales or geopolitical advantage.

Now it seems reasonable to conclude that those refugees, the ones some feel don’t deserve our help, were running away from our bombs or guns. Or if we weren’t directly engaged in the fight, we happily sold arms and equipment to those who were doing the killing for us.  Either way, we were complicit.

We targeted their country and the very places they, their family and friends once lived.  We destroyed their homes, killed some of their family and friends and bombed their supporting infrastructure.

We came to their country for any number of reasons but usually it was about oil or religion. However, these civilian survivors don’t actually have any oil for us to take. They don’t control the airports and seaports we covet as forward military bases.

And they no longer have any money to buy stuff from us. So horror of economic horrors, they aren’t even good enough to be consumers of our products.

Yet despite what has been done to them, some of us refuse to acknowledge our role and responsibility for the horror and death we’ve created.  We took everything away from them and now that they have nothing of value worth taking and no place to go, we want nothing to do with them.

We allow our governments to decide people need to be killed and countries need to be destroyed in the fight against terrorism and/or in the creation of corporate wealth.  In the process, we don’t acknowledge or pretend not to know that almost all refugees have been created by our actions.

Refugees are what our leaders call collateral damage but the reality is, they are frightened, poor and homeless people and in many cases we are to blame.

If one wants to cut back or even eliminate the foreign aid we provide for refugees, then first, would it not be more sensible and humane to stop making refugees? Angry posts about the outrageous practice of assisting those we’ve intentionally harmed do nothing to help the situation.

We spend freely in wars that create refugees yet I’ve never seen a post that demands we stop the killing and use the money saved to help the very Canadians some say they are so concerned about.

If it really is – as these posts claim – all about finding money for those Canadians in need, then what about a post showing a picture of exceptionally wealthy CEO’s from the oil industry along with a demand to end oil subsidies?

We could quickly redirect the billions saved to the homeless, pensioners and veterans these posts claim to support?  That money would solve those social issues almost overnight and eliminate forever, the need for such posts.

So, is it really about not spending money on foreign aid that helps refugees or is it more about not spending money on people who don’t look or act Canadian?

Bill McQuarrie is a former Kamloops entrepreneur who has retired to Vancouver Island where he spends a lot of time fly fishing. He can be contacted at billmcquarrie@gmail.com. He tweets @bafflegabbed.