You know, the photo-op’s great, but I’m sure the people would rather have the money. Photo: Corporal Pierre Thriault
Michael Petrou paints a fairly disturbing story of CIDA’s absolute incompetence in the face of human tragedy, today in Macleans Magazine.
As of the cutoff date, the 14 Canadian charities reporting donations to CIDA raised $154.4 million, of which $128.8 million is “potentially eligible” for the government’s fund matching mechanism. This is on CIDA’s website. What accounts for the $26 million difference is not. I asked the CIDA person I actually spoke to what “potentially eligible” means. She didn’t know.
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I asked how much of the money raised through the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund has been spent. CIDA’s response included a paragraph about where Canada has spent money that doesn’t come from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, before adding the line: “Funds from the Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund will be disbursed in the near future.”
In other words, they haven’t spent a penny.
According to recent figures, Canada’s $150 million aid represents the world’s second largest total of Haitian philanthropy after Norway. Shame it’s in the hands of bureaucrats who don’t seem to understand what the word “urgent” means.
Is the money that accrues to the fund in the form of interest going to relief or does it go to supporting CIDA?
God, that’s a good question Joe. I wish I knew the answer to that. Maybe I’ll see if CIDA will answer my email query.
Here’s what I got so far:
CIDA’s track record isn’t great.
“Friday, December 30, 2005
Tip-offs passed to canadafreepress.com by Sri Lankan journalists during the past year were right on target: The promised money from Canada for victims of the December 26 tsunami never came.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, who made a January 3, 2005 photo-op of tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka, guaranteed $425-million for tsunami relief that has yet to arrive.
Forty million dollars of the $425-million pledged by Martin was donated by average Canadians.”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover123005.htm
Looking through CIDA’s website, it looks like money was spent from 2006 through 2009 on various projects in Sri Lanka. Your guess is as good as mine as to what happened to it.
I was interested to learn that some of the CIDA money went to making multiple documentaries. Some examples:
Film: “L’après-tsunami au Sri Lanka” $46,029
Film: “Children of the Tsunami” $70,000
Film: “Just Another Wave: Building Community Resilience…” $69,000
Films: “World Class: Year of Tsunami” $72,500
Film: “Canada’s Youth Respond to Tragedy” $38,900
I’m not trying to be facetious here, but we’ve all seen pix of military planes loaded with relief “stuff” going to Haiti. Who pays for all that ? Surely not the military, so would some of the accounting not end up coming through CIDA ?
It’s a good question. We’ll see what kind of response I get from CIDA.
I received a short email from CIDA:
“Funds raised by charities and NGOs stayed with these organizations, which use them for their respective projects in Haiti. The Government’s Haiti Earthquake Matching fund is funded mainly from a special reserve the Government maintains for such disasters, called the Crisis Pool, with additional funding from CIDA contingency budgets reserved for emergency humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”
So I guess the question then becomes, does CIDA sit on that special reserve fund, and is it kept in a bank until such time that it’s finally disbursed?