“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?

“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

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