Canada's der HUNGERPLAN 2012: Oda to starving Chads : 'let'em drink $16 orange juice'

Michael Marshall

If  Bev "The Odious" Oda had been in that glass box in Jerusalem  fifty years ago, Hannah Arendt might have instead termed her famous book "THE BANALITY OF EGO".

Mrs Oda likes to present a grandmotherly figure at international aid conferences .

Her 'backgrounder' is always widely circulated to remind delegates from other nations that her family was interned during WWII for simply having her grandparents born in Japan, so that she knows the hardship of war and strife firsthand.

Forget the kindly old grandmother act.

In fact, Mrs Oda has turned her taxpayer-thickened backside on the starving poor of sub Saharan Africa.

Instead she has directed the greatest proportion of Canada's ever shrinking aid money to countries so well able to feed themselves that they have become tempting targets to the Harper government's drive to secure free trade agreements with middle income nations world wide.

Foreign aid from Canada is now less something we should gratefully do as a moral duty 'to be our siblings' keeper'  (as the mission statement of  THE COMMENSALIST reminds us) and more a grudging weapon of seduction in a ballet of free trade negotiations.

Worse, Canada has never given as big a percentage of its GDP to foreign aid as have many countries from Europe, who themselves experienced WWII hunger (and post WWII food aid from abroad).

Our excuse was that our economy wasn't in good shape, but that when it was, we'd up our share.

But in fact, while Prime Minister Harper boasts to the world that Canada's economy is the best in the world, at the same time he cuts, not ups, our foreign aid.

It is the struggling countries of Europe that have maintained or upped their foreign aid.

It burns the conscience of anyone with a heart, instead of a limitless expense account and a limitless ego, to see pictures of the hundreds of babies from Chad starving to death each day.

But Bev Oda, Canada's minister to the world's starving poor, instead morally chooses to Donald Trump her way through a conspicuously extravagant lifestyle ---- at the taxpayers' expense.

The "$16 glass of orange juice scandal" is just the latest
in a long list of unbelievable expense account rampages - and they are just the ones we have been lucky enough to find out about.

By way of contrast to Oda's behavior, David Suzuki's family was also interned,  also at the Canadian taxpayers' expense, during WWII .

 But he hasn't spent his life taking his revenge on Canada's taxpayers, but instead has spent his life doing good, here at home and abroad.

Why can't his fellow internee and fellow sansei, Bev Oda, take a page from David and learn to 'turn the other cheek' on what the Canadian taxpayers did to her family , 70 years ago ?

Instead of kicking and slapping her way through the Canadian Treasury, like some latter day Kamloops Kid .....