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http://www.thestar.com/
How Martin can stay `cool'
By JAMES TRAVERS
Paul Martin delights in telling a conveniently complimentary story about Bono, Ireland's conscience-rocker.
Bono, now as inextricably linked to this dirty old town as James Joyce and Guinness, once graded the former finance minister and future prime minister as "cool, " adding an expletive ubiquitous everywhere except in Toronto family newspapers. That priceless endorsement from U2's megastar was justifiably earned by Martin's efforts encouraging developed countries to forgive the crushing debts that contribute so generously to the core evil of poverty.
But this summer in this trendy euro-capital, Bono is much more likely to use the f-word in ways politicians would rather forget.
Frustrated by the failure to reduce the crippling problems of the world's poorest places, Bono is threatening to move from schmooze and photo-op to protest. "I am ready to march with activist friends to begin a campaign of civil disobedience," he told reporters covering this month's release of the catastrophically dismal U.N. Human Development Report. "We are about to get very noisy, we are about to bang a lot of dustbin lids."
There is much fuel for anger in the 367 pages of narrative and charts that relentlessly plot the widening gap between the haves and have-nots; between those fortunate enough to be born in the right place at the right time and those held captive by cruel circumstance. With statistics so familiar that they depress more effectively than they shock, it points out that we share a planet but live in different worlds.
More than 50 countries, many in Africa, are poorer and hungrier now than they were in 1990, a boom decade here and in most industrialized economies. At current rates of development, it will take until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, 2147 to halve extreme poverty and 20 years longer to meet U.N. child mortality targets.
Mercifully, all the news isn't bad. Some sub-Saharan nations, led by once gritty Ghana and civil war-torn Mozambique, have sharply reduced hunger and others are recording 3 per cent annual income growth. These are watershed achievements for countries with a paper-thin managerial class and no economic room for error. But they can't compensate for the shameful fact that 15,000 Africans die each day for lack of basic medicines.
Those deaths are so needless, the cost of saving lives so small that some who share Bono's growing dismay are promoting novel ways of pricking the world's complacency. Jeffrey Sachs, a U.N. report contributor, suggests putting faces to the statistics by publishing, as the New York Times did after Sept. 11, the pictures of victims forgotten by those who now have nearly everything and want more.
Bono's plan is equally pointed. Tired of waiting for grand summit promises to morph into cheques, he is promising a watershed shift from polite dialogue to rambunctious protest. Instead of sharing the halls of power with the pinstriped likes of the f-ing cool Martin, he says he will take Africa's plight into the streets.
Martin has his own remedies.
In a memorably detailed moment in the otherwise annoyingly anodyne Liberal leadership debates, Martin prescribed changes to Ottawa's approach to overseas development that might eventually make a difference. Instead of scattering petty cash around the world, Martin favours focusing on fewer countries and on key programs that reflect both need and Canadian values ? health, education and competent governance.
That sounds encouraging but it will require more money and more political will than Martin found as finance minister. Until Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien developed a sudden interest in Africa before Canada hosted the G-8 countries at the Kananaskis summit, this administration's foreign aid record was simply, inexcusably, shameful.
If Martin is to abandon a status quo he says is unacceptable, if he hopes to keep his "cool" status, he will have to do much, much more than talk a lot and spend little. In tougher economic times than he enjoyed as finance minister, he will have to convince self-absorbed Canadians that it is both right and smart to stuff more loonies into the aid envelope than ever before.
Even that won't be nearly enough. He will have to arm-twist the bureaucracy until it gives increasingly entrepreneurial non-governmental agencies the autonomy they need to deliver aid that works to where it is needed. And then, like Bono, he will have to take to Washington's mean streets.
Banging a few dustbin lids of his own, Martin must persuade the Bush administration that all its easy talk about democracy, free markets and security is just claptrap if it idles while poverty, the AIDS pandemic and civil strife grimly reap the most vulnerable.
Anything less just won't be cool.
Thanks to Jessica!
How Martin can stay `cool'
By JAMES TRAVERS
Paul Martin delights in telling a conveniently complimentary story about Bono, Ireland's conscience-rocker.
Bono, now as inextricably linked to this dirty old town as James Joyce and Guinness, once graded the former finance minister and future prime minister as "cool, " adding an expletive ubiquitous everywhere except in Toronto family newspapers. That priceless endorsement from U2's megastar was justifiably earned by Martin's efforts encouraging developed countries to forgive the crushing debts that contribute so generously to the core evil of poverty.
But this summer in this trendy euro-capital, Bono is much more likely to use the f-word in ways politicians would rather forget.
Frustrated by the failure to reduce the crippling problems of the world's poorest places, Bono is threatening to move from schmooze and photo-op to protest. "I am ready to march with activist friends to begin a campaign of civil disobedience," he told reporters covering this month's release of the catastrophically dismal U.N. Human Development Report. "We are about to get very noisy, we are about to bang a lot of dustbin lids."
There is much fuel for anger in the 367 pages of narrative and charts that relentlessly plot the widening gap between the haves and have-nots; between those fortunate enough to be born in the right place at the right time and those held captive by cruel circumstance. With statistics so familiar that they depress more effectively than they shock, it points out that we share a planet but live in different worlds.
More than 50 countries, many in Africa, are poorer and hungrier now than they were in 1990, a boom decade here and in most industrialized economies. At current rates of development, it will take until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, 2147 to halve extreme poverty and 20 years longer to meet U.N. child mortality targets.
Mercifully, all the news isn't bad. Some sub-Saharan nations, led by once gritty Ghana and civil war-torn Mozambique, have sharply reduced hunger and others are recording 3 per cent annual income growth. These are watershed achievements for countries with a paper-thin managerial class and no economic room for error. But they can't compensate for the shameful fact that 15,000 Africans die each day for lack of basic medicines.
Those deaths are so needless, the cost of saving lives so small that some who share Bono's growing dismay are promoting novel ways of pricking the world's complacency. Jeffrey Sachs, a U.N. report contributor, suggests putting faces to the statistics by publishing, as the New York Times did after Sept. 11, the pictures of victims forgotten by those who now have nearly everything and want more.
Bono's plan is equally pointed. Tired of waiting for grand summit promises to morph into cheques, he is promising a watershed shift from polite dialogue to rambunctious protest. Instead of sharing the halls of power with the pinstriped likes of the f-ing cool Martin, he says he will take Africa's plight into the streets.
Martin has his own remedies.
In a memorably detailed moment in the otherwise annoyingly anodyne Liberal leadership debates, Martin prescribed changes to Ottawa's approach to overseas development that might eventually make a difference. Instead of scattering petty cash around the world, Martin favours focusing on fewer countries and on key programs that reflect both need and Canadian values ? health, education and competent governance.
That sounds encouraging but it will require more money and more political will than Martin found as finance minister. Until Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien developed a sudden interest in Africa before Canada hosted the G-8 countries at the Kananaskis summit, this administration's foreign aid record was simply, inexcusably, shameful.
If Martin is to abandon a status quo he says is unacceptable, if he hopes to keep his "cool" status, he will have to do much, much more than talk a lot and spend little. In tougher economic times than he enjoyed as finance minister, he will have to convince self-absorbed Canadians that it is both right and smart to stuff more loonies into the aid envelope than ever before.
Even that won't be nearly enough. He will have to arm-twist the bureaucracy until it gives increasingly entrepreneurial non-governmental agencies the autonomy they need to deliver aid that works to where it is needed. And then, like Bono, he will have to take to Washington's mean streets.
Banging a few dustbin lids of his own, Martin must persuade the Bush administration that all its easy talk about democracy, free markets and security is just claptrap if it idles while poverty, the AIDS pandemic and civil strife grimly reap the most vulnerable.
Anything less just won't be cool.
Thanks to Jessica!
