"World Needs More Canada" hollered the lead opinion in last Monday's Globe and Mail. The fallacy of this claim was confirmed to me a minute later when I flipped to the business section where the main headline read, "Canada resists British plan to revalue IMF [International Monetary Fund] Gold Reserves."

According to the Globe article, Canada successfully blocked a plan to help forgive the debt of heavily indebted poor countries by revaluing 103 million ounces of IMF gold reserves. Currently the IMF appraises most of its gold at U.S. $40 an ounce while gold is trading at ten times that price on the world market. This simple reevaluation could increase the IMF's balance sheets by tens of billions of dollars and would undercut the argument that debt forgiveness could harm the institution.

 
"World Needs More Canada" hollered the lead opinion in last Monday's Globe and Mail. The fallacy of this claim was confirmed to me a minute later when I flipped to the business section where the main headline read, "Canada resists British plan to revalue IMF [International Monetary Fund] Gold Reserves."

According to the Globe article Canada successfully blocked a plan to help forgive the debt of heavily indebted poor countries by revaluing 103 million ounces of IMF gold reserves. Currently the IMF appraises most of its gold at U.S. $40 an ounce while gold is trading at ten times that price on the world market. This simple reevaluation could increase the IMF's balance sheets by tens of billions of dollars and would undercut the argument that debt forgiveness could harm the institution.

Debt forgiveness would put an end to governments- mostly in Africa - spending more on servicing their debt than they do on the health, sanitation and education of their impoverished citizenry. And debt relief has been successful. The Guardian weekly reports that, "in Benin, 43 percent of relief granted under the highly indebted poor country initiative went to education in 2002, allowing for hiring teachers in rural areas, while 54 percent went to health for rural clinics, HIV/AIDS and anti-malarial programs, improving access to safe water and immunisation." (October 8 2004)

Yet Canada refuses to support the British gold proposal because, according to the Globe article, "anything causing more gold to go on the market [IMF selling some reserves at market price] would depress prices and hurt the profitability of [Canadian] gold mining companies." Our government has chosen a handful of gold companies over thousands of lives. Shame on them.

Canada's international shame doesn't end there though. Wherever I look our media's claim that "the world needs more Canada" rings hollow. Take the catastrophe in Haiti that has left 3000 people dead from heavy rains. The full force of the hurricane never even hit Gonaives.

Eight months ago, however, a Canadian invasion did hit that desperately poor nation. And last February when Canada helped oust President Jean Bertrand Aristide the upheaval also destroyed the country's Biwo Pwoteksyon Civil or Civil Protection Office, the government department that warns of incoming disasters and co-ordinates relief.

In addition, the three hundred Canadian troops who spent six months in Haiti failed to disarm Gonaives' gangs. Heavily armed Canadian, French and American troops simply allowed those who helped overthrow Aristide - the country's elected president and still the most popular politician in the country - to keep control over the city. Now, as aid workers try to help the area's 200 000 homeless victims, the anti-Aristide thugs are undermining their efforts.

The roots of Haiti's tragedy go deeper than the February upheaval. Less than 1.5 percent of the country is now covered in forest, down from 20 percent a half-century ago. Yet barren hills exacerbate droughts and floods.

Thirty years of IMF inspired agricultural reforms have exacerbated the problem. The IMF has promoted the expansion of cash crops, which entail cutting down trees. Also selling wood to make charcoal -- the source of 71 per cent of national fuel consumption -- is one of the few ways indigent Haitians can make a living. Poverty is so acute that people have little choice but to destroy their own long-term livelihood (the soil to grow foodstuff) to eat today. So the country's extreme poverty, which is in large part a symptom of continuous foreign interventions and outside economic domination, helps explain the floods' awful death toll.

Venezuela is another political hotspot that has not been helped by Canada of late. Canada was one of the last countries in the Americas to recognize the overwhelming referendum victory this past August of reformist president Hugo Chavez. For that matter two years ago Canada, unlike most Latin American countries, failed to immediately denounce the short-lived April 2002 coup. Only after it became clear that the Venezuelan people, parts of the Army and much of the region wouldn't accept an interruption of constitutional order, did our government declare its support for Venezuelan democracy.

And how about the US led missile defense (sic) system? Certainly no sane person (defined here as people who believe that empires should be a relic of a bygone era) supports militarizing space for offensive purposes. Yet that is exactly what our government is supporting with little concern for the inevitable arms race this will create. Does the world need an even more dominant US military or China and Russia procuring new weapons systems?

Finally there is Iraq. While Canada was not part of the "coalition of the willing" it has had a (quiet) hand in the mess that our southern neighbors have created. Canadian forces provided logistical support for the American-led invasion. We sent soldiers to Afghanistan in an attempt to placate the Bush administration by relieving U.S. soldiers there.

More recently, Montreal-based SNC Technologies Inc. (SNC TEC) joined a multinational consortium of ammunition producers that will provide occupation forces with 300 to 500 million bullets per year for the next 5 years. To kill the "terrorists," "insurgents" and "freedom fighters" as well as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, according to one outdated account, you need a lot of bullets. Eric Hugel, a defence industry analyst at Sephens Inc explained the situation to the Financial Times, "We're using so much ammunition in Iraq there isn't enough [US manufacturing] capacity around." "They have to go internationally."

Canadian foreign policy needs to shift from upholding the interests of Canadian corporations and our southern neighbors towards empowering the world's poor. Without this fundamental change in foreign policy the world will need less not "more Canada".