Andrew Scheer's claim about foreign aid deemed false
Andrew Scheer's claim about foreign aid deemed false
Official figures don't support idea that $2.2 billion a year is going to rich or undeserving nations
Jonathon Gatehouse - CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5305045?__twitter_impression=true
"SNIP.....
The claim: "The Trudeau government today sends $2.2 billion of so-called foreign aid to middle- and upper-income countries...Worse still, some of that money is shoveled to repressive regimes that are adversarial, if not outright hostile, to Canadian interests and values."
-- Conservative leader Andrew Scheer announcing his proposal to slash 25 per cent of Canada's foreign aid budget and redistribute the money to taxpayers at home.
The facts: Ottawa spent a total of $6.098 billion on "international assistance" in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2018, according to the latest statistical report from Global Affairs Canada.
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It's not clear how the Tories arrived at their $2.2 billion figure. The party has said that they are defining "middle- and upper-income countries" as those with a score of 0.6 and above on the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI). But that's not a benchmark that any other country or international body uses to determine which nations need assistance. And it seems like a rather arbitrary point within the HDI itself — about three-quarters of the way down the list of "medium human development countries."
......SNIP"