And why is Canada following suit with the US here?
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
202 points (97.6% liked)
Not The Onion
20723 readers
1142 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Looks like aids is going to have a big come back.
Not looking forward to that.
The aid was for HIV meds. They already had HIV.
We are getting squeezed by the US, we cannot afford $2.7B in debt spending for aid.
You know hiv turns into aids right ?
So you have nothing useful to add.
Just for your information, a person can be HIV positive under meds and never have AIDS.
But how about we get to the point of a country in pretty severe debt spending spending $2.7B outside the country. Where do you think that money comes from?
So we spent $2.7B in this aid, but yet, in Canada, we spend less than half that on all research for all diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
I'm not saying keep throwing money at a foreign problem. But that foreign problem will directly lead to the spread of hiv and aids to your country.
Also the HIV is more likely to turn into aids without the drugs.
Here is a big part of the problem that's solvable.
The pharmaceutical companies are bleeding your country dry on the prices they charge for these drugs.
You all could just make them yourself. And essentially take proprietary ownership of the drug.
Why not?
The drug companies have been compensated beyond what they should have been.
These drugs were developed with tax payers money.
The people/state should own drug formulas.
Companies should not be able to withhold health care in this way. They literally are choosing profit over lives.
Take the formula. Make your own drugs.
In the U.S we have some law that lets the government do this. Though it's not been used appropriately. It should be used all the time for drugs like insulin and cancer drugs.
Take that 2billion and invest in infrastructure to produce these drugs yourself and for your own people.
Uh oh. Now they don't have the funding to keep AIDS out of the cinnamon.
Eh, in my view this isn't really a huge surprise, nor is it all that out of line with what was put forward at Davos, contrary to what the article seems to imply.
One of the key themes of the Davos speech is that the international rules based order is dead, and by extension the international organisations that rely on that rules based order are likely due to wither and die. Another key theme was that trade deals had to be practical and pragmatic, limited in scope (especially regarding 'values' differences between nations), and a win-win to each trading partner. Fewer grand "We are in alignment culturally, and have opened free trade between our nations, strengthening our shared bond through alignment with the trading rules setup by the WTO", and more "We got some lumber for sale, who wants to trade us some computer chips? We don't care how you made em, that's your business".
A chunk of Canada's aid funding was done via proxy in USAID, which is now dead, and (from what I recall at least), there were potentially funds intended for foreign aid that got 'lost' as part of the USAID dramatic shutdown -- so invested aid dollars lost due to the US abandoning the area. Canada itself doesn't have the same funding/aid network available, which means any aid given is going to come at a higher 'cost', even at the outset.
But more than that, those aid programs are fundamentally not in alignment with those two key themes from Davos. Foreign aid programs rely typically on international organisations (who historically relied heavily on an international rules based order to operate), and the money invested doesn't typically have a clear "this for that" type of exchange. There're reasons to continue certain foreign aid initiatives -- such as foreign food aid, where Canada pays its own farmers to over-produce certain agricultural products for foreign relief efforts, but the broader purpose is to ensure that Canada maintains a sufficient agriculture sector as part of disaster preparedness for Canadians.
Something like funding HIV prevention in a foreign country is a much more difficult one to peg the direct benefit to Canada. People can see/touch and consume cinnamon.
I think there are a number of tangible benefits, from public health to promoting Canada's image and creating good will with trading partners. It's also good for Canadian morale, where we can see ourselves as producing positive change in the world.
That said, we do need to invest in ourselves and create more positive change within our own country too, and maybe prioritize it more. But just because the US abandons soft power and diplomacy doesn't mean we should too.
Trade with African countries is a tiny fraction of Canada's overall trade. "Good will" is only beneficial if it delivers some sort of result for the spend -- even if that benefit is not immediately realised, not entirely reciprocal, or clear at the time. That hasn't really materialised for Canada, even after decades of aid spending - trade remains at a fraction of what it could've been with African countries.
That goodwill is also something that was more generally beneficial in the old rules-based order -- being able to get others to side with you on UN Resolutions for example. That doesn't matter so much if the UN is dying out as a result of major powers exiting and the US defunding all its programs.
Soft power means a lot less with smaller, targeted trade initiatives and a deteriorated rules based order.
In terms of HIV etc, most likely Canada's aid on this front historically was tied to USAID / US Pharma companies. They're still contributing to a global africa-focused health fund. Neither of these approaches does what's preferred in terms of benefitting Canadians directly -- ie. spending money to bolster Canadian biotech capacity/capability, and having the excess go to those in need. Biotech's an area Carney should've been focusing on building up, especially with the US shying away from science -- even moreso, as biotech firms can quickly pivot to bioweapon firms should Canada be existentially threatened.
As for morale on this front, most Canadians won't care. Like if you go back a couple decades, Canada had boasted that we participated in every UN Peacekeeping mission as good global citizens. That went away under Harper I think, and few cared.
you just wrote a long shpiel about AI datacenter jobs none of us want in response to a topic about cuts to soft power and preventing the spread of an epidemic that killed millions in the 1980s
Ah, yea, my bad. I'll remove/edit it a chunk -- that was sorta a cross post as I'd figured you were responding to a more recent post about Canada's india deals. Wish lemmy provided more context sometimes in the reply snippets.