do canadians support foreign aid?

it's an empirical question, granted.

but, i think that the answer to the question relies on the premises underlying it. broadly speaking, i think the assumption underlying the idea of foreign aid is that canada is a wealthy country, and that it should share it's surplus of wealth with everybody else. whether canadians support foreign aid or not is going to largely depend on whether they think that this assumption is true or not.

see, this is also an empirical question, and what i see around me casts a lot of doubt on it. the reality is that our indigenous people are as impoverished as anybody else in the world. we have a very serious and rapidly growing homeless problem in our cities, both large and small. people are literally dying on the streets - from addiction, from exposure, from violence.

what i don't think canadians agree with is this kind of dogmatic, neo-liberal view that people born into oecd countries had their chance and if they fail then it's their own fault, so public funds should be extended to people that don't have the same opportunities. that is an elitist position that is not going to get much traction with many regular people, at all - primarily because we can mostly see through the premise. you'd have to be pretty sheltered to grow up in an advanced capitalist society, live through the coercive effects of market tyranny and class dominance and somehow conclude that the people that end up on the bottom somehow deserve it. you will no doubt find these kinds of people, but they're called nazis and are pretty rare outside of the upper echelons of power. capitalism produces a mass underclass; it's not some accident, it's by design. escaping that is a consequence of birthright and dumb luck.

what i think is relatively obvious is that any politician seeking to gain broader popular appeal by sending money out of the country is living in a kind of delusional bubble; it shouldn't be hard to understand why canadians are going to want to spend canadian tax dollars in canada, at least until we can solve the myriad of social problems in front of us.