Making His Case
No sooner does Prime Minister Stephen Harper present an important new initiative to be brought forward at the G8 meeting to focus on improving maternal and infant health prospects world-wide, with an obvious focus on undeveloped countries where maternal and infant death rates continue to soar, than does the leader of the opposition step forward to slyly warn voters of suspected duplicity in the Conservatives' hidden agenda.
They've been hiding that agenda fairly successfully throughout their four-year grasp on the government. Bringing forward instead a whole host of agenda items that badly needed focus and treatment. And, for the most part, with niggling little lapses, have done fairly well for Canada.
For Michael Ignatieff it isn't enough to try to promote the need for governments to get serious about the imperative to focus assistance where it's most needed, and to pledge time, attention and treasury to that very particular issue. Every minute, daily, a woman dies giving birth; 530,000 pregnant women die needless deaths annually around the globe.
The causes are those once common anywhere and long since solved in developed countries. For very little cost, deaths caused by preventable or treatable causes such as sepsis, haemorrhage, eclampsia, obstructed labour - or as a by-product of a septic abortion, can be successfully side-lined by support from wealthy countries, to ameliorate the carnage.
The major killers in those same countries among children are equally well-known and equally needful to defeat. Gastroenteritis kills 2.2 million people each year, pneumonia 2.1 million; malaria 2 million and HIV/AIDS, two million.
Governments, international aid organizations and NGOs need to co-ordinate efforts toward practical application of a meaningful solution to these dreadful losses of human life. Where in poor countries children under a year have an 80% chance of dying in childhood and those under five have a 50% chance to survive ... when death takes their mothers from any cause.
Education of women, access to clean, potable water, teaching reliable methods of simple hygiene would go a long way helping indigent women to understand that they can help themselves with a little thoughtful help from the outside world. This is the message that should be coming out of Canada, directed toward its wealthy industrial partners. Start with the women, and their children, and it is possible to help a country move into a more advanced, hopeful arena of existence.
That's clearly not enough for Michael Ignatieff. He is absorbed in the inspirational task of demonstrating that whatever sound minds logically conceive as potential answers to persistent problems, they can be better solved with his methodology which appears, on the evidence of his self-righteous rhetoric to revolve basically around the absolute need to provide for access to abortion, as a fail-safe contraceptive technique.
So the message is that we need to temper the values-neutral initiatives to assist women and children through the delivery of mosquitoe netting, pharmaceuticals, potable water, clinics and education with the insistence in traditions-ridden societies that abortions be provided on demand. The implication that Canada has embarked on a Bush-style funding initiative denying assistance to recipient countries that allow abortion speaks of Mr.Ignatieff's agenda.
Besmirch the government's initiative by presumptively linking Republican Bush with Conservative Harper, and innuendo rules the day. The truth is Mr. Ignatieff can do nothing to twist the clear and unequivocal statement of the Prime Minister in vowing to launch "a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world's poorest regions" with "clean water, inoculations and better nutrition, as well as the training of health workers to care for women and deliver babies".
Get it? It's concise and practical and contains no hint whatever of any hidden message to be construed as Mr. Ignatieff prefers. Mr. Ignatieff should be prepared to assist, through Liberal support of this important vision, not to claim his superior view of what receiving countries should be accepting to meet his priorities. This man is a slow learner.
They've been hiding that agenda fairly successfully throughout their four-year grasp on the government. Bringing forward instead a whole host of agenda items that badly needed focus and treatment. And, for the most part, with niggling little lapses, have done fairly well for Canada.
For Michael Ignatieff it isn't enough to try to promote the need for governments to get serious about the imperative to focus assistance where it's most needed, and to pledge time, attention and treasury to that very particular issue. Every minute, daily, a woman dies giving birth; 530,000 pregnant women die needless deaths annually around the globe.
The causes are those once common anywhere and long since solved in developed countries. For very little cost, deaths caused by preventable or treatable causes such as sepsis, haemorrhage, eclampsia, obstructed labour - or as a by-product of a septic abortion, can be successfully side-lined by support from wealthy countries, to ameliorate the carnage.
The major killers in those same countries among children are equally well-known and equally needful to defeat. Gastroenteritis kills 2.2 million people each year, pneumonia 2.1 million; malaria 2 million and HIV/AIDS, two million.
Governments, international aid organizations and NGOs need to co-ordinate efforts toward practical application of a meaningful solution to these dreadful losses of human life. Where in poor countries children under a year have an 80% chance of dying in childhood and those under five have a 50% chance to survive ... when death takes their mothers from any cause.
Education of women, access to clean, potable water, teaching reliable methods of simple hygiene would go a long way helping indigent women to understand that they can help themselves with a little thoughtful help from the outside world. This is the message that should be coming out of Canada, directed toward its wealthy industrial partners. Start with the women, and their children, and it is possible to help a country move into a more advanced, hopeful arena of existence.
That's clearly not enough for Michael Ignatieff. He is absorbed in the inspirational task of demonstrating that whatever sound minds logically conceive as potential answers to persistent problems, they can be better solved with his methodology which appears, on the evidence of his self-righteous rhetoric to revolve basically around the absolute need to provide for access to abortion, as a fail-safe contraceptive technique.
So the message is that we need to temper the values-neutral initiatives to assist women and children through the delivery of mosquitoe netting, pharmaceuticals, potable water, clinics and education with the insistence in traditions-ridden societies that abortions be provided on demand. The implication that Canada has embarked on a Bush-style funding initiative denying assistance to recipient countries that allow abortion speaks of Mr.Ignatieff's agenda.
Besmirch the government's initiative by presumptively linking Republican Bush with Conservative Harper, and innuendo rules the day. The truth is Mr. Ignatieff can do nothing to twist the clear and unequivocal statement of the Prime Minister in vowing to launch "a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world's poorest regions" with "clean water, inoculations and better nutrition, as well as the training of health workers to care for women and deliver babies".
Get it? It's concise and practical and contains no hint whatever of any hidden message to be construed as Mr. Ignatieff prefers. Mr. Ignatieff should be prepared to assist, through Liberal support of this important vision, not to claim his superior view of what receiving countries should be accepting to meet his priorities. This man is a slow learner.
Labels: Government of Canada, Health, Human Relations
posted by Pieface | 6:39 PM
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