Persistent Tragedy

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, visiting Haiti for a two-day trip to have a look at what Canada's 2,000-troop-and-medics-dispatch is up to, travelled there inside a -17 transport aircraft, one of four purchased by the Government of Canada for $1.8-billion. This is Canada thinking big, thinking of exerting its assertive muscle during times of international intimidation and stressors in the world at large.

Eschewing former Canadian administrations' move toward the kindly sounding 'soft power' of taking the world stage as a peace-enabler, the prime minister explained for any who couldn't get the message of having the right equipment to deploy for the right reasons at the right time: "There was a time when that kind of heavy-lift aircraft didn't fit Canada's soft-power policies. "But our government bought them for the hard-power requirements of today's world."

Unspoken but understood is that today's world includes Canada's commitment in Afghanistan where more aggressive military equipment was required to keep our own troops safe from the resurgent Talibans' urgent determination to wipe them off the map of the country. "Now we're using them for relief work. So what is the moral of the story? "To do soft power, you need hard power, you need a full range of capabilities."

That heavy-lift C-17 transport that took Mr. Harper to Haiti also carried water filters, medical and and other desperately needed supplies. For the simple truth of the tragedy is that it is ongoing. Over a million Haitians remain homeless in the wake of that devastating earthquake. They live in squalid camps wherever they happen to be, in the ruins of their country.

The United Nations informs that 272,000 Haitians of the much larger figure of homeless has been provided with materials to afford them shelter against the rainy season. Tarpaulins are what most can anticipate at best, for the near future. The rainy season will accelerate the opportunities for disease transmission when the ground becomes saturated and rivers of raw human feces will run through the camps and into tents.

The scale of the devastation that hit Haiti is still being discussed and measured, and an assessment resulting from a study undertaken by the Inter-American Development Bank states that the earthquake aftermath in Haiti outdistances the destructiveness of the 2004 Asian tsunami that hit Indonesia, and the cyclone that struck Myanmar in 2008.

The report explains that Haiti's earthquake "...caused five times more deaths per million inhabitants than the second-ranking natural killer, the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua". As such, it claims that the cost of reconstructing homes, schools, streets and civil infrastructure in Haiti will come in at around $14-billion.

The number of people killed in the quake, according to Haitian officials was in excess of 217,000, equating to 2.4% of the population of nine million. The country has been slow to pull itself into some semblance of order. A full month after the earthquake struck dead bodies are still being piled into mass graves outside Port-au-Prince.

This natural disaster, hitting the most vulnerable, poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has resulted in crowning the country as the site of the most destructive natural disaster in modern history.