0.7%

The situation in Burmyanmar (I'm not even going to venture into the treacherous waters of what to call it) got me thinking about foreign aid. We're supposed to give 0.7% of our GDP to foreign aid, but the last I heard we don't give the full amount. I couldn't google up any information that's more recent than 2005, so I decided to do some research of my own.

According to Statistics Canada, our GDP is currently $1,558,844,000,000 (i.e. approx. $1.5 trillion, if you don't feel like counding digits).

I couldn't seem to google up information on how much we're currently spending on foreign aid. However, the 2008 Budget says that they plan to bring Canada's total international aid budget up to $5 billion in 2010-11. (If you can find information on our current foreign aid budget for 2008, please do post it.)

So let's work with those numbers. Our economy's collapsing, our dollar is high, maybe foreign aid of $5 billion over a GDP of $1.5 trillion isn't that far-fetched. So if you run the numbers, you'll find that $5 billion is 0.32% of Canada's GDP, leaving us 0.38% short.

Let's play with that 0.38%. Go to Google and type in 0.38% of $$$$$, replacing $$$$$ with your annual salary. Check out the resulting amount.

It's not that much, is it? I mean, it's not nothing. Buying shoes that cost that much would be a splurge, but it would certainly be a good price for Perfect Shoes (i.e. comfy, attractive, timeless, something you can wear every day then get reheeled and wear again next year). It would be too much to spend on a friend's birthday present, but if your best friend lost their wallet the Friday before a long weekend, you certainly wouldn't hestitate to press that amount of cash into their palm, waving away their protests, to tide them over until they can get down to the bank on Tuesday. If that were the price of tickets to something that makes you squee like a fangirl at the prospect of getting tickets for it, you wouldn't think twice before going to Ticketmaster the minute the sale opened and frantically pressing refresh. If something important - house, car, computer, dog - had some kind of emergency and you needed to throw money at it to fix it, you'd breathe a sigh of relief if the total bill came out to only 0.38% of your annual salary.

It really surprised me that our aid shortfall was such a relatively small amount. When you look at it on personal terms, it's an amount that if you had to pay it out unexpectedly and in one lump sum, you might feel it in your budget for a month, but after that you wouldn't even notice.

So I went to the Red Cross website and donated that amount to Burmyanmar. Maybe if our country won't step up, we can each make up our individual share of the shortfall.