June 1, 2009

At the going rate, the bail-out of General Motors will cost Canadians about 1.4 million dollars for every GM job.

Currently, That price does not include power steering.

This is The Current.

Debating Aid

The song, Do they know it's Christmas debuted in 1984 ... the year the world mobilized to confront a famine in Ethiopia. It made international aid a top of mind issue in a way it has rarely been. The scale of the response was driven by stark images of starving children ... and the media-spectacle of pop stars such as Bob Geldof who insisted we all had to do something.

But 25 years later, Ethiopia is still one of the world's poorest countries where millions face chronic food shortages. And across Africa, poverty is a defining feature of daily life, despite billions of dollars in international aid. Dambisa Moyo and Stephen Lewis have each dedicated much of their lives to trying to change that. But they've come to very different conclusions about how to do it.

Dambisa Moyo is a British-based economist who is originally from Zambia. She has worked with Goldman Sachs and the World Bank and she's the author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How there Is a Better Way for Africa. Stephen Lewis was the United Nations Secretary General's Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa. He's the co-founder of The Stephen Lewis Foundation and a professor in Global Health at McMaster University.

This evening, they'll be be participating in a public debate on the issue: "Be It Resolved: Foreign Aid Does More Harm Than Good." It's part of a series called The Munk Debates. Dambisa Moyo and Stephen Lewis were both in Toronto.

Support Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries

Tiananmen Anniversary - Wong

We started this segment with a report from Tom Kennedy on June 4th, 1989.

Twenty years ago this week, a rising wave of pro-democracy demonstrations ended with a massacre. Shortly after midnight on June 4th, 1989, tanks rolled in to Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Chinese soldiers began firing into the crowd. And the square became the site of bloody carnage. By some estimates, as many as 3,000 people were killed, although the Chinese Government still disputes that number as well as reports of the number of people arrested and imprisoned in the weeks and months that followed.

Jan Wong watched those events unfold. At the time, she was the Globe and Mail's Beijing Bureau Chief. She's the author of Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found and she was in Toronto.

Tiananmen Anniversary - Action Plan

Twenty years after the killings in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Government is still the focus of a great deal of international criticism over its human rights record.

In April, the Chinese cabinet unveiled a lengthy document meant to address those criticisms. It's what Chinese leaders call an action plan to better protect the political, economic, social and cultural rights of Chinese citizens ... ostensibly the first of its kind in China's history.

According to the offficial line, the plan: "Signals that the human-rights cause has become a major theme of China's national development and will promote the concept of respecting and safeguarding human rights at various levels of government and the whole of society at large."

Wenran Jiang thinks that's a step in the right direction. He's a professor of political science and the Research Chair at the China Institute at the University of Alberta. He was in Edmonton.

Tinanmen Anniversary - Action Plan Critic

Many human rights organizations are skeptical about how much of a difference China's Human Rights Action Plan will actually make. Sophie Richardson is the Asia Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch and she was in Washington.

Air France - Missing Plane

An Air France plane carrying 228 people from Brazil to France has gone missing over the Atlantic. Charles de Gaulle airport says it lost contact with the Airbus 330 flying from Rio de Janeiro overnight. Brazil's air force has started to seach for the missing plane. to give us a sense of what may have happened to this plane, we were joined by David Gleave. He is with Aviation Safety Investigations and we reached him in Gatwick, England.

Music Bridge

Artist: Chris Velan
Cut: CD10 "What We Do"
CD: "Twitter, Buzz, Howl"
Label: Maple Music
Spine #: MM1101

Parental Alienation

Rhonda Pisarello was eight years old when her parents divorced. Her sisters were seven and one. Rhonda's father was awarded custody of the three girls. And her mother was granted the right to see them a few days each week. A year after the divorce, Rhonda's father remarried. Rhonda is an adult now and she picked up the story from there. We aired a clip.

Rhonda's story has all the hallmarks of what we now call Parental Alienation. The number of court cases that involve Parental Alienation is getting more attention these days but it is not new to our court system.

Nick Bala has just completed the first study of how Canadian courts and judges have handled Parental Alienation over the last 20 years. He's a professor in the Faculty of Law at Queen's University and he was in Kingston, Ontario.