When she's not slinging cocktails as Ottawa's favorite bartender to MPs of all parties, parliamentary staff and the odd thirsty journalist, Julie McCarthy fundraises for a small African village.
In the last four years, she's raised $8,000 from an annual golf tournament and auction, enough to pipe clean water to 110 crowded houses in an dusty corner of rural Kenya.
She exemplifies what Prime Minister Stephen Harper means when he insists a little money can deliver a big improvement to the wretched lives of women and children in Africa.
With 500,000 women dying in pregnancy and nine million children perishing before their fifth birthday, Mr. Harper has vowed to lead a unified effort by G8 countries to deliver simple solutions, such as clean water, to the slow the easily-preventable carnage.
The obvious temptation is to ooze cynicism, viewing Mr. Harper's World Economic Forum speech on Thursday as a channel-changing epiphany for a prime minister suddenly sagging in the polls.
It has all the elements of a desperate makeover, the policy equivalent of his blue sweater vest in the 2006 campaign or his Beatles singsong routine last fall.
After all, to fend off opposition attacks of being a hard-nosed control freak, there's nothing so motherhood as helping the downtrodden in Africa or as apple pie as vowing to end the suffering for women and kids.
So Mr. Harper clearly has to back up his priority with more than words if he's to be taken seriously. That means plenty of bucks to backfill what is, so far, empty rhetoric.
Perhaps the missing detail is understandable. These are early days in Mr. Harper's transformation from cold-hearted parliamentary tactician to global humanitarian giant.
It's been a very sudden conversion for a prime minister who just celebrated four years in power this week with nary an earlier mention of this plight as a political crusade.
He did not raise humanitarian causes in Africa during his last campaign or in the Throne Speech. His government has, in fact, turned away from the continent as a foreign aid destination, lopping seven of its 14 countries off his government's priority list, winding down its African fund in 2008 and closing an embassy in destitute Malawi.
Success will, the prime minister noted, require a ‘unity of purpose' by the developed nations, so it was curious that he apparently failed to flag his plan to G8 partners in advance.
Barack Obama certainly appeared in the dark before his State of the Union address on Wednesday. The U.S. president vowed action on every conceivable file except restarting a global crusade against stricken women and children. In fact, President Obama left the distinct impression that exporting cash around the globe is at or near the bottom of his agenda.
The other six G8 leaders have not exactly leapt to the cause with enthusiasm, although delegates did give Mr. Harper's challenge the loudest applause during an address that was, it must be said, nicely crafted and solidly delivered.
More confusing is why this won't be an agenda item better suited to the larger and more influential G20 group of nations, which includes countries experienced at channeling aid for maximum benefit.
Earlier Canadian precedents are not encouraging for this initiative. The last Canadian-hosted G8 in Alberta's Kananaskis saw then-prime minister Jean Chretien promoting African assistance as his legacy project. He sought $64 billion from the summit's partners and pledged Canada to a $6-billion contribution, a plan that fell far short of delivery.
This prime minister's ambitious plan is complicated by factors that didn't exist when Mr. Chretien was in power. Canada has just declared devastated Haiti a 10-year assistance priority and Mr. Harper plans to unleash a massive developmental aid effort in Afghanistan after our troops pull out of combat duty next year. All that effort is played to the soundtrack of a deficit elimination project that will sheer billions of government spending off the bottom line.
U2 singer Bono famously declared ‘the world needs more Canada' before he soured on former prime minister Paul Martin's potential as a world leader in humanitarian aid.
Unless Mr. Harper wants that song to remain the same, Africa need more bucks. In the current wobbily economic environment, that means it needs a political miracle.
National Post
