NGOs — Why Should We, The Taxpayers, Fund Them?

Ezra Levant has already published a few comments on KAIROS funding scandal. So you can see for yourself what kind of organization KAIROS is, what kind of people and organizations they proudly support and how they try to hide it now, pretending they never did. Obviously, I'm glad that the Federal government has finally stopped giving them money.

But there's a bigger question here: why should the government provide taxpayers' funds to non-government organizations? Since when did it become norm for a (supposedly) non-government organization to receive some 35%-40% of its funds from the government? And how come it's commonly believed that the government no longer has the right to cancel those subsidies?

Let's take another look at what this so called "Christian charity" looks like:

If you remain unpersuaded of the case to let KAIROS's members support it, rather than taxpayers, perhaps I can draw your attention to their last annual report. Here are some of the things they spend your money on:

Fundraising and overhead: $800K

"Energy justice": $500K

"Public engagement": $400K

That's all pure politics -- and it just happens to equal the amount of dough they're demanding from the government. By contrast, "anti-poverty grants" only account for $148K, or just 3.7% of their budget.

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Those numbers say it all, don't they? Not to mention that, in all those years, the government was in fact funding its political opponents. No, I'm not saying that they have no rights to campaign for what they believe in. I'm only saying that they shouldn't do that on taxpayers' money. So I hope that CIDA doesn't cave in under the growing pressure from all those "social justice" wackos and doesn't reverse the funding cuts.

But that's just one NGO out of many. Yes, the government has reduced its projected expenses by an average of $1.75M a year. But, considering that the deficit is $56 billion, it's like saving a quarter, while going $8000 deeper in debt. Sure, an extra quarter in the cookie jar - that's nice, but a lot more effort is actually needed.

What's needed is a thorough audit of every single government expense. And the best way to achieve that is with zero-based budgeting. In other words, instead of merely requiring the departments to keep their expenses from growing beyond reasonable limits, each department must be compelled to explain why those expenses are even there.

I won't be surprised if, once the government departments are forced to justify every single expense they incur, we'll find plenty of "temporary" expenditures that should have expired long ago, along with plenty of "year-end" expenses, when the department is just eager to spend the money before the fiscal year is over, so that it looks like they truly needed all those funds...

So it's time for the government to bring in the zero-based budgeting. A whooping deficit is not just an excuse - it's a dangerous symptom that must be addressed immediately. Even if in the opinion of Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty, it's still too early to end the "stimulus" spending, zero-based budgeting could still be implemented as a "pilot project" in some of the non-essential departments. Including CIDA which has been milked by the NGO parasites for decades.