Why I am a Conservative

It is sometimes difficult to support the federal Conservatives, usually when they are not being very conservative. But stories like this one remind me why I like this government. I enjoyed the article so much, I must confess that I read it three times.

I had never heard of KAIROS until I read Colby Cosh's analysis of their partisan politics. That led me to some further reading, and I discovered that KAIROS had issued a denunciation of Alberta's oilsands, and then they went on their fact-finding trip to Fort McMurray. One might have thought it would have been in the reverse order.

A quick visit to KAIROS's website shows that their most important goal now is not actually anything to do with religion, let alone with Christianity. It's about getting back to the taxpayer trough. I say let them raise their own money through bake sales, like everybody else's church or synagogue has to do.

Poke around their site and try to find any substantive difference between their views and the NDP's foreign policy platform. They both have an unhealthy obsession with denigrating Israel, natch. And KAIROS has a special hate-on for, of all places, Colombia. That's no surprise -- Colombia is the Latin American country most resistant to Hugo Chavez's malign influence. (KAIROS obviously hasn't had a chance to add brave little Honduras to its hit list.) Between criticizing Israel and Colombia, KAIROS doesn't have a lot of time left to criticize, say, China and its brutal treatment of Christians and other religious minorities. But then, neither does the NDP.

But enough political debate -- this is about free money, not ideas. KAIROS has a massive staff of around 20. That's a helluva full-time political campaign squad. Without recession-weary taxpayers paying for all those "ecological justice" coordinators, a lot of sociology majors are going to have to find real jobs, and Greenpeace and the Canadian Arab Federation can only absorb so many of them.

KAIROS wanted $1.8 million a year from the government -- that's basically a fully-staffed political war room, dedicated to their radical point of view. If KAIROS really is, as its website boasts, the political voice of the Anglicans, Catholics, Mennonites, United Church, etc., that money should be a snap to replace -- not much more than a dime per member of its constituent churches, really. Because KAIROS really is speaking for its members, isn't it?

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.

It's pretty grotesque when a so-called Christian organization is so busy beating up on Alberta, Israel and Colombia that it only has 3.7% of its money left over for Jesus-y things like helping the poor. But then again, according to KAIROS's honcho, Bill Phipps, Jesus wasn't God anyways.

Excuse me, while I re-read that news story one more time, just to savour it.