A Canadian on Politics

(finally bringing myself back into paying attention to politics again.  Hi!)

Federal ministers are scoffing at the findings of a United Nations right-to-food envoy who blasted Canada for tolerating inequality and lack of access to nutritious diets among its poor and First Nation citizens.

Olivier De Schutter, whose damning report is based on an 11-day visit to Canada, says the country’s rate of food insecurity is “unacceptable” and called on the federal government to adopt a national right-to-food strategy.

“What I’ve seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples,” De Schutter told reporters in Ottawa Wednesday.

“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs,” he said, noting that “people are simply too poor to eat decently.”

De Schutter said 800,000 Canadian households are “food insecure” because social assistance benefits and minimum wages have not kept up with the rising costs of basic necessities, such as food and housing.

“Food banks that depend on charity are not a solution: they are a symptom of failing social safety nets that the government must address,” he said.

“Here I have to say my concerns are extremely severe and I don’t see why I should mince my words.”

But Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said De Schutter is simply an “ill-informed” and “patronizing” academic who is “studying us from afar.”

De Schutter made recommendations about the diets of Canada’s First Nations without ever setting foot in the North, said Aglukkaq, a Nunavut MP.

“I found it insulting as an aboriginal person,” she told CTV’s Power Play Wednesday.

mmigration Minister Jason Kenney also lashed out at De Schutter, suggesting the envoy wasted both his time and the UN’s resources by spending 11 days here.

“It would be our hope that the contributions we make to the United Nations are used to help starving people in developing countries, not to give lectures to wealthy and developed countries like Canada and I think this is a discredit to the United Nations,” Kenney said, noting that Canada sends billions of dollars in food aid to the developing world each year.

When asked why no Conservative cabinet ministers met with De Schutter during his trip, Kenney responded that the trip was nothing more than a “political mission” and said the UN was out of line by investigating Canada.

“We think the UN (World) Food Program should focus its efforts on those countries where there is widespread hunger, widespread material poverty and not get into political exercises in developed democracies like Canada,” Kenney said.

Huh.  The classic: “but there are starving kids in Africa!” argument.  Complete with no statistics on how people are NOT starving in Canada.

As if living in a rich, democratic country were proof against starvation or even simply going hungry.

WINNIPEG — The chairman of Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission says removing more than 100,000 aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in residential schools was an act of genocide.

Justice Murray Sinclair says the United Nations defines genocide to include the removal of children based on race, then placing them with another race to indoctrinate them. He says Canada has been careful to ensure its residential school policy was not “caught up” in the UN’s definition.

“That’s why the minister of Indian affairs can say this was not an act of genocide,” Sinclair told students at the University of Manitoba Friday. “But the reality is that to take children away and to place them with another group in society for the purpose of racial indoctrination was — and is — an act of genocide and it occurs all around the world.”

About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were forced to attend the government schools over much of the last century. The last school closed outside Regina in 1996.

The $60-million truth and reconciliation commission is part of a landmark compensation deal between the federal government, the Crown and residential school survivors. It is about halfway through its mandate and has visited about 500 communities, where it has heard graphic details of rampant sexual and physical abuse.

daskannnichtsein:

mollydruwho:

The UN states that any country restricting a woman’s access to abortion and/or contraception is, in doing so, violating a woman’s human rights.

….finally.

So, we’ve got extremely reputable cancer-related organizations saying abortion doesn’t cause cancer or increase your risk.

We’ve got extremely reputable reports declaring post-abortion depression to be a hoax.

We’ve got extremely reputable reports showing how many women die from lack of safe, legal abortions.

And now we have the UN stating that ANY and ALL restrictions to the right to choose, to have knowledge, and to have contraception is a violation of human rights.

Your move, Anti-Choicers. Try not to use slavery, the Holocaust, or the Bible.

Boo.  Effin’.  Yah.

(via stfuconservatives)

OTTAWA — Foreign diplomats bombarded Canadian climate change negotiators with questions Thursday in Bonn, Germany, as they challenged the Harper government’s transparency and policies to fight global warming.

In the wake of media coverage highlighting missing and conflicting information in an Environment Canada submission to the United Nations, officials from Australia, China, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the Philippines questioned government policies regarding fossil fuel subsidies and the Alberta “tarsands,” a lack of investment in clean energy and the scientific evidence used to determine its greenhouse gas emissions target.

The not-so-diplomatic discussion took place during a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiating session. Canada is one of about 200 members of the treaty, which calls on its members to stabilize the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere to prevent dangerous changes to the earth’s climate and ecosystems.

Representatives from other countries pounced on Canada after Michael Keenan, an assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada, delivered a presentation suggesting that the government was showing “significant ambition” in its proposal to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Dear Government,

I do not think “significant ambition” means what you think it means.

No love,

Mei

OTTAWA — The federal government has acknowledged that it deliberately excluded data indicating a 20 per cent increase in annual pollution from Canada’s oilsands industry in 2009 from a recent 567-page report on climate change that it was required to submit to the United Nations.

The numbers, uncovered by Postmedia News, were left out of the report, a national inventory on Canada’s greenhouse gas pollution. It revealed a six per cent drop in annual emissions for the entire economy from 2008 to 2009, but does not directly show the extent of pollution from the oilsands production, which is greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of all the cars driven on Canadian roads.

The data also indicated that emissions per barrel of oil produced by the sector is increasing, despite claims made by the industry in an advertising campaign.

“The oilsands remain Canada’s fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas pollution, and they’re the subject of a huge amount of attention and scrutiny in Canada and internationally,” said Clare Demerse, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental research group. “So it’s very disappointing to see Environment Canada publish a 500-page report that leaves out these critical numbers — especially when last year’s edition included them.”

Overall, Environment Canada said that the oilsands industry was responsible for about 6.5 per cent of Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, up from five per cent in 2008. This also indicates a growth in emissions that is close to about 300 per cent since 1990, which cancel out many reductions in pollution from other economic sectors.

The report attributes the six per cent decrease in Canada’s overall emissions to the economic slowdown, but it also credits efforts by the Ontario government to reduce production of coal-fired electricity as a significant factor.

1. Do not leave details out of reports to the UN, jackasses.  When you obfuscate from the UN, you decrease it’s efficacy.
2. Is it me or if we show a 6 percent drop, and are not including 6.5% of our greenhouse pollutants, doesn’t that mean we likely had a rise? The data is not collated together - no where in the article does it say what the results would have been if the report is accurate.  I’d say this interpretation is based on an absence of accurate fact, and I’d REALLY like to know what the report should really show.
3. I would dearly, dearly like to know how NOT INCLUDING A SIGNIFICANT POLLUTANT is still IN LINE with UNFCC requirements.

Look.  Guys.  We all know the oilsands are a politically charged area.  We also all know it is a source of revenue, important to the big companies, profit, jobs, etc.  You know what else is important?  OUR OZONE LAYER.  THE AIR WE BREATHE.  THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET.

We cannot just ignore this.  It must be dealt with somehow, managed somehow, improved on somehow.  The problem is not going to go away for ignoring it, and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

And you know, had it been in the report, that would be a story too - probably sooner than this article.  But at least then it would be about the oilsands prosperity being at odds with the environment (therefore, something needed to be checked, resolved or corrected) OR at best, that we have identified the importance of new facilities operating at peak efficiency as soon as possible.  Instead, it is about our government (REGARDLESS of who made the original decision) committing an ever so pleasant sin of omission.

PS - filing the report later than earth-quake stricken, nuclear-accident-dealing Japan is just embarrassing.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday he is looking to extend Canada’s role in the NATO-led mission in Libya.

Harper’s statement toed the line world leaders laid out during this week’s G8 Summit in France, where they unanimously demanded the resignation of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Ottawa’s role in the mission will be debated in Parliament next month.

“We’ll be looking for an extension to our mission,” Harper told reporters in France. “We’ve had, as you know, good, strong support across parties in Parliament for this mission.”

Harper said he hopes the unanimous international support from the heads of state at the summit — including a nod from Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev, whose government had been critical of the airstrikes — encourages Canada’s opposition parties to back the country’s continued involvement.

The official Opposition NDP has not come out in support or against an extended mission, but has requested only that all information about the mission be made public and for an “open, public debate in the House of Commons.”

Compare this to yesterday’s news.

UNITED NATIONS — Canada pledged on Thursday to maintain its annual “diplomatic” assault on Iran at the United Nations — even though the world body’s Human Rights Council earlier Thursday resumed direct scrutiny of the Islamic republic after a nine-year hiatus.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told Postmedia News there would be no let-up in Canada’s successful multi-year bid to push through resolutions in the UN General Assembly deploring abuses in Iran that include public executions and arbitrary arrests.

“Canada will continue to take Iran to task for their egregious human rights abuses,” Cannon said from Ottawa. “We will do this at every opportunity, and in every appropriate forum, including in the General Assembly, until the situation improves dramatically.”

Canada’s drive annually infuriates Iran, which invariably lobbies against the measure — one year by issuing a book documenting what it described as human rights abuses committed by the Canadian government.

Ottawa launched its attacks after the Geneva-based council’s predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, went mute over Iran in 2002 as human rights “rogue” states came to dominate the body. At the same time, the European Union quit tabling resolutions in the General Assembly criticizing Iranian practices as it focused on a human rights “dialogue” with Iran.

But what specifically spurred Canada was the 2003 torture and murder in an Iranian jail of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi. The first Canadian-led resolution on Iran emerged that year.

ROME — Global food prices are the highest in 20 years and could increase further because of rising oil prices stemming from the unrest in Libya and the Mideast, a UN agency warned Thursday.

Skyrocketing food prices have been among the triggers for protests in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, and raised fears of a repeat of the food price crises in 2007 and 2008.

Some experts point to key differences compared to those years: for one, the price of rice, a dominant component of regular diets in many parts of the world, is much lower today. Still, aid group Oxfam called the hike “deeply worrying.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that its food price index was up 2.2 per cent last month, the highest level since January 1990 when the agency started monitoring prices.

It also was the eighth consecutive month that food prices had risen, the Rome-based agency said. In January, the index had already registered a record peak.