Shaming Canada
"Canada sends billion of dollars of food aid to developing countries around the world where people are starving,"
"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."
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney - May 2012
Back in May of 2012 the United Nations special rapporteur on 'right-to-food', Olivier De Schutter, mystified most Canadians by visiting Canada for an eleven-day stay. Where he busied himself ascertaining the state of this nation's food-availability situation. It could not possibly have escaped his notice that food in this country is plentiful and relatively inexpensive.
On the other hand, there is a good degree of unemployment, and there are the working poor, both of which categories will without doubt find it a stretch to place enough nutritious food on the table to satisfy human need. While, controversially enough, there is a growing epidemic of obesity in this country.
Canada does not issue food stamps like the United States, but there is employment insurance, and there are private charitable municipal agencies that aid those in need. And there is municipally-administered welfare.
And there are food banks, too many of them, necessary however, to service the needs of too many people who require the added assistance of obtaining food from sources other than their own stretched incomes.
This is a situation most certainly not unique to Canada. It is endemic, and wide-spread throughout the world. There have always been the indigent poor for whom there is never enough food available.
Increasingly, however, there are agencies of one kind or another who aid people in financial distress.
Even while the greater society seems to be well supplied with good jobs that compensate well, making consumer goods available on a wide scale as evidenced by the growing proliferation of malls and big box stores that serve those who live on the avails of welfare payments and those whose salaries are munificent.
There are native communities in isolated areas of the country, living on their traditional geographies by choice, indeed insistence, who are sustained primarily by the transfer of funds through federal government agencies struck for that very purpose. Obviously, it is expensive to ship fresh food far distances when environmental conditions leading to transport difficulties make the stocking and purchase of those foodstuffs very expensive.
The UN's envoy, Mr. De Schutter, has now released his full findings in a report presented in Geneva at the UN Human Rights Council. That would be the council whose members include some of the world's most egregious human-rights violators. And it is they who sit in judgement on the other nations of the world, some of them representing even worse human-rights violators.
It is a rare occasion indeed when the UN Human Rights Council condemns oppressively abusive regimes, but as is demonstrated now, there are certain countries in bad odour at the HRC. Canada, for example, which has on occasion, in support of Israel, the HRC's perpetual whipping-boy, walked out when a harangue against the State of Israel for purported human rights violations is ongoing.
Which makes it mandatory that Canada be slated for a calling-out of its own.
Forget Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Venezuela, for they all represent upright, responsible human rights-protecting nations of the world. There is never any need to call them to action to improve their human rights record. But Canada?
Well, the cancellation of the long-form census, the ongoing Canada-EU free trade negotiations and Ottawa's transfer of funding for provincial social services through the equalization program are all cited as examples leading to human-rights abuses leaving Canadians hungry.
Labels: Canada, Controversy, Culture, Economy, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, March 06, 2013
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