Women from around the world are mobilising today to call for action on climate change as international leaders meet in New York at the United Nations General Assembly.

"There is no climate justice without gender justice," the movement argues. Solutions and policy demands will be presented in New York City as part of the Global Women’s Climate Justice Day of Action in an effort to highlight the reality that while women are among those most severely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, women are also the "key to creating climate solutions."

The aim is to get political officials to agree “equitable, immediate, and bold action on climate change" as we enter the final two months before the COP21 climate change negotiations in Paris in December. At this time, the Women’s Climate Declaration will be presented to world governments.

Connecting Women

“Women around the world are facing the impacts of the climate crisis every day,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, co-founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, which helped organise the event. “We are issuing a wake-up call to the world that the time has come for bold action to address the roots of the climate crisis, with women’s leadership at the forefront.”

Among the women speaking at the event in New York are Mary Robinson, the UN special envoy on climate change, and May Boeve, head of climate campaign group 350.org. Other leading international women speaking include Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, First Nations and anti-tar sands activist, Jody Williams, American political activist and Nobel Prize laureate, and Patricia Gualinga, international relations director for the indigenous community of Sarayaku in Ecuador.

As Orielle Lake explained, the day of action is “about connecting women working on vital climate projects around the globe. It is about bringing our passion and determination to the surface and manifesting our vulnerabilities and fierce strengths.”

According to the UN, women form a disproportionately large share of the poor. In rural areas and developing countries women are typically the ones responsible for securing water, food and energy for cooking and heating – this dependence on local natural resources makes them highly vulnerable to climate impacts, including drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation.

And, compared to men in poor countries, women face historical disadvantages such as limited access to decision-making and economic assets, and this further increases the challenges of climate change.

Global Action

This is why it is not just in New York City that women are mobilising. Throughout September, women in over 30 countries have been holding events calling for change.

For example, in the Niger Delta region of West Africa, women held a summit on gender and oil. Meanwhile, in the Amazon Rainforest indigenous women protested fossil fuel extraction in their territories. And, in Canada documentary photography depicts women from across the country seeking to protect water from pollution.

As the UN argues, it is “imperative that a gender analysis be applied to all actions on climate change and that gender experts are consulted in climate change processes at all levels, so that women's and men’s specific needs and priorities are identified and addressed.”

Melissa S. United States

Hala Alhaffar. Damascus, Syria

In addition to asking for a transition away from fossil fuels, protection of our forests and oceans, and increased funding for adaptation, the Women’s Climate Declaration lays out a series of gender-conscious demands. These include: a gender-responsive climate change policy and programme; recognising that gender-sensitive climate policy benefits men, women, children and the planet; and respecting and learning from the traditional ecological knowledge, wisdom and experience of the world’s indigenous peoples.

It argues: “Unsustainable consumption and production reverses development gains in the global North and the global South: Women and men of industrialized nations have a responsibility to educate themselves, examine their worldviews, commit to action, and lead by example.

“No one person, organization, community, province, region, or nation is capable of solving the challenge of climate change alone. This is a time for collaboration at a global level as never before required.”

Photo: 350.org via Flickr / Omnia Abdallah, Khartoum Sudan

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

An astonishing 720 million people around the world face falling back into extreme poverty unless we tackle climate change immediately, warns a new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

The report was published as world leaders gathered this week at the United Nations General Assembly and agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among which is the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030.

This goal is achievable, according to the ODI, but not without a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions peak in 2030, and a fall to near zero by 2100. “Climate change increases the probability that those who emerge from extreme poverty will be at risk of falling back into it,” it concludes.

Beyond 2030

Sustaining poverty reduction therefore relies on curbing climate change the report argues.“If the global community is serious about eradicating extreme poverty for good, it needs to think beyond 2030. Eradicating poverty by 2030 will be no great accomplishment if we are incapable of sustaining that achievement from 2030 onwards.”

It continues: “It is policy incoherent for big GHG emitting countries, especially industrialised ones, to support poverty eradication as a development priority, whether through domestic policy or international assistance, while failing to shift their own economy toward a zero net emissions pathway.”

As the report notes, progress on poverty eradication over the past two decades has reduced the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day in the developing world – defined as the extreme poor – from 43 percent in 1990 to about 17 percent as of 2011.

"In order to stop poverty, we must stop climate change." – Jay Winter Nightwolf, Echota Cherokee nation. #ActOnClimate

— Sierra Club (@sierraclub) September 24, 2015

Analysing data on the impact of climate change on food prices, the effects of childhood malnutrition and stunting, the productivity of primary sectors (such as agriculture or mining), and increased droughts, the ODI estimates that up to 720 million people are at risk of facing extreme poverty from 2030 to 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario. As the report starkly points out, this is roughly the same number of people that exited extreme poverty over the last two decades.

However, this number is likely to be much higher if the effects of sea-level rise, an increase in airborne diseases, and conflict – among other climate impacts – are factored into calculations.

Ecomodernist Manifesto

The ODI report comes at the same time as a group of individuals calling themselves the ‘Ecomodernists’ launched their manifesto in London yesterday – among those promoting it include self-styled ‘climate lukewarmist’ Matt Ridley, and former environment secretary and climate denier Owen Paterson.

As the manifesto explains, ecomodernism believes in human rights and freedoms – chief among these, the alleviation of global poverty.

However, in contrast to the ODI’s report, their manifesto goes on to argue that “climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be.”

Instead, technology should be the main driver in helping developing countries to achieve modern living standards and end material poverty it says. This includes intensive agriculture, nuclear energy, reforestation and urbanisation. Furthermore it argues that renewable energy is inadequate for meeting global energy demands and that there need not be a limit to economic growth.

Economic Growth

But as the ODI argues: “While [economic] growth is unquestionably part of reaching zero extreme poverty, relying on high growth rates alone to achieve this goal would be unwise. First, recent high growth rates may not be sustained. Projecting them decades into the future paints an overly optimistic view of extreme poverty in 2030.

“In reality, economic growth has become increasingly less effective at reducing poverty because of the increasing inequality of that growth. Since 2005, inequalities have widened even further in developing countries, leading to lower rates of poverty reduction than would have been the case if inequality had remained constant.”

Achieving a zero-emissions future, with peak emissions within 15 years, requires all countries to “transform” their economies, the ODI explains. Deep domestic GHG cuts are part of developed countries’ obligation it says, with middle and low-income countries also ensuring their current investment choices reduce their forecast emissions.

“This presents a global challenge that some argue conflicts with the goal of eradicating extreme poverty,” ODI acknowledges, “However, early evidence suggests low-emission economic development, although radically different from historic experience, is consistent with the combination of moderate, sustained and pro-poor growth and reductions in inequality needed to eradicate poverty.”

Therefore addressing growth and inequality together is “far more likely to reduce poverty than a strategy reliant on attempts to maximise growth alone, based on unrealistic projections.”

Agriculture and Cities

Pointing out that industrialised agriculture is a significant contributor to GHG emissions, the ODI looks to the World Bank which argues that “improving the productivity, profitability and sustainability of smallholder farming is the main pathway out of poverty in using agriculture in development.”

Doing so presents a “major synergy”, says the ODI, for reducing poverty and emissions “where there is the institutional capacity and political will to limit the land-use conversion of forests and other natural stores of GHGs.”

And on urbanisation, the ODI agrees it can drive positive change but only if city planners and policymakers tackle poverty and climate change together rather than “entrench and perpetuate old problems for new people”.

“The impact of unchecked climate change creates an insurmountable challenge for the zero poverty target,” it argues, “but climate change mitigation need not.”

Photo: Asian Development Bank via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Pope Francis has released his long awaited encyclical, or teaching document, on climate justice and the environment, and it flies in the face of everything climate deniers stand for.

The encyclical is officially called “Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home,” and it makes a compelling case for humanity’s moral responsibility to “protect our common home” by tackling the root causes of two of the greatest interlinked global crises of our time: climate change and poverty.

“[T]he earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor,” Pope Francis writes. Echoing his earlier critique of capitalism and inequality, the Pope links the pollution and waste degrading our environment directly to our “throwaway culture” that, unlike nature, does not seek to reuse and recycle every resource as a valuable constituent of the circle of life.

“We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations,” the Pope writes. He faults this mode of consumption for creating global warming, and concludes: “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.”

The Pope unequivocally embraces the science showing mankind is responsible for global warming:

"A number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity."

He specifically calls for policies to change the way we power human society:

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.”

It is the poor who suffer most from the impacts of climate change and humanity's failure to act, the Pope argues.

"Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited."

No role for fossil fuels in solving global poverty

Unlike Peabody Energy, which has touted coal as a solution to global energy poverty, the Pope sees no place for fossil fuels in helping to raise the standard of living around the world in a sustainable manner:

“We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels — especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas — needs to be progressively replaced without delay.”

While the ultimate goal of climate action, according to the Pope, must be to increase prosperity and justice for all of Earth’s inhabitants, he does not ignore political realities in developing countries even while he calls on developed countries to shoulder a proportion of the burden equal to their culpability in creating the climate crisis in the first place:

For poor countries, the priorities must be to eliminate extreme poverty and to promote the social development of their people. At the same time, they need to acknowledge the scandalous level of consumption in some privileged sectors of their population and to combat corruption more effectively. They are likewise bound to develop less polluting forms of energy production, but to do so they require the help of countries which have experienced great growth at the cost of the ongoing pollution of the planet.

Only collective action by all of the countries of the world can adequately address the climate crisis, the Pope says:

Enforceable international agreements are urgently needed, since local authorities are not always capable of effective intervention. Relations between states must be respectful of each other’s sovereignty, but must also lay down mutually agreed means of averting regional disasters which would eventually affect everyone. Global regulatory norms are needed to impose obligations and prevent unacceptable actions, for example, when powerful companies dump contaminated waste or offshore polluting industries in other countries.

These assertions form the basis of the Pope’s call for mankind to take collective action in defense of our shared planet.

So it’s little wonder climate deniers lined up to try and discredit the Pope ahead of the release of the encyclical. But Pope Francis appears to speak directly to the issue of climate denial in calling for "a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet."

"The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity."

Environmentalists welcomed the Pope’s call for "universal solidarity" in climate action.

“The pope’s message applies to all of us, regardless of our faith,” Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “He is imploring people of good will everywhere to honor our moral obligation to protect future generations from the dangers of further climate chaos by embracing our ethical duty to act.”

Mike Brune, Sierra Club executive director, released a statement saying, “The vision laid out in these teachings serves as inspiration to everyone across the world who seeks a more just, compassionate, and healthy future.”

The Pope's encyclical comes at a critical juncture for the global response to climate change. Momentum is building for a meaningful agreement to halt global warming, to be negotiated this December at UNFCCC talks in Paris. The Pope’s decision to weigh in and call for a healthy and more equitable clean energy economy is widely expected to help build on that momentum.

Image Credit: giulio napolitano / Shutterstock.com

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Jennifer Story of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently interviewed Alex Himelfarb, former chief of the Privy Council and member of the DeSmog Canada advisory board. Himelfarb recently co-authored with his son, Jordan Himelfarb, a collection of essays called Tax is Not a Four Letter Word. In this interview Story asks Himelfarb about the book and his efforts to shift they way Canadians think about taxes. 

Jennifer Story (JS): The sub-head of the book is “A different Take on Taxes in Canada”… different from what?

Alex Himelfarb (AH): Different from the predominant negative view of taxes as simply a burden from which we must be relieved. For decades now that’s precisely how our leaders have talked about taxes. Our tax conversation has become profoundly distorted. What’s missing in this conversation is what we get for the taxes we pay. We are more than just consumers and taxpayers. We are citizens with responsibilities for one another; we undertake to do some things together, things that we could never do alone or that we can do much better collectively. Taxes are the way we pay for those things. They’re the price of living in Canada and the opportunities that provides. Indeed, those opportunities exist because of the sacrifices and taxes of previous generations to build the Canada we inherited.

It’s become a political truism that politicians would have to be nuts to talk about taxes unless they’re promising more cuts. But that fear of taxes is limiting, dangerous. We need to shift the conversation, to recognize that the public services and goods we value have to be paid for and that tax cuts are not free. We cannot have Swedish levels of service and American levels of taxation.

We demand of our leaders to explain how they are going to pay for new services but, equally, we need to demand that they explain the COSTS of their promised tax cuts ­–­­­ to our quality of life, to our democracy, to our economy. Would we be so pleased with the next tax cuts if we knew they came with worsening traffic congestion, increased risks to food safety, longer wait times for health care, less help for the jobless and needy, rising inequality and environmental degradation? We seem only to talk about what government costs and not about what it gives.

Too much is at stake to let our identities as “consumers” and “taxpayers” supplant our citizenship and commitment to the common good.

(JS): You already knew more than your average citizen about taxes and the public good. What, if anything, were you surprised to learn during the editing of this book?

(AH): We worked with people who have much greater tax expertise. We learned a lot about the technical aspects, new kinds of taxes. But the biggest thing we learned is how profoundly this anti-tax conversation now dominates.

Of course, a minority will never be convinced, and we will always have legitimate disputes about the right amount and mix of taxes. But the majority does value what their taxes buy. Nonetheless, they worry about how government spends, inevitably  circling back to the problem of waste. Why would I want to pay taxes when so much is wasted?

Let’s be clear, I have never known a political leader who promoted more waste, less efficiency. Politicians are always reluctant to raise taxes and they all want to get as much bang for their revenue as possible.  Some governments are better at this than others, but over the past few decades, all governments have sought to get the best results at the lowest costs. Yet perceptions of wasteful spending persist.

In part, concern about government waste is a proxy for differences in values. What we call waste is often spending we don’t much like (say, the arts from the right, or military spending from the left). That’s the stuff of elections as we try to choose a government that reflects our priorities.

But here’s the thing: we can’t pick and choose a personalized, made-to-order government profile in the way we personalize our latest mobile device. We cannot unbundle government the way we are proposing to unbundle cable services. No political party, no government will be a perfect reflection of our personal preferences. In a pluralistic society, sometimes we pay for things we don’t like. For a democracy to work we must get beyond our personal desires, engage on what the country needs now and for the future, sometimes even set aside our private desires for a larger purpose. There will always be some spending we just can’t fathom, but much of that isn’t waste, simply disagreement on what the country needs and on the role of government. Sometimes we are part of the minority. Those tensions are built into any democracy. It will always be so.

Yes, waste, pure and simple, happens. All of us have shaken our heads at some example of inexplicable spending. All governments do, and ought to, work at reducing waste and increasing efficiency. But no organization, public, private or in-between, is or ever will be perfectly efficient, nor does the evidence support that private is necessarily more efficient than public.  We are talking about imperfect systems made up of perfectly imperfect people. Those desperate to prove government is useless will always find some example. While it is certainly the job of leaders to ensure that waste is minimized, our fixation on government waste is vastly exaggerated, and undermines even the minimal amounts of trust we need to find collective solutions to problems we can’t address on our own.

Former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page reminded us regularly that any promises that tax cuts would be paid for by reducing waste are bogus – the numbers never add up. The screaming headlines about waste mislead us. Studies in the U.S., even before the major downsizing of the ’90s, found big numbers but which added up to a very small percentage of spending.  Same here in Canada. The vast majority of tax dollars are spent on things the majority of us care about: infrastructure, environment, health and safety, health care, education, social assistance, child development. The gravy just isn’t there.

Tax cuts inevitably affect public services. The evil twin of tax cuts is austerity, ongoing and seemingly endless. In Canada, austerity has been implemented in the slowest of motion and so the consequences are less visible than, say, in parts of Europe. But they are real nonetheless, felt first by women and youth, and the most vulnerable. Austerity, it seems, makes us meaner. Next in line are the politically easy targets – civil service, teachers, unions. It seems that bashing bureaucrats is always good politics whatever the consequences.

But of course in the end we all pay the price in rising inequality and the erosion of essential institutions, infrastructure and the environment. This erosion happens so slowly it’s hard to attribute to the tax cuts. Government just slowly gets worse. Ironically this is used to justify further tax cuts. Witness recent proposals to eliminate EI because it now serves so few people so badly. The Post Office. What next? When we lose trust we can’t solve problems together. We look at traffic gridlock and instead of saying, ‘let’s build transit solutions’, we conclude, ‘government doesn’t work’.

Extreme inequality further undermines trust – those at the very top become increasingly effective at convincing us of the dangers of taxes – after all they don’t need many of the public services the rest depend on – and those at the bottom won’t want to pay if they think the game is rigged. Extreme inequality erodes our ability to come to a common view, to build a shared sense of the common good.

Perhaps the most enduring consequence of austerity is that it stunts the political imagination. Previous generations could imagine universal public health care, public pensions, the National Child Benefit. But now our first response to the dreamers is ‘ya, but how would we ever pay for it?’ This breeds a kind of fatalism, declinism –growing doubt that we could make things better together, that we could ever hope to solve the big problems, inequality or climate change.

If I track the last fifteen years, all the tax cuts, federal taxes as percentage of GDP are four points lower, each point worth about $20 billion. Imagine what we could do with that, or even a portion. The two cents of GST that the Conservative government cut in its first couple of years cost about $14 billion per year, slightly more than the surplus they inherited. Think about how much more resilient we would have been without those cuts when the recession hit, how much more we could have helped those hardest hit, without so much added debt and without turning to austerity as though it were inevitable. We chose the path we are on.  We can choose something better.  

(JS): You are fundamentally an optimist … what evidence do you see to be optimistic about the future as it relates to taxes?

(AH): To some degree, optimism is a matter of disposition. But it’s also a philosophical choice. If we have a choice between hope and despair, why would we choose despair? If we believe nothing is possible, then we don’t act. When we think nothing is possible, well, nothing’s possible.

But in practical terms, I see some signs – perhaps I want to see them – that people are ready to turn a corner. Municipal leaders in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax – just to cite a few – seem ready to discuss more ambitious visions for their cities and grapple with the revenue tools they’ll need. Maybe it’s easier to build trust locally.

Bill de Blasio, the Mayor-elect in New York City, won on four priorities: addressing inequality, taxing the rich, raising the incomes of the lowest public sector earners, and limiting police powers. Various jurisdictions are raising the minimum wage. When the State of Missouri’s Republican legislature recently passed a tax cut, the Democratic governor vetoed it, and he seems to be winning the debate. We simply can’t keep squeezing and let inequality go unchecked. We will turn this around. The question is how much pain will we endure before we do that.

(JS): You said at the Toronto book launch that not all the authors would agree about some things. What are those areas of tension you found and how were they resolved?

(AH): Who gets taxed, what’s the best mix – all debatable. But they agree 100% that we have a distorted conversation and that’s doing damage. They agree we need to transform how we govern and tax reform must be an essential part of that transformation. And they agree that there’s no free lunch; we all must pay our fair share.

We will have to be smart in how we tax and, to be fair, progressive. By progressive I mean three things: those who benefit most should pay the greatest share; those who do most damage to the commons should pay most for its repair; and when we have broad-based and seemingly regressive tax measures, as we will, we should mitigate the harm to those least able to pay.

(JS):Imagine you’re sitting in Stephen Harper’s chair. What do you think the number one agenda item should be to improve our tax system for the common good?

(AH): I wouldn’t necessarily lead with taxes. But I wouldn’t avoid the discussion. There’s no way to get to where we need to go without considering taxes. The number one agenda item for me would be to address poverty and inequality. We can’t achieve the trust necessary to move forward together without tackling inequality. We won’t find the collective will to tackle climate change if we don’t tackle inequality.

Here in Toronto, the tale of two cities, the rich and poor, that is the problem. The resilience of our cities demands that we address this. The focus on waste, the gravy train, bloated bureaucracies, this is a conjurer’s trick. Focusing on those ‘problems’ ensures we don’t focus on the real problems. Don’t look there, look over here. Don’t look at that, look at this.

We need leaders to say no to these conjurers’ tricks, to focus on building the cities, the provinces, the country we need.  It is time to change the conversation.  We don’t need to choose decline. We will get the future we are willing to pay for.

Edited to reflect the author's changes on 12/23/13. Image Credit: Kevin Dooley via Flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

James Anaya, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, upon completion of his 8-day visit to Canada said the country “faces a crisis when it comes to the situation of indigenous peoples of the country.”

The overarching message in Anaya's concluding statement, released yesterday, is that over the last decade Canada has failed to make any meaningful progress on the very serious threats faced by aboriginal communities. 

Anaya's visit comes 10 years after the 2003 visit by UN Special Rapporteur Rodolfo Stavenhagen who, at the time, stressed “the economic, social and human indicators of well-being, quality of life and development are consistently lower among Aboriginal people than other Canadians.”  In 2004 Stavenhagen noted poverty, infant mortality, unemployment, morbidity, suicide, criminal detention, children on welfare, women victims of abuse, child prostitution are significantly higher in Aboriginal populations compared to any other sector of Canadian society, while education, health, housing conditions, family income, and equal access to economic and social opportunities are much lower.

Canada, Stavenhagen assured the international community in 2003, had “taken up the challenge to close this gap.”

Upon completion of Anaya’s current visit he stated Canada still has a very long way to go in its work to tighten the “well-being gap” between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians.

Canada, notes Anaya, was one of the first countries to extend constitutional protection to indigenous peoples’ rights, yet, he says “despite positive steps, daunting challenges remain” for Canada.

“The well-being gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in Canada has not narrowed over the last several years, treaty and aboriginal claims remain persistently unresolved, and overall there appear to be high levels of distrust among aboriginal peoples toward government at both the federal and provincial levels,” he said.

Although Canada ranks high on international indices of human development standards, he said, “amidst this wealth and prosperity, aboriginal people live in conditions akin to those in countries that rank much lower and in which poverty abounds.”

He noted dismal living conditions, poor education and high suicide rates in aboriginal communities were alarming. This is not new information, said Anaya, who added the Canadian Human Rights Commission “has consistently said that the conditions of aboriginal peoples makes for the most serious human rights problem in Canada.”

He also said that the “disturbing phenomenon” of murdered and missing aboriginal women forms part of the “long shadow” of oppression that includes residential schools and other aspects of Canadian First Nations’ history.

Of additional concern, says Anaya, is the fact that Canada’s ‘solutions’ to the variety of social and economic hardships faced by aboriginal communities “has not appropriately included nor responded to aboriginal views.” He added one hundred and thirty years of Indian Act policies have persistently undermined, and continute to undermine, First Nation’s and Inuit people’s self-governance, which is essential to “creating socially and economically healthy and self-sufficient aboriginal communities.”

Anaya’s preliminary recommendations, reported by Roger Annis on the Vancouver Observer, are listed below. A more in-depth report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in 2014.

• Granting an extension to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is examining the history of the residential school policy that dates back more than one century. He says the extension should last “as long as may be necessary.” The Commission’s mandate expires on July 1, 2014, but its work has been obstructed and delayed because the federal government has refused to divulge extensive documentation about residential schools.

• Slowing a “rush forward” with planned legislation this fall to reform the Aboriginal education system. He says there is “profound distrust” among First Nations over the proposed First Nation Education Act. It will set standards for teaching staff, curriculum and students. Aboriginal leaders are concerned the act will impose standards that disregard Indigenous language and culture and that education funding will not be increased. They want immediate increases to education funding, but Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt says there will be no funding increases considered until the new act is passed.
• Establishing a public inquiry into the cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women, whose numbers are estimated at more than 600. The federal government has flatly rejected this, and is ignoring calls from international organizations and provincial governments on the matter.
• Treating the housing situation on First Nations reserves and Inuit communities “with the urgency it deserves.” He says housing conditions are unacceptable and it is “abundantly clear” that funding for aboriginal housing is “woefully inadequate.”
• Adopting a much less “adversarial” approach to dealing with aboriginal land claims and treaty disputes.
• Recognizing that “resource extraction” should not occur on lands subject to aboriginal claims without “adequate consultations” and the “free, prior and informed consent” of the Aboriginals affected.

First Nation’s children on reserves in Canada receive 22 percent less per child in federal funding and more than 500 reserve schools lack access to basic amenities like running water in libraries. The average child on reserve receives $2000 to $3000 less per year in education funding.

In addition First Nation’s communities have been on the front lines of some of Canada’s most ground-breaking – and expensive – legal challenges to environmentally harmful resource extraction. The Beaver Lake Cree Nation is undertaking what could become Canada’s most important challenge to the ever-expanding Alberta tar sands. And the Chilcotin people in Northern British Columbia are just weeks away from what might be the most significant land title hearing in Canada since the precedent-setting 1997 Delgamuukw decision.

Remote front-line communities often face the greatest impacts of resource extraction that threaten land-based ways of life. First Nations, through constitutionally-protected rights and treaty rights, must be ‘adequately consulted’ before resource projects are approved – a requirement often overlook by the Government of Canada.

In addition the lack of meaningful investment into First Nations’ land, economies and culture has led to difficult socio-economic conditions for younger generations. Child poverty is the most striking indicator of the well-being gap that is widening between on and off reserve children.

This graphic, produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, shows the disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadian children according to province.

First Nations child poverty by the numbers:

• Each on-reserve First Nations child receives 22% less funding than each child off of reserve.
• 50 per cent of status First Nations children in Canada live in poverty.
• Approximately 3 times as many First Nations children are now in child welfare care than were ever in the residential school system.
• First Nations children are 6 to 8 times more likely to go into child welfare care than non-aboriginal children.
• 65% of kids in child welfare care in Alberta are First Nations (who account for less than 10% of the population).
• 53% of kids in child welfare care in British Columbia are First Nations.
• 1 in 6 children on reserves in Canada doesn't have clean water to drink.
• The cost to pull all First Nations children out of poverty: $1 billion.
• The World Health Organization says, for $1 properly invested in children, the taxpayer saves $7 down the line.
• That’s a net profit of $6 billion.  

For more of James Anaya’s reflections on his visit to Canada, see his written statement on the UN's website.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. For Part 1, The Country has become a Petrostate, click here. For Part 2, Canada's Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate, click here. For Part 4, What is Happening to Canada?, click here.

Few are aware Canada's GDP shot up from an average of $600 billion per year in the 1990s to more than $1.7 trillion in 2012. This near tripling of the GDP is largely due to fossil fuel investments and exports. However not many Canadians are three times wealthier. For one thing GDP is only a measure economic activity. The other reason is that little of this new wealth stayed in Canada. And what did stay went to a small percentage of the population, worsening the gap between rich and poor.

One of the hallmarks of a “petro-state” is that while a country's energy industry generates fantastic amounts of money, the bulk of its citizens remain poor. Nigeria is a good example. Canada's poverty rates have skyrocketed in step with the growth of the energy sector. One Canadian child in seven now lives in poverty, according to the Conference Board of Canada, the country's foremost independent research organization.

[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Income inequality increased faster than the US, with the rich getting richer and poor and middle class losing grounds over the past 15 to 20 years, the Conference Board also reported January 2013.

"Most of Canada's increase in wealth went to the big shareholders in the resource industries,” says Daniel Drache, a political scientist at Toronto's York University. “It mainly went to the elites."

Drache argues that Canada has moved into a type of “reckless resource capitalism,” sacrificing innovation and creativity. Resource extraction industries like logging, mining or fossil fuel production create relatively few jobs, and most of them are short-term positions. Almost all of the equipment used in Canada for resource extraction is made by other countries.

Drache says Canada's economy has completely reversed from its high-tech days of the 1980s and 1990s and has returned to its colonial roots as a "resource-based economy selling rocks [minerals] and logs" — and now oil and gas.

The Petro-state Path to Poverty

The extraordinary wealth in one sector has been a disaster for the overall Canadian economy, according to another recent study. Up to 45 percent of job losses in Canada's manufacturing sector can be attributed to what economists call "Dutch Disease," wrote authors from Canada and Europe in a peer-reviewed paper published November 2012 in the journal Resource and Energy Economics.

Dutch Disease refers to the many examples where an increase in exploitation of natural resources coincides with a decline in the manufacturing sector. It was first documented in the Netherlands during its North Sea oil boom in the 1960s.

Canada's energy wealth has also exacerbated income inequality by spurring the cost of goods and services and making Canadian exports more expensive. Ten years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth about 65 cents on the US dollar. In recent years, the Canadian dollar has been on par with the US dollar, or even exceeded it in value.

The study in Resource and Energy Economics found that the "Canadian currency has been driven up by the prices of commodities." As the Canadian currency gained strength, more than a half-million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. In 2011 Canada lost industrial plants at twice the pace of the United States.

"This illustrates a negative side-effect of the oil-resource richness in Alberta," the study’s authors concluded.

That is a conclusion the Harper government does not want to hear even though the study was commissioned in 2008 by a government department. Applying the term "Dutch Disease" to Canada has Harper officials saying it is an insult to the hard-working employees in the resources sector.

There's not many to insult. Relatively few Canadians work in the resources sector. It's all big machines and big money. The Alberta tar sands are the world's largest industrial project with investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars and only 20,000 people worked there in 2011. For all its rapid growth Canada's oil and gas sector created only about 16,500 new jobs between 2000 to 2011, the same period in which 520,000 manufacturing jobs were lost.

Canada's GDP has nearly tripled, its energy and resources sectors have never been bigger and yet governments are running huge and growing deficits. Meanwhile the federal and Alberta governments spend millions of dollars facilitating faster growth of the energy industry so it can rip more publicly-owned, irreplaceable oil, gas and coal out the ground. For whose benefit, Canadians ought to be asking.

Image Credit: Kris Krug via flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.