Canada & the world II
May 30
UNITED NATIONS: CANADA DEMANDS ACTION FOR WORLD HUMANITARIAN AID
(RCI) Canada is demanding a tougher international response to countries that block humanitarian aid. Canada told the United Nations Security Council that these countries should be punished for their delaying tactics. Canada’s ambassador to the UN, John McNee, described the situation in Burma as a matter of life and death. Burma has been harshly criticized for delaying the entry of foreign aid workers into its country to help in the relief effort following a devastating cyclone. The storm hit certain parts of the country more than three weeks ago, killing almost 134,000 people and leaving 2.5 million homeless. Burma only began allowing foreign aid workers into the country this week.
May 27
PARIS: PM PITCHES ‘GREEN’ PLAN
(RCI) Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper began his three-day, four-nation European visit in the French capital, where he met with President Nicolas Sarkozy. The two leaders met for a half-hour and discussed the environmental plan put forward by Mr. Harper’s Conservative government and freer trade between his country and the EU. The prime minister also inaugurated an exposition related to the 400th anniversary of the foundation of Quebec City before leaving for Bonn, where he’ll meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Mr. Harper will also visit Italy and the UK. The visit is intended in part to prepare for the G8 summit this summer in Japan, a meeting that will focus on climate change. Canada and the U.S. could find themselves isolated at the event for their opposition to any new global environmental plan to replace the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change which doesn’t include all major polluters, including China and India.
May 13, 2008
Jeremy Kinsman: Diplomatically Speaking
Can we deliver food aid at the point of a gun?
The title of Pierre Trudeau’s only full-length speech on foreign policy in the House of Commons, in June 1981, was “Who is my neighbour?”
It is a question Canadians still need to ask. As current crises in Burma, Zimbabwe and Darfur destroy lives, are we to be detached and indifferent, waiting to help only if called upon? Or will we Canadians always be personally affronted by human suffering, no matter where it occurs?
Trudeau’s sense of a world community had much to do with the economic handicaps affecting poor countries. It is a concern as acute today, especially in Africa, as it was in his time. Despite decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid, progress in Africa is sporadic and scattered.
There are enough success stories — Liberia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Mozambique — to show that the problems are not insuperable if the international community can be mobilized. But is the will still there?
