Harpercons play hunger games

A long list of community leaders, legal experts and academics are waiting for a heartfelt “I’m sorry” from the prime minister.

Fat chance.

Their issue is the insulting behaviour of senior cabinet ministers who seriously attempted to discredit the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, when he ventured into Canada last month. As the Conservatives’ nation-altering omnibus bill moves into full debate this week, the de Schutter affair is a reminder of the vastness of the HarperCon mission.

The mild-mannered and unfailingly polite Belgium-based law professor toured nine countries before coming to Canada, the first wealthy nation he’s investigated. 

Following two weeks of meetings with senior civil servants and visits to organizations and aboriginal communities, he issued a May 16 report calling for a food policy in keeping with Canada’s UN commitments. 

Recent tax cuts of $48 billion to  wealthy people, he argued, indicate that money is at hand to fund social assistance and up minimum wages so 900,000 people a month wouldn’t rely on food banks, and 15 per cent of First Nations peoples wouldn’t suffer chronic hunger.

And then the barrage began. 

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney charged that De Schutter was discrediting the UN and wasting taxpayers’ money. “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,” he said. 

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq called De Schutter “ill-informed” and  “patronizing.” Canada’s northern people hunt for food every day, she said, but De Schutter neglected to target “environmentalists that try to put a stop to our way of life.”

The ministers got all their facts wrong. Thanks to his day job as a human rights law professor and his ability to work 16-hour days, De Schutter donates his time to the UN and raises funds for his expenses, so the Canadian government will have to look elsewhere to cut budgets of international civil servants.

Moreover, he has a standing invite to visit Canada, a courtesy this country has long extended in keeping with its signing of the 1993 Vienna Declaration on the universality of human rights (which makes no exceptions for wealthy nations, by the way). 

De Schutter’s meetings with government officials were all arranged  by the Department of Foreign Affairs. The rapporteur released his report in the presence of Inuit national leader Mary Simon, who referred to surveys documenting 70-per-cent levels of food insecurity among Inuit peoples.  

Such information makes the PM’s duty to apologize unequivocal. 

A protest letter, organized by Amnesty International’s Alex Neve and  Food Secure Canada’s Diana Bronson and signed by 100 notables, reminds the PM that “if the UN failed to hold Canada accountable in the same way as other governments, the entire UN human rights protection system would be discredited.”

A long-time human rights specialist, Bronson introduced me to the power of the human rights perspective on food when she presented a brief to De Schutter at a meeting I chaired on school food issues at FoodShare.

When children go to school without food in their stomachs, it’s not just a health or education problem, she said; it’s a violation of those children’s human rights, which are protected by international treaties. 

Remember, it was Harper appointees who opposed an emergency UN meeting on the right to food in the midst of the 2008 food price crisis, and today Canada resists recognition of access to water as a right.

Conservatives respect rights, but they’re always “negative rights” that keep the state from interfering in an individual’s right to freedom of speech, religion, security or property – as opposed to positive rights to food, water, health or information that the state must protect.

The Conservatives’ parliamentary majority doesn’t mean never having to say they’re sorry. This country has signed on to a web of international human and civil rights obligations – and they remain in force.