The Canadian Press reports, “The United Nations right-to-food envoy (Olivier De Schutter) says the Canadian government’s controversial decision to … negotiate a free trade deal with Europe will make it more difficult to fight poverty in Canada.”
The article highlights, “De Schutter aligns himself with critics of the negotiations to craft a comprehensive free trade pact between Canada and the European Union… His report says initiatives to improve food and nutrition and promote local markets, including ‘buy local’ initiatives, might be negatively affected by the provisions of the proposed trade pact.”
Specifically, De Schutter’s report says, “They may also be undermined by the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union, currently in draft form, which would prohibit municipal governments from using procurement of goods and services valued over $340,000 in a way that favours local or Canadian goods, services or labour. …Numerous municipalities across the country have opposed this restriction on the ability of local authorities to promote urban-rural linkages and local economic development through institutional purchasing, and have requested exemptions.”
He also criticizes the ending of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, the scrapping of the long-form census, the lack of a national strategy to fight hunger, the failure to ensure that provinces spend transfer payments on social services, and the dismantling of the National Council of Welfare. “Those are among the many cutting observations made by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food, who will release his report Monday in Geneva at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.”
“The report says Canada is not meeting its obligations under international conventions it has signed. It singles out Canada for not acknowledging the right to food under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. ‘The special rapporteur is concerned about the growing gap between Canada’s international human rights commitments and their implementation domestically,’ the report says.”
Today at 12 pm ET, our friends at Food Secure Canada will be holding a national web-based Conversation between the UN Special Rapporteur and civil society groups across the country. Today will be in English, while tomorrow at noon the Conversation will be in French. For more, please read ‘UPDATE: Join the Conversation with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, March 4-5’ at http://canadians.org/blog/?p=19517.
To respond to our ‘ACTION ALERT: Harper must walk away from CETA’, go to http://canadians.org/action/2013/harper-ceta.html.
