Why is Canada the only country to quit UN anti-drought convention?

Why, suddenly, has the federal government chosen to withdraw from a United Nations convention to combat drought, making Canada an outlier among 194 nations, the only country in the world outside the agreement?

Is International Cooperation Minister Julian Fantino to be believed when he said, in the government’s first public statement on Wednesday, that “membership in this convention was costly for Canadians”?

Maybe not. Membership appears to have cost Canadians $350,000 last year — the equivalent of a departmental rounding error or less than 2 per cent of what the government spent on “Economic Action Plan” advertising over the same period.

The decision was certainly not taken because the problem of desertification is less pressing now than when it was identified during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit as one of the three greatest challenges, along with climate change and the loss of biodiversity, to sustainable development. In recent years, severe droughts have encouraged the spread of deserts in East Africa and the Sahel belt, leaving millions in those areas in poverty. Currently around 70 per cent of the Earth’s arid regions are threatened by desertification.

Perhaps the government has withdrawn from the convention now because it does not want to attend next month’s meeting of signatories in Bonn, Germany, where member countries will, according to a UN notice, “carry out the first ever comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of desertification, land degradation and drought” — a project that runs counter to this government’s increasingly secretive approach to science.

Or maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper was telling the whole story when he said, when pressed for a fuller explanation in Question Period on Thursday, that the government would prefer to fund direct action on desertification rather than the UN convention, which he dismissed as a bureaucratic “talkfest.”

In which case, it might be worth reminding the prime minister 1) of the difference between and complementary nature of programs and international treaties, and 2) that a complex global challenge such as fighting drought requires multilateral, scientific solutions. And both multilateralism and science depend on co-operation and information-sharing — even the occasional talkfest.

Whatever the government’s motives, its history of hostility to international co-operation and environmental science make this world-first a dubious distinction.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Editorial