Liberal leader Bob Rae calls it a national embarrassment that a United Nations representative is in Canada investigating complaints about Canadian hunger and lack of access to safe or nutritious food.
Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, is in Canada this week to meet with government officials, some politicians, food activist groups and First Nations communities to examine how Canada is upholding the UN convention on the right to food.
“This is the first visit a UN officer has made to an industrialized country to talk around issues of food,” Rae told a Parliament Hill news conference May 7. “It says a lot about the priorities of this government. We are now under scrutiny for the failure of national policy.”
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Liberal agriculture critic Frank Valeriote complained the Conservative government has failed to create a national food policy as proposed by the Liberals in the 2011 election and by several farm and food groups.
Many Canadians are short of food or lack nutritious food choices, First Nations communities often lack clean water and there is no coherent policy to deal with it, he said.
De Schutter arrived in Montreal May 5 for meetings, visited Ottawa May 7 and 8 and then travelled to Toronto, Winnipeg and several reserves to meet with food activists, food bank officials, migrant agricultural workers and First Nations residents.
In Ottawa, he met with Rae and New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair.
While no federal ministers met him, they said officials would brief him on government policies and food and services to First Nations’ reserves.
“We look forward to the visit to brief the UN and to make the point that our government has delivered and is delivering,” heritage minister James Moore said in the House of Commons May 7. “We will continue to deliver in the future. We are making sure that we have results.”
In Winnipeg May 10, de Schutter met with food activist groups including members of the National Farmers Union to discuss “the organization of food chains and the impact on the right to food.”
Once he completes a report, de Schutter will present it to the UN Human Rights Commission.
“It will become part of Canada’s human rights record,” said Rae.
The Liberal leader tied the issue of the ‘right to food’ with budget cuts to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
He accused the Conservatives of being responsible for making Canadian food less safe and not creating a national food strategy that would reduce Canadians’ dependence on food banks.
In a brief for the UN representative, the group Food Secure Canada that has been working on a national food policy stressing local food, small scale farming and organic production complained that a major issue in the Canadian food system is “the industrial food model” that it said is causing a crisis in Canadian agriculture and food production.
