There are many words that could describe the federal Conservative government’s curious decision to pull out of a United Nations convention on consequences and possible solutions to drought.
Some of them are even printable.
“Embarrassing” comes to mind, “short-sighted” is another, “contradictory” perhaps and maybe even “ahistorical.”
Let’s start with embarrassing.
Drought and expansion of deserts into once-food-producing lands is one of the great catastrophes of the modern world, creating hunger or starvation and vast armies of refugees in Africa and elsewhere.
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In 1994, Canada signed onto the UN’s “Convention to Combat Desertification in those countries experiencing severe drought and/or desertification, particularly in Africa.”
So did every other UN country and the result has been the usual UN gabfests but also an impending report from scientists on the costs of droughts and spreading deserts.
Canada has become the first country to leave, on the advice to cabinet by the normally more sensible foreign affairs minister John Baird. It is an embarrassing international black eye for a country that has a deep stake in the drought issue.
Prime minister Stephen Harper said it was about money. Only 18 percent of Canada’s funding went to programming.
“The rest goes to various bureaucratic measures,” he said. “That is not an effective way to spend taxpayer money.”
Put that in context. Canada spends less than $300,000 a year on supporting the work of the convention, and it is not a “programming” body but a bureaucratic body to co-ordinate research and to look for solutions.
That $300,000 is chump change for a government that spends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars promoting itself and poured millions into the Ontario riding of Treasury Board president Tony Clement prior to the 2010 G8 summit — tax dollars that did not hurt his successful re-election bid the next year.
As to shortsighted and contradictory, droughts around the world cost Canada many millions of dollars every year. Canada’s usually generous international aid and World Food Programme contributions are often used to try to mitigate the human and financial costs of drought.
A UN conference and bureaucracy surely will not produce a quick fix, but it is a forum where the world is trying to deal with the problem.
The government’s decision is also ahistorical because this country has suffered drought. Drought and soil drift, particularly in the Conservative prairie heartland, laid the land barren for more than half a decade in the 1930s. Climate change specialists routinely predict a recurrence.
This country has something to offer to the discussion with experience at better soil conservation and something to gain from collective wisdom about the future threat.
The financial argument Harper offered is not credible, so what is behind it?
Surely it’s not the well-noted conservative ideological bent, because what is liberal or ideological about studying and discussing drought and desertification?
Surely it is not the government’s well-known skepticism about climate change talks. Drought is real.
Maybe it simply reflects the Conservative skepticism about the UN and its wordy ways.
Whatever the explanation, it is a wrong-headed embarrassment.
