Canada

Climate change is not only the great environmental emergency of our time, but also an unprecedented human rights crisis. It threatens a wide range of human rights, including the rights to water, to health and to life itself. Unfortunately, some of our current technology-focused climate solutions, such as electric vehicles or solar power, threaten those rights. The shift to electric vehicles and renewable energy is essential for the fight against the climate crisis, but must not come at the cost of further human rights abuses or environmental harms. 

This February, Amnesty International Canada embarks on a year-long project to bring awareness to these issues and to call on Canada to put human rights and Indigenous knowledges at the centre of climate justice and decarbonization initiatives.

What’s this all about?

Anti-Black racism is prejudice, attitudes, beliefs, stereotyping and discrimination that is directed at people of African descent and is rooted in their unique history and experience of enslavement and its legacy. Anti-Black racism is deeply entrenched in Canadian institutions, policies and practices, to the extent that anti-Black racism is either functionally normalized or rendered invisible to the larger White society. Anti-Black racism is manifest in the current social, economic, and political marginalization of African Canadians, which includes unequal opportunities, lower socio-economic status, higher unemployment, significant poverty rates and overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. [source: https://www.ontario.ca/document/data-standards-identification-and-monitoring-systemic-racism/glossary]

Communities have been speaking out for decades about how Black people experience policing in Canada. It’s time to listen: racism is not up for debate – it’s systemic.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls finished its work a year and a half ago, and the issue has largely faded from news headlines during the pandemic. But this human rights crisis has not gone away. In fact, according to a survey conducted last Spring by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people has increased during the pandemic.

The federal government has still not issued a formal response to the National Inquiry’s Final Report. The much-anticipated National Action Plan to implement the National Inquiry’s 231 Calls for Justice, which was set to be released in June 2020, was delayed because of the pandemic. The government has stated that the plan is under development, but the timeline remains unknown.

Three years ago, in January 2018, the government announced that it would create an independent office with the power to investigate. Instead, in April 2019, it unveiled a powerless advisory post called the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE). The CORE is little different from what has already existed for years and is ill-equipped to address human rights abuses linked to Canadian companies operating overseas.

At the time, the Canadian government said that the promised powers to independently investigate would need to wait a little longer – until the results of an external legal review were made public, in just a few weeks’ time. Fast forward more than 18 months later and the report remains buried and the office of the CORE remains powerless.

Then in late November 2020, the office of the Minister of Small Business, Export Development and International Trade cemented the CORE’s fate, informing our coalition (the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability) that Canada will not give the CORE the promised powers to compel documents and testimony after all. This is outrageous!

Canada’s announcement of a climate accountability bill (Bill C-12: Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act) is a step in the right direction but is insufficient to ensure human rights protection in the face of climate change.

To meet its international human rights obligations, Canada must ensure that the shift towards a zero-carbon economy and a more resilient society: addresses systemic inequalities, combats discrimination, and promotes gender, class, racial, disability and intergenerational justice; ensures a just transition for workers and communities impacted by the shift from a fossil fuel economy; and respects, protects and fulfils human rights. These principles should be clearly set out in the bill’s preamble.

By Charlene Scharf, Health Network Co-Coordinator

As we follow the crest of the second wave, and on the eve of the annual flu season, concerns are rising over the new pressures that will come to bear on the health care system. The vital healthcare workers across the health systems from long term care homes to hospitals and all in between have already faced unprecedented pressures and risks since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was clearly outlined in the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Report highlighting the alarming burden of disease and deaths from COVID-19 which discussed collected data globally in mid-August, 2020. It found that of the 52 national nursing associations in 50 countries, the infection rates for healthcare workers ranged from 1% to 30 % of all COVID-19 cases. The average rate was 10%. An alarming statistic from the study revealed “across 44 countries, there were 1097 deaths among nurses with the possibility of the actual deaths being much higher.”

35 years ago, on a wintry evening in early 1985, I attended my first Amnesty International meeting.   

I had just begun studying law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, with an entirely unformed notion of becoming a lawyer pursuing social change. I had seen an intriguing notice on a bulletin board giving details about the monthly meeting of the Halifax Amnesty group. I went, and never looked back.   

I remember three things about that evening. First, the inspiring and welcoming Amnesty members I met were of all ages, backgrounds and interests, and from many different corners of the world; but were all united in a common sense of purpose and possibility. It was the evening I first heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our shared responsibility to uphold it.