Canada

Amnesty Canada volunteers are taking action for climate justice. Our new Climate Justice and Corporate Accountability Specialized Team brings together volunteers to collaborate on this exciting and vitally important issue. To join this volunteer team, email edumitru@amnesty.ca.

Looking for other ways to get involved? Join us next week for an educational and thought-provoking evening entitled Climate Change – What it is and How it Affects us All. Register here.

And please take a moment to sign Amnesty’s new e-petition to Canada’s Minister for Environment and Climate Change demanding strong climate action that respects human rights. Sign petition.

Here are some other interesting climate updates:

Amnesty International will intervene today at the Supreme Court of Canada's carbon pricing hearing. 

We firmly believe that without robust climate action at all levels of government, the climate crisis will continue to negatively impact a range of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, and disproportionately impact marginalized and vulnerable communities and groups.

Amnesty's intervention at the Supreme Court today will emphasize the fundamental importance of Canada’s international human rights obligations and the need for these commitments to guide Canada’s climate action. We will argue that constitutional ambiguities with respect to division of powers between provincial and federal governments should be resolved in a way that both maximizes Canadian compliance with international obligations and facilitates provincial adherence to our obligations. 

You can watch the Supreme Court of Canada's live webcast today.

On September 23rd, a new session of Parliament will begin and the government will deliver a Throne Speech, outlining their priorities. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has indicated this Throne Speech will be a 'roadmap out of the pandemic towards a society that is fairer and more welcoming.' 

Amnesty International has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister and his cabinet, urging them to implement a genuinely transformative human rights agenda. 

The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau

Prime Minister of Canada

80 Wellington Street

Ottawa, Ontario

September 10, 2020

Dear Prime Minister,

We write this Open Letter, on behalf of 400,000 supporters of Amnesty International across the country, in times of considerable uncertainty, turmoil, injustice and fear; but also of mobilization, courage, determination, and possibility.

Against that backdrop, you have indicated that your government’s upcoming Throne Speech will lay out a “plan to rebuild a stronger, more resilient Canada” and offer a “roadmap out of the pandemic towards a society that is fairer and more welcoming.” Central to those goals is the imperative to implement a genuinely transformative human rights agenda. This Throne Speech must acknowledge that respect for human rights will be central to all aspect of adopting laws, developing policy, making budgetary choices and taking action. Towards that vision, we urge you to take up the following seven recommendations:

Years of campaigning led by Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people resulted in government finally calling an inquiry to investigate the scope and scale of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit persons, and to identify solutions to end the violence. In June 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls issued its final report, including 231 Calls for Justice. The federal government committed to creating a National Action Plan by June 2020 to transform the Calls for Justice into concrete actions, but has delayed creation of the plan, and a timeline and process to create it remains unknown.

Normally on October 4th, hundreds of Sisters in Spirit vigils are held in communities across Canada to honour Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people who have gone missing or been murdered, and every year many Amnesty members participate in these vigils.

High quality, accessible, affordable, inclusive childcare is important for children, but it’s also essential for care givers—particularly women—who shoulder the burden of unpaid care work.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, without access to childcare, women either take on a disproportionate share of unpaid care work in the home, balancing paid work with child care, house work, and in some cases home schooling—or they reduce their work hours, take leaves of absence from work, or leave their jobs entirely. In August, Statistics Canada reported that mothers whose youngest child was 6-17 years old were the furthest from returning to pre-pandemic employment levels.

If unpaid care work was equally distributed between people of all genders, access to childcare might not be so central to ensuring that the rights of women are respected, protected, and upheld. However, ongoing gender discrimination leads to women carrying out the bulk of unpaid care work, including childcare, making access to childcare very much a women’s rights issue in Canada.

Amnesty International must honestly and openly confront concerns about anti-Black racism within our organization, historically and currently. We are moving towards meaningfully addressing systemic oppression, internally and externally, beginning with acknowledgment of allegations and harms. 

Activists against anti-Black racism in the United States and Canada have raised troubling questions about the possible role of Luis Kutner — said to have had leadership roles in the early years of Amnesty International and/or Amnesty International USA — in events that led to 21-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton being shot and killed in December 1969 by the FBI and local police in Chicago.  FBI documents, declassified in 2018, reveal information Kutner provided to the FBI prior to the raid that resulted in Fred Hampton’s murder at the hands of police.