CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick Amnesty International Canada is slamming the Conservative government’s response to last week’s United Nations World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined to attend, and whose final communique the Canadian government wanted to have watered down. “It would be an understatement to say that Canada’s approach to the Conference was a disappointment. Obviously, the fact that there was no high-level involvement during the week, when of course the prime minister was in New York, is something that sends a very distressing and worrying message,” said Alex Neve, secretary general for Amnesty International Canada pointing to the absence of Harper or any cabinet ministers. Harper dispatched a public servant, Deputy Minister Colleen Swords, who only began on the aboriginal affairs file in July, to represent Canada at the conference. Last week’s UN conference was the first ever, and took place in New York while Harper was in the city for the United Nations General Assembly. While much attention has been paid to his absence from the climate change summit, neither Harper nor Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt attended the indigenous peoples conference. While the conference was not as well attended by world leaders as either the UNGA or climate change summit, several leader of countries with significant indigenous population, including Mexico, Bolivia, Finland and Norway did take part. NDP deputy critic for Intergovernmental Aboriginal Affairs Romeo Saganash says he was “totally disappointed” on Canada’s attendance, or lack thereof, at such an important event. “They certainly never approached me, although they know that I’ve worked at the UN through the system for 23 years. Before becoming an MP, I was the representative for the Grand Council of the Cree and other Indigenous organizations at the UN during the negotiations and discussions on the UN Declaration but they never approached me. “There used to be a time when the government of Canada spoke and everyone listened in that room. Now they’re deserting the rooms.” Canada also took issue with two paragraphs in conference’s outcome document concerning “free, prior and informed consent” — an international legal concept that empowers indigenous groups to stop or approve major industrial projects on their lands. The Canadian government rejected the inclusion of the concept in the outcome document as amounting to a veto on resource projects and potentially contradicting Canada’s laws and constitution. “Canada’s position on this issue is well known and has not changed,” Canada’s mission to the UN said in a press release. “While the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Outcome Document for this World Conference are not legally binding and do not reflect customary international law, or change Canadian laws, we regret that our concerns were not taken into account.” Neve said Monday that Canada was out of step on the issue. “And to see that Canada was the only country that decided to disassociate itself from aspects of the important output document that came from that and to return to old rhetoric about how problematic the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ is, to go out of it’s way to say that Canada doesn’t view that as a binding or important international legal document, was very, very troubling,” he said. Neve was joined Monday by Beatrice Vaugrante, director general of Amnesty International Canada Francophone, and Michele Audette, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, on Parliament Hill to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of Amnesty International’s report “Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous women in Canada”, and said that little has been done in the decade since to address the problems the report identified. “We know from recent RCMP statistics that hundreds of Indigenous women and girls have been killed across Canada over the past ten years. Hundreds. We actually don’t know the true number because there has not been and still is not a reliable, comprehensive approach to make sure that those grim, necessary statistics are reliably compiled,” said Neve. “We have vigils across Canada but not only here, as well in six other countries saying we’re honoring the families but demanding justice, safety and dignity for families and the girls who left,” said Audette, adding that more vigils will be taking place across Canada Saturday. “We also have the support from the international community, where several special rapporteurs told Canada that there’s something wrong here in Canada,” she said, adding that women are “the most often forgotten.” “We now have all of Canada’s premiers on board,” said Neve. “All of the country’s humans rights commissioners; UN bodies like the special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, the committee on the elimination of the discrimination against women, the committee against torture, the committee for the elimination of racial discrimination; and a long list of our closest allies, including Norway, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands,” are also supportive, Neve added. Liberal aboriginal affairs critic Carolyn Bennett was in the room for the press conference and added her voice to the complaints against the government for their lack of attendance in New York. “We were pushing for it if Canada didn’t want to go, could they have sent an indigenous leader go as the co-chair for that Conference, some aspiration that we’ve had about how Canada could and should be leading on this file,” said Bennett. “This government just doesn’t get it, they don’t get what nation-to-nation, government-to-government is supposed to look like… It’s more than disappointing, it’s shameful.” The NWAC has so far collected 28,000 signatures supporting a national inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women and was the driving force behind a national roundtable, an invitation to which Harper will receive in the coming weeks. Audette, the current president of NWAC, will be stepping down in December to pursue the Liberal candidacy in Manicouagan, Quebec. Related Stories:
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:37:39 +0000
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