A rchive Date
[ 06-09-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoSun/editorial.html
Chretien: The world tour begins
With his appearance this week at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa, Prime Minister Jean Chretien's costly, 18-month retirement tour is off to a flying start - literally.
The conference itself, a massive, 10-day event hosting 182 countries, 40,000 delegates and 6,000 press (plus 6,000 police and security guards), is the largest-ever gathering hosted by the UN. And like so many UN undertakings, it's already proving to be a public relations disaster.
Stories out of the Johannesburg meeting have detailed the five-star opulence of the delegates' hotels, the flowing vintage champagne and luxurious meals.
Beyond these frills - and the obvious, blatant hypocrisy of staging such a display just down the road from some of the world's poorest people - there's the overarching hypocrisy of the event's stated goals.
The intent is to ease hunger, save the environment, clean up the world's water and bring at least half the planet's poor up to a better living standard - all by the time the next summit is held in about a decade.
But as with other such events - like the conference on AIDS in 2000, also in South Africa, or the outrageous farce that was last year's anti-racism conference there (which turned into a shameful gang-tackle of Israel) - this summit's failings and contradictions are destined to outlast its accomplishments. If, indeed, it accomplishes anything.
All of which is a fitting stage for Chretien, who speaks to the meeting tomorrow and is widely expected to thrill the UN crowd by pledging Canada's support for the Kyoto accord on climate change. (On this, he's been infuriatingly coy, though his office stated late last week that he will continue consultations before committing Canada to it officially ... nice of him, eh?)
Consider: here is a guy who has talked and talked about how much he wants to help Africa, yet he has been weak-kneed on Zimbabwe's crisis, mealy-mouthed on the AIDS problem and now he's making a grand appearance at an event that slaps Africa's poor in the face.
As for Chretien's endorsement of the dubious Kyoto treaty , it'll get reaction, all right - hugs at the conference; anger in Alberta where the economic fallout could be devastating. But the best measure of the whole shindig's potential value comes from none other than environmentalist (and Kyoto supporter) Elizabeth May, head of the Sierra Club of Canada, who dismissed it as a "useless talkfest."
"The world would be better off and the climate would be better off if we could have avoided all the greenhouse gases from people flying there, and all the money."
She knows hot air when she sees it - and there's no doubt hot air will be the main product of this summit.
Get used to it, Canada - Chretien's legacy-seeking world tour has just begun. (No wonder Tory Peter McKay has dubbed him "the Sultan of Shawinigan.") After 18 months of this, we'll all be suffocating. And poorer, too, no doubt.
http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoSun/donato.html
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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