NINE CANADA BREACHES OF U.N. PEACE POLICIES

Written by three members of the Pugwash Canadian Conferences, Pierre Jasmin (Artiste pour la Paix, diplomas from 6 countries including USA and USSR), Phyllis Creighton, MA (Hist.) University of Toronto, and Tamara Lorincz, PhD candidate, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.

1. Financing Big Pharmas, instead of favouring a just and free distribution of vaccines worldwide through the ACT Accelerator, launched by the World Health Organization and supported by partners such as the Agora of the Earth’s Inhabitants (Emeritus Professor Riccardo Petrella) even if on that point, Prime minister Trudeau appears to be in tune with the Conservative Party and the main medias who applaud his selfish expensive vaccine grabbing policy and even find it insufficient.

2. Refusal to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force on January 22, supported by 130 voting countries in the UN General Assembly. Trudeau was contradicted on January 21 by a press conference bringing together six representatives, two senators and four MPs representing all parties in the House of Commons (without however representing the majority, far from it). The TPNW was ignored (censored?) by our medias and those of nuclear-armed North Korea, Russia, China, USA, United Kingdom, France, Israel, India and Pakistan governments, supposedly* representing half the world’s population.

3. Increased spending on armaments by Minister Sajjan (Lockheed Martin/Irving battleships of more than $70 billion + $30 billion planned for fighter-bombers of the F-35 type), contradicting both disarmament policies favoured by UNIDIR and UNODA and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute calculation that NATO countries have spent in each of the last three years 16 to 18 times more than Russia on various armaments (except nuclear weapons).

4. $ 12.5 billion purchase of the TransMountain pipeline by the government which protested against Biden when he rightly cancelled Key Stone XL, in contradiction of the targets and unanimous recommendations by the COP21 (UN) and the 1200 scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

5. Reducing to a handful of participants the Canadian U.N. Blue Helmets’ program initiated by Nobel Prize laureate Lester B. Pearson and defended by Professor Dorn from the Royal Military College of Toronto (www.WalterDorn.net). refusal by Stephen Harper to send Canadian Blue Helmets in Haiti resulted in inexperienced and cholera stricken Blue Helmets sent by Nepal, provoking hundreds of deaths.

6. Membership in the Lima Group and its anti-democratic pressuring applied to elections, especially in Bolivia and Venezuela.

7. $15 billion export of Ontario armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, in violation of the UN Arms Trade Treaty.

8. Illegal economic boycotts and sanctions of medical aid, against 19 different countries (including 9 Africans) in disrespect of Security Council rules; application of these Canadian measures is denounced by Group 78 and by the parliamentary petition e-2630 (NDP Scott Duvall with the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War).

9. Sending the RCMP to impose the Coastal GasLink Pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory, in violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which Canada long opposed, along with USA and two other countries, until the welcome reversal by Minister of Indigenous Affairs Carolyn Bennett on May 10, 2016 (Artists for Peace congratulated her).

* “Supposedly” because most of the countries mentioned would not allow democratic polls which no doubt would reveal a political reversal. Very recent polls carried out at the request of ICANW revealed that 76 to 86 percent of the populations of Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, countries that are part of NATO, demand that their leaders bring their countries to join the TPNW, and in those in which American nuclear bombs are stored, to get rid of them. South and Central Americas and Africa, as well as New Zealand, also support the TPNW.

[Photo by Mat Reding on Unsplash]

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