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|  | Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON Volume 5, Issue #2, July 2001
The World Summits and Their Relevance to Canadian Domestic Social Policies (A summary of remarks by Geoffrey Pearson, UNA-Canada National President, to a seminar organized by the Queen's International Institute on Social Policy) UN Conferences set goals and recommend procedures. They have no regulatory power and Member States may implement or ignore their recommendations. But Summit Declarations are difficult to ignore if monitoring procedures are in place and follow-up conferences agreed to. In Canada, UN Declarations or Conventions usually need to be transformed into domestic legislation. The Millennium Summit of September 2000 was attended by some 170 Heads of State or Government and has led to high expectations. Some goals, as enunciated in the Millenium Declaration, however, may be utopian. Take as example: "To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's population whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and., by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water; To ensure that, by the same date, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and that girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education." (UN Millennium Declaration, pg 8) In addition, OECD countries were called upon - To implement the enhanced programme of debt relief for the heavily indebted poor countries without further delay and to agree to cancel all official bilateral debts of those countries in return for their making demonstrable commitments to poverty reduction; and - To grant more generous development assistance, especially to those countries that are genuinely making an effort to apply their resources to poverty reduction". These objectives will be a challenge for CIDA, especially for trade and aid policies that are not as generous as they might be (we are at the bottom of the OECD table in terms of meeting the .07 aid target). Moreover, while Canada remained first on the UNDP Human Development Index in 2000, we have fallen behind in some categories of development - eleventh in the OECD for the incidence of poverty and tenth in the amount of funding for UN Agencies. Moreover, Canada's controls on emissions of carbon dioxide have not reduced our share of almost two percent of the global total. (This has relevance in terms of the commitments of the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment and Development and the RIO + 10 conference scheduled for 2002). In meeting the goals of the 1990 World Summit for Children, however, Canada has done relatively well, despite some mixed results. According to Canada's ten year review: "While most Canadian children faced increased economic and time pressures, the majority of families continued to cope well, and by some measures, seem to have improved. In 1996, 93% of Canadian children up to the age of 13 lived in families that functioned well ,defined by a family's ability to cope with everyday problems, to communicate, and to interact with each other. By this definition, only 7% of families were considered to be having difficulty functioning, a slight improvement over 1994". (National Report of Canada: Ten year review of the World Summit for Children, pg 19) Global conditions of increasing poverty and inequity, combined with populations projects of 9 to 11 billion by 2150, imply that Canada ought to do more to help counter those conditions both for reasons of global solidarity and of national interest. This interest will be manifest in three ways: 1) growing numbers of refugees; 2) degradation of the environment; and 3) the prospect of disorder and violence in countries from which many immigrants to Canada have come.
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