The world received a welcome piece of
good news over the weekend: Canada has passed off chairmanship of the
Arctic Council, and it will likely be 16 years or more before we get
it back.
That leaves the world plenty of time
for real leaders to address the alarming environmental changes that
are occurring in the region, and hopefully to curtail unwarranted
energy exploration in the North, with all of its pollution risks.
The council meets every two years, in
the country of the current chair. (The members are Canada, the U.S.,
Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, plus all
circumpolar indigenous peoples.)
Friday's meeting in Iqaluit was
supposed to be preceded by a showcase event in Ottawa the day before.
The event was to celebrate the Council's accomplishments during our
two-year stint in the rotating chairmanship, but it was abruptly
called off.
The reason was politics. How would it
look if senior Russian officials were invited to visit Ottawa for
what is essentially a photo-op, while Canada/Russian tensions over
events in Ukraine were so high?
It would remain for environment
minister Leona Aglukkaq to repeat Canada's outrage over Russia's
invasion of Ukraine and its military support for rebel forces wanting
to secede parts of Ukraine into Russia.
As it was, Russia had already had
gotten the message, and didn't care to hear it again. Russian foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov had attended every Arctic Council meeting
since 2004, but gave this one a miss. Environment minister Sergei
Donskoi came in his stead.
And in the due course of events,
chairmanship passed to the United States, which wasted no time in
announcing the agenda of the last two years has been ended.
The Arctic Council is no place for
geopolitical messing around, while back doors were being opened for
accelerated industrial development of the north, at the expense of
the environment.
U.S. secretary of state John Kerry
assumed the chair and announced that the priorities of the Arctic
Council have changed, starting now. Global climate change is
occurring fastest at the poles, and addressing the results of
receding sea ice, rapid acidification of the ocean, the collapse of
permafrost, rising sea levels and general warming would take
immediate priority.
“This is not a future challenge, this
is happening right now,” Kerry said, adding that all member nations
“must do everything we can to prevent worse impacts” of
greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Arctic Council can do more on
climate change,” Kerry said.
News reports of the change of
chairmanship say the move was welcomed by the other members of the
council, who also want to focus on the threats of a warming climate
both on the land and on the people who live there.
Canada, for its part, has made no
secret (or at least it has been a very poor one) of its lack of
concern regarding climate change. In the minds of our governors, the
best protection we should offer the wild areas of the north is a good
dose of profiteering.
Thus the formation of the Arctic
Economic Council, a self-selecting group of businesses that work in
that formidably difficult region. The economic council was a chief
highlight of Aglukkaq's term as chair of the Arctic Council.
Except in corporate boardrooms, our
current government has made very few friends globally for its
policies on the environment. Rather the opposite. Our government has
made our country a global embarrassment on issues of greenhouse gas
emissions and pollution.
Remember when Canada's global brand
used to be our forests, glaciers, clean rivers and open, unpolluted
vistas? Not so much any more.
So, well and good that Canada no longer
drafts the agenda for the Arctic Council. Far better to be a
follower, in the presence of better leaders.
The next decade is expected to be a
watershed space of time for the Arctic. Either we will preserve what
we can, or we will risk losing it all in the greatest global disaster
in human history.
Activists around the world still hold
out hope that with strong measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions,
we can avoid the worst.
Based on its record, the Canadian
government scarcely gives climate change in general and its effects
in the north in specific, a reluctant second thought.
The Arctic Council can be a strong
voice, based on its highly industrialized member nations and historic
indigenous peoples as stakeholders.
Let us hope that a rotation of strong
leadership can help bring that about. Lord knows, leadership on the
environment from the outside is the best Canadians can hope for.
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