Why Chiara Sacchi Filed a Landmark Climate Complaint Against Five Countries—Including Her Own

WATCH THE VIDEO

World leaders didn’t exactly act with urgency at this week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit, but a group of children sure did. Sixteen youth filed an unprecedented complaint against five G20 countries for not acting on climate change.

The five countries are Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey, all of which have signed what’s called the third Optional Protocol of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That protocol allows children to file petitions against any of the 41 countries that have ratified it alleging their rights have been violated and asking for relief. And when it comes to climate change, there’s a pretty clear-cut case.

Chiara Sacchi, 17, is one of the signers of the petition, along with 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. But while Greta may be the most recognizable name on the case, each of the kids has a unique story to tell. Sacchi’s is that she’s from Argentina, putting her in the powerful position of taking her own country before the children’s rights committee for violating her rights (kids from Brazil, France, and Germany are parties to the complaint as well). Earther spoke with her about why she signed onto the complaint, why she thinks the climate crisis needs to be taught in schools, and her fear that future generations may not be able to enjoy the wonders of the natural world as the climate crisis worsens.

In a press release about the complaint, Sacchi said, “it feels like we are alone, like no one knows what to do, and when you know what to do, nobody takes action.” But the whirlwind of participating in last week’s climate strike in New York and meeting the other young people on the case has reshaped her outlook.

“This week, I’ve met a lot of people and been through a lot,” she told Earther. “With all the solidarity all over the world, how could I feel alone?” SOURCE

It’s time for a Recognition of Wrongs framework

Photo: Shutterstock, by Nalidsa

pon taking power in 2015, Prime Minister Trudeau characterized Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples as of primary importance: “No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous Peoples. It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous Peoples, based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership.” As a token of this friendship, Trudeau promised an extensive review and reconfiguration of federal laws and policies that concern Indigenous peoples.

In 2018, Carolyn Bennett, the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, initiated consultative rounds with experts for what would become the draft Recognition and Implementation of Indigenous Rights Framework (RIIRF) legislation. The stated intent was to provide a legislative framework to recognize and animate Indigenous rights. The experts consulted were highly critical of the assumptions and objectives of the legislative draft, and after a couple of redrafts the matter was consigned to the political closet of failed initiatives. The RIIRF initiative left many participants suspicious of the federal government’s intentions, its truthfulness and its competence. After all, given the gap between Indigenous aspirations, current law and the proposed recognition legislation, one had to assume either bad faith or stupidity in the conception of the initiative.

The RIIRF was deeply problematic because it functioned to limit rather than enable the exercise of existing Indigenous rights. Moreover, the draft did not measure up to the requirements set by Canadian constitutional law and was inconsistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP is the international gold standard for recognition of Indigenous rights. The Harper Conservatives were part of a cabal of four states resisting the 2007 adoption of the declaration by the UN, and once the declaration was passed, they continued their foot-dragging at home, maintaining Canada’s “objector” status. It wasn’t until 2016 that the Trudeau Liberals removed the objector designation, fully endorsing Canada’s adoption of the declaration. Now, Canada must attend to implementation — to making its policy and legislation consistent with UNDRIP.

The RIIRF framework does not refer to Indigenous nations as governments, instead describing them as legal entities likened to “natural persons,” a legal term with the potential for the corporatization of Aboriginal and treaty rights. Corporation models reframe Indigenous government so that Indigenous rights resemble those of corporations — whose duties are to shareholders rather than citizens — rather than being a distinct form of rights that arise from our prior existence on our territories (inherent rights) and from treaties. This model does not produce governments with constitutional status in a federal order. This provision was recycled from the failed federal 2002 First Nations Governance Act, which was rejected by most First Nations.

Governments of settler states have a most difficult time accepting responsibility for actions that violated the rights of Indigenous peoples, and in particular with acknowledging that the state itself is built on an expropriated base of Indigenous territories, sovereignties and resources. In Canada, reconciliation initiatives have been focused on a few high-profile historical errors, such as the residential school policy, the criminalization of Indigenous religious practices, the forced relocation of certain Inuit communities and the incarceration and state execution of Indigenous resistance leaders in the 1885 Metis and Indian resistance to colonial occupation of their lands. It has not been applied to the intergenerational consequences of these and related practices or to settler state positions and practices that continue colonialism today.

Moreover, reconciliation has not taken up the ideology, the structures and the processes that animated these and other fundamental human rights violations and that facilitate the contemporary continuance of those violations. In spite of the evident contradiction with its claims about the importance of the relationship with Indigenous peoples and the objective of reconciliation, the Trudeau government is hell-bent on continuing the Canadian tradition of appropriating Indigenous lands and resources and ignoring Indigenous dissent, including by ignoring the UNDRIP requirement for free, prior and informed consent over the use of unceded traditional Indigenous territories. Pipelines, anyone? MORE

Canadian youth don’t trust their government to deliver real climate action

Greta Thurnberg speaks at the New York Youth Climate Strike on Sept. 20, 2019, in front of 250,000 people. Photo by Fatima Syed

Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg is wrong: the kids are going to be just fine.

At least, that’s what Canadian leaders have told themselves for the past 20 years.

In the late 1990s, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government was an active negotiator in the first international commitment to reduce GHG emissions. Things looked promising. But by 2002, when the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in Parliament, Canada was already failing to meet its targets.

When the Conservatives came into power in 2006, they had heaped criticism on Liberal efforts to address climate change but also failed to produce credible alternatives. Stephen Harper dropped commitments to what he called the “job-killing, economy-destroying Kyoto accord” and instead introduced the Clean Air Act, which targeted contaminants creating smog without actually mitigating the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

More recently, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has made relatively bold commitments to climate action since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Liberals have promised to clean up our oceans, introduced a revenue-neutral carbon tax and committed to a ban on single-use plastics by as early as 2021. Yet according to the Pembina Institute, if Canada continues at the same rate of reduction in GHG emissions since Trudeau’s election in 2013, we won’t achieve the Paris Agreement target until the beginning of the 23rd century.

We are still nowhere near where we need to be and it’s time our leaders are honest about the challenge we face.

It doesn’t help that, when it comes to climate policy, Canadian politicians are acting like a bad Tinder date: making quick promises, delaying action and then ghosting on commitment altogether. Climate change cannot be a partisan issue. It is an existential threat to our collective future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report explains that if we don’t achieve ambitious targets, we have less than 11 years before we experience truly unmitigable climate disaster.

We’ve already started to see the effects of climate change in Canada. The recent devastating impact of hurricane Dorian in Atlantic Canada, melting permafrost in the North and wildfires in British Columbia are all signs the consequences of climate change are on our doorstep.

The good news is young people want to help. We, more so than any other demographic, understand and want to engage with climate policy. MORE

Ontario to lose more than 10,000 teaching positions over five years under Ford government changes: watchdog

Ontario will have 10,000 fewer teaching positions over the next five years as the Ford government boosts class sizes and introduces mandatory online courses, says the legislature’s independent financial watchdog.

Some 994 elementary and 9,060 secondary positions will be gone from the system based on the previous student-teacher ratios, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario said in an explosive report — one that landed in the midst of contract negotiations and just days before the high school teachers’ union is set to sit down at the bargaining table with the government and school boards.

This year alone, there are 2,826 fewer teachers than there would have been under the teacher/student ratios of 2018-19, says the report released Thursday at Queen’s Park.

“When we analyze any program change, we always look at what we call the baseline,” said Financial Accountability Officer Peter Weltman, speaking to reporters at Queen’s Park. “Had there been no change to the education program, to class sizes, because of the significant population growth and enrolment growth that that would entail — if nothing had changed we would need 10,000 more teacher jobs five years out.”

The government’s estimate of 3,475 positions is based on four years’ worth of “jobs that will be taken out of the system that currently exist,” Weltman said. “So both numbers are right, but we look at it from a different point of view because we are always comparing the change against the status quo.”

An education ministry official characterized 3,475 jobs as a “net” loss, given some elementary teachers will be hired where enrolment demands.

The report also says the province’s $1.6 billion attrition fund is more than enough to stave off teacher layoffs as bigger classes are phased in by not replacing retiring teachers or those who resign, but noted that education spending is not keeping up with increasing costs. MORE

RELATED:

Private Education Company Offers To Let High School Students Pay For Classes Cancelled by Doug Ford