Tag Archives: federal

Wanted in 2021: A coherent global health strategy for Canada

Gender equality

The current federal government has taken some meaningful steps towards promoting gender equality in Canada and globally. While important, these efforts don’t sufficiently address other mounting global inequities and health needs.

Canada’s Official Development Assistance investments, as currently designed, are not properly set up to support these and other health challenges. Although health has been previously used by Canada and other countries as a political instrument to promote peace, security and prosperity, Canada can no longer afford to separate its own security agenda from its global fight against health, racial and other social inequities.

These problems are going to be exacerbated in the coming decades by the existing climate crisis.

People wearing masks march in a climate protest. — People take part in a climate change protest in Montréal on Nov. 21, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

The triple crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and related health and economic fallouts, climate change and persistent inequities present major challenges for wealthy countries like Canada. They require countries to address domestic needs while also tackling development priorities in vulnerable regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s why we need a global health strategy for Canada that’s integrated, mindful of health, racial and gender equity, and also serves Canada’s security and global citizenship agendas. Canada needs to be innovative when it comes to research and policy.

Linking domestic and global policy

In addressing global health threats, the federal government must erase the artificial divisions between domestic and global policy.

Canadian strategy must fundamentally strengthen the country’s political voice in the G7 and G20. We must commit public funds and expertise toward strengthening multilateral and bilateral partnerships with other governments and global institutions such as the World Health Organization.

The federal government must also approach its commitment to global health with openness, seeking out a wide range of perspectives that will form the basis of the design and monitoring of a renewed global health strategy for Canada.

Establishing global health strategies is nothing new. Back in 2007, the foreign affairs ministers of Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand signed the Oslo Ministerial Declaration on global health as a pressing foreign policy issue. Canada was absent.

France, Norway, Switzerland and others have followed up by establishing specific strategies. The Dutch parliament just adopted a motion to develop one.

Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau shake hands. — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets German Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel during the G7 leaders summit in La Malbaie, Que., in June 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Germany’s recently launched global health strategy could be a model for Canada. It takes a whole-of-government approach to improve policy coherence rather than leaving it up to any one ministry to lead in a silo. Germany will invest more in the World Health Organization, among other multilateral organizations, and in health promotion and research that supports its strategy.

Canada too must fully acknowledge that our security interests are directly linked to health equity across the globe — and nowhere is this more evident than in the race we have witnessed to develop and now deploy a COVID-19 vaccine. Here, a coherent global health strategy would ensure that Canada lives up to its commitment to universal access to a vaccine in the face of rising vaccine nationalism.

Showing global leadership

The strategy needs to be aligned with 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, which provides an integrated framework for member states, including Canada, to measure progress on actions taken across sectors to address health, social, economic, gender and environmental inequities.

We need a strategy with a clear mandate, accountability and monitoring mechanisms, and one that is clearly communicated. We also need to solicit advice from our global partners. Choosing to bring outside perspectives to inform strategy development would make Canada unique while also deliberately engaging a wide range of Canadian stakeholders.

A parliamentary committee on global health could also be established to guide the work across various federal departments. And we could follow France and Sweden in appointing a global health ambassador to lead government engagements.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is seen in Vancouver shortly after his election in October 2015.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

We already have precedents, including Canada’s Ambassador for Climate Change and Canada’s Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security — roles that signal the country’s leadership and commitment to collaborate with the global community.

Canada can use a global health strategy to engage proactively as a leader on the global stage. In 2015, a newly elected Justin Trudeau declared that Canada was “back.” There’s no better way and better opportunity for Canada to prove it than now with a comprehensive global health strategy for the post-pandemic era.

Erica Di Ruggiero, Director, Centre for Global Health & Associate Professor, University of Toronto and Garry Aslanyan, Manager of Partnerships and Governance at the WHO Special Programme TDR, and Adjunct Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sipekne’katik backs out of commercial lobster season citing fears over safety

Conflict over Mi’kmaw lobster fishery reveals confusion over who makes the rules

Researching the issue

We’re part of a small group that has been examining these very issues since 2014, and includes scholars with expertise in ocean governance and marine policy and colleagues from the Assembly of First Nations. Our research project, Fish-WIKS, aims to understand how Indigenous and western knowledge systems can be used to improve the sustainability of Canadian fisheries.

The processes that feed into decision-making in fisheries in Canada have been primarily influenced by western science‐based knowledge systems that focus on a reductionist approach to understanding problems. In contrast, Indigenous ways of knowing are based on world views and values that are integrative and holistic, or as Elder Albert Marshall of Eskasoni First Nation once spelled out, “wholistic.”

Who would have guessed that our results from examining an alternative governance structure for the livelihood fishery in Nova Scotia through the lens of both knowledge systems, referred to as “two-eyed seeing,” would coincide with the current conflict playing out in the lobster fishery?

Two-eyed seeing

In two-eyed seeing, knowledge is viewed as a system that comprises what is known and how it is known. But a knowledge system, whether western or Indigenous, is composed of many things.

Conceptual illustration of components of a knowledge system.
(A. Giles, L. Fanning, S. Denny and T. Paul, 2016)

What we know, how we practise our knowledge, how we adapt to it and how we transmit and share knowledge are the more familiar elements. But the values and beliefs that underpin these elements, and which actually distinguish one knowledge system from another, are often ignored.

This is a problem because the values and beliefs underpinning one system are often at odds with those of another system, potentially creating a barrier to collaboration. However, the Fish-WIKS projects showed there are similarities that can bridge these knowledge systems and lead to greater understanding of the differences.

Governance gaps

Our research identified a number of gaps in governance that have contributed to the lobster fishery situation we have today.

There is still no federal policy to address livelihood fisheries and the issue of livelihood as a treaty right is not mentioned in the Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy, the primary policy guiding the federal response to Indigenous fisheries

There are also conflicting views on who has the authority to manage fisheries, which stem from the perceived legitimacy of each governing system. Legitimacy influences whether a political action is perceived as right or just by those who are involved, interested and/or affected by it.

The two sets of rules for fisheries arise from the protection of Aboriginal and treaty rights in sections 25 and 35 of the Constitution, complicating the issue of legitimacy. This legal pluralism gives DFO the authority over non-Indigenous commercial fisheries while limiting its capacity to govern Indigenous fisheries.

A man sitting at the back of a fishing boat with a smiling toddler on his lap. — A Mi’kmaw fisher holds his son on his boat before heading out to set traps in Saulnierville, N.S. on Oct. 21, 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS /Andrew Vaughan

In addition, Canada must justify any limits it places on the rights of Indigenous people engaged in fishing practices, as determined by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. vs. Sparrow in 1990. The court also affirmed Miʼkmaw treaty rights in R. vs. Simon in 1985 and R. vs. Marshall in 1999.

Our research confirms that Mi’kmaq are aware of challenges with the exercise of treaty rights and supports the necessity for Mi’kmaq to develop fishery and fishing rules that are legitimate in the eyes of Mi’kmaw fishers, non-Indigenous fishers and DFO. Some communities have developed such rules, incorporating knowledge from both western and Indigenous systems.

However, the question remains, does DFO have the justification to intervene with Mi’kmaw lobster livelihood fishing practices if, as Dalhousie University fisheries expert Megan Bailey pointed out, there is no scientific evidence that the current practice of the lobster livelihood fishery threatens the sustainability of the stock?

This needs to be cleared up. The Fisheries Act gives the DFO broad regulatory authority and this may extend to Indigenous fisheries. But the Marshall decision narrows that authority to apply only “where justification is shown.”

Moving forward

Canadians need to recognize that this current conflict playing out in Nova Scotia represents not only an operational nightmare for DFO but is a deep-seated governance issue. It requires developing a mechanism by which Mi’kmaq can legitimately contribute to the governance of fisheries as an integrated whole.

Short-term solutions will be identified, but a longer-term solution must address the legal pluralism that exists in Canada and facilitate the adoption of other forms of governance models in which DFO does not have exclusive authority.

The current focus on the lobster livelihood fishery and finding a dollar definition for “moderate” misses the fact that the underlying governance gap is the crux of the issue.

Steve MacLellan

Ramble On

Tag Archives: federal

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