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Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Jun/16/22 7:02:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, we have complex crises and emergencies: the climate crisis, the pandemic, an energy crisis, the war. All of them are affecting food insecurity. When so many complex systems present themselves in crises, there is more we can do than provide food aid, as his department can do. How do we think strategically to actually confront these multiple crises?

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Context: House Hansard - 90 - Jun/16/22

Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Jun/16/22 10:02:50 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I totally agree that the climate crisis and the food crisis are connected, but not in the way that I think my friend believes. The more we ignore the urgency of the climate crisis and the more we perpetuate some role in our future for the use of fossil fuels, the more we exacerbate a growing climate crisis that drives increasing drought. It means that the U.S. prairies and Canadian prairies will face drought. South Saharan Africa will face drought. This drives more food insecurity and drives more geopolitical instability, which drives more migration. We have to find solutions that work for all the crises we face and drive for solutions that work for them all at once. We cannot pick one over the other.

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Context: House Hansard - 90 - Jun/16/22

Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)

Jun/16/22 10:14:04 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to start by thanking the hon. member for Vancouver Granville for sharing his time with me. I recognize that we stand on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. This debate has been encouraging in that we recognize that there is a looming food crisis and food instability globally, but also dispiriting in that we seem to think we can bite off little chunks of it as an incremental set of issues within one silo called “food”. We are, in fact, facing multiple crises that influence each other and must be dealt with together. I just pulled some clippings I have. I remember when the pandemic was first getting up and running and I flipped this article I found in The Guardian to the person who was then our Minister of International Development. She was also on it, saying she was getting to the World Food Programme. The article is from The Guardian, April 2020, and the headline is “Coronavirus pandemic 'will cause famine of biblical proportions'”. It quoted at length from David Beasley of the World Food Programme. That is where we started from: the pandemic causing huge risk of global food insecurity. Then, of course, the climate crisis made all those issues worse, as it has from the beginning. I mean, the Arab Spring was caused by the geopolitical instability that created the wars in Syria and Libya. That came from prolonged drought, which meant that there were food breakdowns. There was a food insecurity crisis, and it created war. Now we have climate change galloping and galloping, and persistent droughts. Just this last season, we saw droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, droughts through the U.S. prairies, droughts through the Canadian prairies, and now we have an overlay of war. I want to stop for a moment and say something about David Beasley, because I think it is really interesting. I got to know him through the U.S. presidential prayer breakfast. He is a Republican. He is a former Republican governor from the state of South Carolina. He lost his seat as governor of the state of South Carolina when he changed his position on the question of whether the Confederate flag should fly above the capitol. When he took down the Confederate flag, he lost his seat. As I may have mentioned, as a very dedicated Christian, he has put his talents where they are of most use, that being as the head of the UN World Food Programme. He knows what he is doing. It is urgent that we save lives, and we do not save lives through dribs and drabs. Canada must commit at least the $600 billion that the World Food Programme says we need. However, I will turn to another source right now. The question is, how do we, as humanity or as politicians, deal with more than one scary thing at a time? Are we capable of doing it? The word I want to use is “polycrisis”. It comes from Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, who now runs a program called Cascade Institute in collaboration with scientists around the world. I just want to read something from the Cascade Institute website, because I think it helps us: Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled “global systemic risks.” They include climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization [such as cyber-attacks], mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations, and an escalating danger of nuclear war. Compared to humanity’s situation even two decades ago, most of these risks appear to be increasing in severity and at a faster rate.... With one minute left, how do we address polycrises? I suggest that we do not address them as if it is normal business. It is not status quo. This requires that when the G7 meets later this month, when NATO meets, or whenever world governments meet together, they stop thinking that we are going to get out of this with incremental in-the-box thinking. We have to get way out of our boxes. We have to treat the global food insecurity crisis as an emergency and try to save tens of millions of lives while we can. We have to address it as part of the attack on Ukraine and defend Ukraine, but also ask Ukraine to take the mines out of the harbour in Odessa and tell Russia to take away its blockades because grain must move across borders. We have to treat this as a geopolitical emergency and as a crisis of the human family. We can only do it all together.

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Context: House Hansard - 90 - Jun/16/22

Ms. Elizabeth May

Jun/16/22 10:22:42 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I really appreciate the question from my hon. friend from Ottawa West—Nepean. These are not separate crises. If we look at the role Putin has played in undermining our own democracy, the Russian government has been using disinformation websites for quite some time to undermine democracies by provoking a whole series of false narratives. Donald Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, disrupting democracies in the western world, increasing incivility in the way we deal with each other and increasing the risk of white supremacy, which is an example of something that threatens our democracy. We cannot take these things as separate and siloed. We need to defend democracy and attack autocracies and fascist states. In doing that, we need to be conscious of the fact, to be biblical like David Beasley might want me to be, that we cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time. We have to identify the enemy, and the enemy is multinational corporations that seek to profit from every one of these crises.

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