Durban Day 5: A Defence of Minister Kent

By Peter Jones

Peter Kent, the Canadian Minister of the Environment, believes that Canada is morally superior to most other oil-exporting countries.  The reasons for this moral superiority are closely tied to our democratic heritage and our Charter of Rights.  The great majority of African countries are like the oil exporting countries to which he compares Canada so favourably. So it is not a logical stretch to believe that we are morally superior to Africa!

That conclusion fits in tidily with Minister Kent’s latest pronouncement on morality and climate change in his comments on financial assistance to assist developing countries.  This proposal has been under discussion for some time and was fleshed out  at the UN Conference on Climate Change held last year at Cancun.  At that time Canada accepted in principle a Green Climate Fund to support developing countries in their efforts to restrict emissions and cope with the mounting impacts of climate change.

Minister Kent appears to reject  “guilt payments” to developing countries.  “There is a fairly widely held perception in the developing world of the need for guilt payment” to be built into any international deal on climate, Mr. Kent said in an interview Tuesday. It’s a view Ottawa does not share. (Globe & Mail news story of November 30, 2001)

Unless one shares a “survival of the fittest  ethics”, this statement is reprehensible.  Canada’s assumed moral superiority does not enable us to dismiss the Western world’s contribution to the poverty and despair of the countries of Africa.

We had to make our disagreement clear before defending Minister Kent.  In the same interview he criticized the claims of China and India to be treated as developing countries when they are among the largest of GHG emitters.  China and India can legitimately say that they have a greater percentage of poor citizens, who do not enjoy anywhere near the standard of living as in Western countries.  But given their present and future prospects of industrialization they should perhaps be contributors to the fund but not recipients.

The reasons for and the need for a Green Climate Fund should never be in doubt.   Pope Benedict and other world religious leaders have been clear on the moral justification for such a fund. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in a shared a video of support, said, “It’s no time for despair – but it’s certainly no time for complacency either. The moral crisis is as real as ever. And we need as never before real moral leadership from the international community. We need to know that governments will fulfill the pledges that have been given by the richer countries, to provide $100bn by 2020.”

Perhaps the problem lies with the Headline given by the Globe & Mail to their coverage of Minister Kent’s remarks: “Kent rejects climate ‘guilt payment’ to poorer countries”. Is his issue with the idea of guilt, the necessity of payment, or both? He needs to set the record straight.

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