The voice that wasn’t heard at G20 Summit

Joanne McDonald
June 30, 2010

While world leaders wrapped up the G20 Summit with an agreement to slash fiscal deficits, and police made 900 arrests in downtown Toronto, the issues that brought 25,000 protesters to Queen’s Park were largely ignored.

Concerns around climate change, worker rights, human rights, global water shortages and the increasing gap between rich and poor were addressed by eight civil society leaders at the Shout Out for Global Justice, Friday at Massey Hall.

Water warrior Maude Barlow said it’s time for a huge global uprising of civil society to say, “that’s enough,” joining speakers in rejecting the G20 as a decision-making body.

“Stop this damn summit,” said Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians. “No more boys’ club, no more global royalty. Send them to where they belong: at the UN (United Nations).”

“Our world has never faced a greater set of issues than it does today,” which she said, the summit, costing $1 million a minute, will not address.

Barlow is leading a global movement to have water declared as a universal human right. “Knowing there will not be enough water, rich countries are buying up water and creating a new wave of colonialism.”

“Canada has retreated from its former stellar stand on human rights,” Barlow told 2,300 people at the historic hall. “I love my country, but based on Harper’s record, the UN should deny Canada a seat on the Security Council.”

The G20 is a clear attempt to sideline and marginalize an already weak UN, said Naomi Klein.

Author and journalist, Klein said the biggest test of the fledgling G20 has been to deal with the financial crisis. “Banks were on their knees begging for public money and this was our chance to restructure the financial system,” she said, adding, “nothing happened.”

“Now here we are at the austerity summit where they’ll stick us with the bill for their former follies.”

Klein said bad debt will now be transferred from the private to the public sector; “the only quibble at this summit is how fast and how deep the cuts should come.”

“Don’t roll over and accept it,” Klein said. “Let this G20 be the place where we draw the line.”

Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya, an environmental justice organization that represents five million farm families in India, said the biggest fight is over the land of the poor being taken by corporations with the help of the G20  “wheeler dealers.”

The worst thing about world order by the G20, Shiva said, is that “it cannot be done without deep militarization.”

“Drilling, killing and spilling.” Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now lamented the lack of discussion by G20 leaders of the Gulf Oil spill.

“Runaway corporations have to be held to account,” said Goodman. “In order to do that we need independent media, one The outcome of the G20 will lead to a dramatic austerity drive and “the most aggressive attack on working families,” said John Hilary, executive director of War on Want, in the U.K.

Meanwhile, he said, bankers are getting off scot free, “and we’re being forced to pay for the crisis.”

“The most regressive socially unfair model you can take is now being rolled out across Europe. Britain has sacrificed jobs on the altar of the free market. Yet the same failed policies are coming back with the free trade agreement (being negotiated) with Canada and the EU.”

Pablo Solon, Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations called for building a global coalition to support a UN declaration of water as a universal human right. Solon recounted how Bolivian peasants replaced governance by a small elite with leadership of the first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who nationalized the gas and oil companies. This movement began with the successful struggle to take back public control of water, when private water corporation Bechtel was thrown out of Cochabamba.

After the failure to reach a consensus on greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen in December, Morales called a People’s Climate Summit in Cochabamba in April to address climate change. “We want to see a 50 per cent reduction of greenhouse emissions in the next negotiations to take place in Cancun or our children will have a very black future.”

Leo Gerard, President of the International Steel Workers, said he never imagined that $1.3 billion (in summit security) could be spent for democratic suppression. That, with the millions in bonuses for corporate CEOs, could have been better spent to sustain health care and create good green jobs “and a better world for our children and grandchildren,” Gerard said.

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