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Bob Rae

October 4, 2021

After a year and half of the loss, fear and isolation of COVID-19, New York has made great efforts to return to its normal, manic pace. At the United Nations, September always marks the beginning of a new session — taking place both in person and now virtually on a wide range of media platforms. As in all New Year celebrations; a chance to reflect on what has gone before and what will emerge as dominant themes. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) calendar is so relentless, and so full of meetings, that it is often a challenge to distinguish between what is just noise, and what are, in fact, signals of trends whose impact will stay with us for a long time.

This year, the ongoing and persistent consequences of both the current pandemic and climate change stood out. COVID-19 has wrongly been described as a great leveller. It is much more a revealer and a magnifier. Well over five million people have lost their lives, and if new variants continue to emerge, it won’t be disappearing any time soon. It is a truly global event, but one that has been addressed locally and nationally, and therein lies the central problem. The virus has not made us more global in our collective outlook, it has turned each of us inward, isolated our reactions, and led to pressure on local and national governments to respond as quickly and effectively as they can to our personal needs and demands.

Governments with the means to do so have stopped at nothing to get the vaccine into waiting arms, and to enforce measures they deem essential to getting the virus under control. This, in turn, has created deep resentment in those parts of the world where governments do not have the same access to reliable vaccines, or the means to borrow the money to deal with both the health and economic fallout from the pandemic. The gap between rich and poor countries has been a constant feature of modern life, and it has been magnified by the current crisis. The speechifying that marks “high-level week”, where each country’s leader addresses the General Assembly, was dominated by this sense of anger and frustration from those who have felt deeply that their country’s plight has been ignored.

The reports and reviews of the global response to the pandemic are understandably full of the same messages, and to say that what happens next is a test of global solidarity is an understatement. The central difficulty is that most governments, and their populations, are more preoccupied with themselves than they are with the fate of the world.  This isolationism, which is reflected on television screens day and night, makes the necessary and deeper commitments more difficult.

A major factor that differentiates this moment from global crises as recent as the 2008 financial meltdown — in response to which the G20 formulated a coherent, effective plan — are the growing roles of Russia and China, particularly the latter.  In the last decade, China has emerged as a major creditor able to leverage its economic power toward political outcomes, while insisting that it is still a developing country. We don’t yet have the global financial architecture to deal with the breadth of that problem.

This tension will play out over the coming months and years.

Climate change reflects a similar tension. The impacts grow with each passing day — severe weather events, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, droughts, floods — the signs are unmistakable and documented in scientific and other reports that point to the inexorable impacts: movement of populations, aggravating conflicts, deepening economic divides, all proceeding apace with alarming consequences for human health and even survival. As always at the UN, there is yet another conference, at Glasgow in November, known as COP26, that will deplore the reality that targets have not been met, that things are getting worse, and that we are far from bending the curve (a phrase borrowed from the struggles with COVID-19).  We know for sure there will be two weeks of rhetoric. Whether this will produce a credible and effective agenda for change is less certain.

In the last decade, China has emerged as a major creditor able to leverage its economic power toward political outcomes, while insisting that it is still a developing country. We don’t yet have the global financial architecture to deal with the breadth of that problem.

What the COVID pandemic and climate change have in common is that they are both, without any doubt, global in nature. While national and local actions are essential to combatting them, they are, by themselves, clearly insufficient to address these issues and their consequences. What is equally true is that they are chronic as well as catastrophic, and the economic and social fallout is having effects that are both long-lasting and deep-seated. The debates at the UN, in both the General Assembly and the committees and side meetings where more detailed discussions are taking place, make this very clear. These discussions are happening at the G7, the G20, all regional and other organizations, in both Geneva and New York, and at all points in between. We do not yet have credible plans to address either the immediate or long-term consequences.

For example, while various announcements were made by a number of countries — the US, the EU, the UK, Russia, China, and India, to name just a few — about sharing vaccines, none of this amounts to a plan. Targets are set, but no clear decisions about how they will be met. This leads to deeper gaps in trust and confidence, and a collective sense of frustration among countries that do not have the means to deal with the health and economic crises that threaten to engulf them. Discussions in Geneva involving both the World Health and World Trade organizations on patent waivers and sharing production capacity have been so slow as to lead the newly chosen head of the WTO to muse about resignation.

Climate change and COVID are far from being the sole focus of discussions at the UN: deepening political conflicts with profound consequences for human life are not diminishing. No part of the world is immune to the dangers: Venezuela/Colombia, Haiti, the Sahel in Africa, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar: each is the scene of great suffering, and debates that reveal deep-seated antagonisms between warring parties and the states that support different sides in the conflict.  Saving future generations from the scourge of war was the original purpose of the United Nations, and it remains at its heart today. Canadian policy has to embrace one central thought: disengagement and indifference to these conflicts come with a clear consequence — malign forces will fill any vacuum. Extremism is fueled by poverty and powerlessness, and can turn to terrorism unless successfully confronted.

While military intervention has no great record of success, neither does neglect. Neville Chamberlain coined the unfortunate phrase “little countries that are far away of which we know nothing”. There are no such places today, and that is a reality which we must continue to embrace. What form engagement takes will be a matter of debate. But that we must engage cannot be in doubt.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Marc Garneau’s September 27th speech to the General Assembly, “In Our Hands”, made the important point that autocracy and authoritarianism are on open display, and have to be exposed and opposed if we are to hold true to our commitments in the UN Charter whose 75th anniversary we celebrated last year.

The United Nations is a place where these conflicts play out in debates on resolutions, appointments to senior positions in the organization, the work and decisions of all the agencies, boards, councils, and commissions of the UN itself around the world. This, again, is what makes the principle of engagement so important. If Canada and others are disinterested in these critical decisions, we shall end up with organizations whose purpose and direction will not serve the interests of human dignity, civil liberties, and the rule of law, and whose public servants are reporting to home capitals and not to the UN itself. These battles are fought outside the glare of publicity, and with not everyone understanding their importance and consequences.

We ignore these challenges at our peril. This is what makes understanding the bigger picture so important. We cannot sit on the sidelines, wringing our hands, shouting “woe is me” to the heavens.  We have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.  We join the world’s struggles with the clear sense that what we wish for ourselves we wish for others. This requires actions, and decisions, and not just words.

Bob Rae is Canada’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.