The UN’s condemnation of Canada is insulting and ridiculous 
By Nile Gardiner 
May 17th, 2012
Telegraph
– HYPERLINK http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100158472/the-uns-condemnation-of-canada-is-insulting-and-ridiculous/ \t _blank http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100158472/the-uns-condemnation-of-canada-is-insulting-and-ridiculous/
The United Nations Human Rights Council has just launched a broadside against, wait for it, Canada. Its preposterously titledhttp://www.srfood.org/ \t _blank  ‘Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,’ Olivier De Schutter, has accused the Canadians of unacceptable “rates of food insecurity,” and has called on the federal government in Ottawa to adopt “a national right to food strategy.” Mr De Schutter himself is no stranger to controversy, recently penning http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/24/climate-change-human-rights-issue \t _blank a piece for The Guardian calling for the establishment of supranational “human rights courts” to address climate change.
In – HYPERLINK http://www.srfood.org/index.php/en/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2253-canada-national-food-strategy-can-eradicate-hunger-amidst-plenty-un-rights-expert \t _blank a remarkably Orwellian statement issued yesterday, De Schutter, an expert on European Union law, declared:
Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in ten families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs. These rates of food insecurity are unacceptable, and it is time for Canada to adopt a national right to food strategy.
What I've seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and Aboriginal non-Aboriginal peoples. Canada is much admired for its achievements in the area of human rights, which it has championed for many years. But hunger and access to adequate diets, too, are human rights issues — and here much remains to be done.
A large number of Canadians are too poor to afford adequate diets. “800,000 households are food insecure in Canada. This is a country that is rich, but that fails to adapt the levels of social assistance benefits and its minimum wage to the rising costs of basic necessities, including food and housing. Food banks that depend on charity are not a solution: they are a symptom of failing social safety nets that the Government must address.
De Schutter subsequently went on to damn the Canadian government for levels of obesity in the country:
More than one in four Canadian adults are obese, and almost two thirds of the population is overweight or obese, costing at least 5 billion Canadian dollars annually in health care costs and in lost productivity. “This is also a result of poverty: adequate diets have become too expensive for poor Canadians, and it is precisely these people who have to pay the most when they live in food deserts and depend on convenience stores that charge higher prices than the main retailers.
Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration has rightly blasted the UN report, as well as UN interference in the sovereign affairs of one of the world’s leading democracies. Canada’s health minister Leona Aglukkaq met with De Schutter, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/canada-hunger-un-idUSL1E8GGP0N20120516 \t _blank describing him as “an ill-informed, patronizing academic studying, once again, the aboriginal people, Inuit and Canada’s Arctic from afar.”
One would think the United Nations would be concerned with real deprivation and hunger, in places like North Korea and Zimbabwe, instead of focusing on one of the richest countries in the world, with among the highest overall living standards on the planet. Even the UN’s own Human Development Index (HDI) http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/CAN.html \t _blank ranks Canada sixth in the world out of 187 countries. But then again, De Schutter represents the discredited UN Human Rights Council, which http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/membership.htm \t _blank includes in its membership some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, such as China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Its bar has been set so low that even Libya under Colonel Gaddafi was elected to membership. The HRC is a farce, and their latest report on Canada is further proof of it.
The UN’s condemnation of Canada is both insulting and ridiculous, a further symbol of the long-term decline of a world body that is all too often used as a battering ram by dictatorial regimes to bash the West. It is time for Canada, the United States and Great Britain to press for the creation of a new human rights organisation outside of the UN system, one that actually promotes liberty across the world instead of undercutting it. Canadians, like their British and American counterparts, have fought for freedom time and time again, from the beaches of Normandy to the battlefields of Afghanistan. The last thing they need is to be lectured on “human rights” by a pompous Belgian bureaucrat backed by Beijing, Havana and Moscow.