Prime Minister Stephen Harper welcoming Mexican President, Felipe Calderón at the G20 Summit Leaders Dinner. (Credit: Gobierno Federal via Flickr)
In the middle of the G20 Summit in Toronto, a day-and-a-half meeting between more than 20 heads of state from every continent, Prime Minister Stephen Harper took part in a side convention with members of the international business community. The stated intent of the so-called B20 was for executives — including those from Canadian banks, tar sands companies and media corporations — to provide "candid and useful advice" to the Prime Minister. Held outside of the limelight of the official political negotiations, the B20 meeting may offer some clues as to why this year's G8 commitments on climate change and other issues were so underwhelming, and don't reflect public concern over our economy and our environment.
Let's start with climate change. This year's pledge mirror the same undelivered promise made during last year's G8 in Italy — which was to limit global average warming to 2 degrees Celsius. While the goal itself is laudable, action taken to date has been nearly nonexistent. It's actually more likely that temperatures will rise by double that amount. What we needed to hear from leaders this year was some evidence of progress and an action plan for meeting the 2-degree goal — not a shallow reiteration of their previous promise.
For instance, last year in Pittsburgh, U.S. President Barack Obama got G20 leaders to agree to develop a strategy and a timeline for eliminating subsidies to the oil and gas sector. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper failed to name a single existing subsidy to Canada's oil and gas sector that his government is ready to phase out. Those subsidies are estimated at $2 billion per year. Harper has said that his highest G20 priority was to get global leaders to agree to cut spending and eliminate their deficits. One would think that first on the list of expenses to cut in order to balance Canada's budget would be government giveaways to polluting companies that are already making billions in profits. This is probably not the kind of advice the Prime Minister received, though, from the executives who attended the B20.
The B20 meeting may also help explain why there is still no agreement among the G20 nations on applying a bank tax or a financial transaction tax. The U.S. and European governments, many of whom are putting a bank tax in place in their own countries, were pushing to get all G20 countries to agree to a global bank tax. Harper and several of his ministers spent the lead-up to the Toronto summits traveling the world to advocate on behalf of Canada's banks in opposition to such a bank tax. Is this a reflection of the type of advice the Prime Minister is getting from Canada's bank executives at meetings like the B20?
The Prime Minister's corporate convention may also help explain why there was scant media coverage about NGOs being segregated from journalists during the G8 meetings. Veterans of previous summits noted that the arrangements in Canada were unprecedented — even Russia had shown itself to be a more transparent and accountable host in 2006. Did the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, a corporate lobby group that represents media outlets among other industries and was present at the B20 meeting, address the issue of non-profit representatives being separated from journalists by a wall standing over a storey tall?
I also wonder if Canada's business executives told the Prime Minister that any new commitments to assisting the world's poor need to be in addition to existing pledges — and not at the expense of other commitments. The Canadian government's decision in the last federal budget to freeze all overseas development assistance raises the question of which initiatives in the developing world will lose Canadian support to pay for these "new" commitments to child and maternal health and adaptation to climate change? Will Canadian money be taken away from school programs in the developing world to fund fancy new promises? Or will there be less money for fighting HIV/AIDS and malaria?
Standing on the other side of a 12-foot wall, it's hard to know exactly how decisions are made at these types of summits. But looking at the process — and the outcomes — it's easy to surmise that more than politicians and corporate executives need to be part of the conversation. Maybe Harper should consider the value of a P(ublic)-20 meeting when making decisions that will affect millions of Canadians and billions of others around the world.
