NEW YORK — International free trade, capitalism and free-flowing investment capital offer a critical path to long-term prosperity, equality, freedom and world peace, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday in his first address to the United Nation’s General Assembly since 2010.
Sidestepping the issues of terrorism, Ebola and climate change, which have dominated discussion at the UN, Harper chartered a different and uniquely commercial course in his examination of the persistent problems of poverty, disparity, terrorism and war now facing mankind.
Instead, he asked the UN to look beyond the crises of terrorism and Ebola and proposed a broader, long-term solution to these problems, calling on wealthy countries to open free-trade agreements with developing countries, giving them access to expanded markets; and to support investment funds that help destitute mothers and their children as well as other anti-poverty programs.
“Today, there are many embattled parts of the world where the suffering of local populations and the threats to global security deserve our urgent attention, and I could easily use my entire time here on any one of them,” he said. “There are, however, other areas of service to humanity.”
While “extreme situations” confront the world in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and many parts of Africa, “there is more to peace than the absence of war,” he said.
“For this reason, the growth of trade between nations, and the delivery of effective development assistance to ordinary people — simple, practical aid — these are the things that have become the signatures of our government’s outreach in the world,” Harper said. “Trade means jobs, growth and opportunities.”
Trade has made “great nations out of small ones,” he said, using Canada as an example.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper addresses the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Canada free trade agreements have linked together a network of countries that possess more than a quarter of the world’s people and nearly half the world’s business.
“Our free trade network will grow larger yet,” he promised.
Trade alone, however, will not initially help the poor, who “for some time to come will need a helping hand.”
To this end, he said, “saving the lives of the world’s most vulnerable mothers, infants and children must remain a top global priority.”
The Harper government is a major supporter of the UN’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Initiative and the Every Woman Every Child initiative, which he calls a “top global priority” in laying the path to prosperity.
He said millions of lives have already been saved through these programs and urged the General Assembly “to ensure that in the evolving, post-2015 development agenda, maternal, newborn and child health remain a clear and top priority.”
Canada, he said, will support the World Bank’s Global Financing Facility for Every Woman, Every Child with $100 million in funds.
While he said there are many problems and issues facing individual countries that require urgent attention, he urged the UN “not forget to also look beyond those, at the long-term opportunities and efforts that can truly transform our world.”
“We have it in our power to create a better kind of world for our children than we have today,” he said.
“It was never the intention of the founders of the United Nations, Canada being one of them, that ours would be a world where terrorists could get the resources necessary to sow death and destruction, but where workers and families could not get jobs and opportunities, or where mothers and children could not obtain those necessities required to live and to thrive,” he concluded.
