Federal promises to expand the protection of land and water are empty without budget commitments
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This column is an opinion by Gauri Sreenivasan, Mandy Gull and Jacqueline Scott. Sreenivasan is policy director at Nature Canada. Gull is Deputy Grand Chief of the Cree Nation Government. Scott is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and founder of Black Outdoors. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
The federal government is hard at work finalizing a budget that will underwrite our path forward out of the pandemic as a country. That’s why 50 women leaders from diverse regions and sectors, and across Indigenous, Black, racialized and LGBTQ2IS+ communities, are writing to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland this week to remind her that nature’s recovery is essential to our own.
For over a year the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on our health and wellbeing, our economy and our communities. Low-income and working women, particularly from Indigenous, Black and other racialized communities, have borne the brunt not only of job loss in this “she-cession,” but of the physical and mental stress fuelled by lockdowns and school closures, rising family violence and heavy demands on frontline workers.
The pandemic has thrown into relief what we value — and the urgent need to build up and invest in essential support systems that will secure a healthy, and more equitable future for all.
And throughout the pandemic, as it has since time immemorial, our most foundational and essential support system has been nature.
As the buds burst forth and the birds return this spring, people are rejoicing at the prospect of more ways to get outside safely, and the chance to reconnect with each other and the land. While we marvel at nature’s persistent capacity for renewal, natural support systems — from forests, to wetlands, to oceans, and the wildlife they hold — are being dangerously depleted. More than 600 wildlife species in Canada alone are at risk of disappearing.
Nature is in crisis across Canada — and therefore, so are we.
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