Article content continued

The envoy will give his preliminary assessment Wednesday as he wraps up his mission and addresses national media.

His report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council and will form part of Canada’s official international human rights record.

But the question is: Will it matter? Furthermore, some have questioned whether De Schutter should even be probing the state of such a wealthy country in the first place, given the scale of poverty and hunger in famine-stricken nations?

‘It’s even more shocking to me to see that there are 900,000 households in Canada that are food insecure’

De Schutter is the first to admit that Canada’s record is wanton when it comes to responding to concerns flagged by UN human rights bodies. But he bristles at any suggestion that he has no business in Canada.

“It’s even more shocking to me to see that there are 900,000 households in Canada that are food insecure and up to 2.5 million people precisely because this is a wealthy country. It’s even less excusable,” said De Schutter.

“It’s not because the country is a wealthy country that there are no problems. In fact, the problems are very significant and, frankly, this sort of self-righteousness about the situation being good in Canada is not corresponding to what I saw on the ground, not at all.”

Yet that rosy picture is what’s being promoted by the Conservative government.

In a statement to Postmedia News, a spokesman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan emphasized that, since 2006, the government has “worked with First Nations partners to ensure First Nations communities have access to healthy and affordable food, housing, education, and water, as well as economic opportunities.”