OTTAWA (CP) - Labour leaders representing about 80 million union members from around the world emerged from a meeting Tuesday with Prime Minister Jean Chretien saying he agreed to some of their key demands.
Mamoumata Cisse of Burkina Faso, one of about 30 international labour leaders at the meeting, said Chretien promised to involve African citizens groups in the African aid plan he will propose at next week's G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Alta. "The prime minister assured us that Canada is determined to . . . take account of the social partners, notably the union organizations at the local, regional and international levels," she said.
Critics have panned the G-8 African aid package, known as the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), as a top-down scheme developed without the input of the people it's supposed to help.
Cisse, of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, said most of the 90-minute meeting was devoted to NEPAD, but labour leaders also demanded reforms to global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.
It is customary for the leader of the host country at a G-8 summit to meet with labour leaders, but in the past their concerns have rarely been reflected in the decisions reached.
John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the biggest U.S. labour coalition, said he expects things will be different this time. "We're hopeful and optimistic that our points of view will be making it into the final communique."
At a separate news conference, Canadian social activists, including Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians and musician Bruce Cockburn, stated similar concerns about lack of grass-roots involvement in the G-8 agenda.
Barlow said there will be more soldiers guarding the G-8 leaders at Kananaskis than Canada sent to Afghanistan. She estimated the cost of the 36-hour conference at $15 million an hour.
"All of this is only to promote a set a policies predetermined before they set foot in Alberta," she said. "We are going to continue to speak on these issues in what is fast becoming a corporate security state in Canada."
Cockburn, who will perform at a concert for activists in Calgary during the June 26-27 summit, said he has seen a lot of top-down aid financed by G-8 countries in the Third World.
"It doesn't look like development to me."
He said political dissent is a vital democratic right.
"The silencing of dissent by various means, the attempted elimination of one whole side of the globalization debate, is to me a worrisome sign of worse to come.
"We need to clearly say that spending $500 million on a two-day meeting that will be guarded by 5,000 troops to silence our right to express ourselves is not the Canada that we grew up in."
The Council of Canadians issued a statement calling on its supporters "to base their activities on the principles of peaceful protest."
It called on police and government authorities to do the same.
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