John McArthur - Mentions and Appearances
On business as usual, no, the world will not meet its commitments [to the UN Sustainable Development Goals], that seems pretty clear. So, the question is, where can you change business as usual?
We need equal pay for equal work, we need equal representation in leadership roles in public and private sector, we need to remove the discrepancy in unpaid work, we need to remove the problem of violence against women. I don't know any political leaders in Canada that would be against any of those targets. And so what we need is these longer-term strategies where we can kind of push out beyond a political four-year cycle and say, "aha," these investments, these strategies we need to launch, we're going to do it but it's for a 10-year, 12-year horizon and our success will be measured by how we're doing in that 2030 deadline.
In 2000, roughly one in four people around the world was living in extreme poverty. Today, it's down to about one in 12...The question is not whether it's possible, the question is how are we going to do it?
Sustainability is seen as often not a hard-edge issue. It’s not a hard-news issue...But I don’t think that’s quite right, because if we lose our fisheries, that’s a hard issue for much of Canada. If we suffer from catastrophic climate change, that’s a hard issue for us. If there’s floods in Calgary, that’s a hard issue for the people of Calgary. I think we need to understand the connections between these issues.
The more people that are creating, the more people that are innovating, the more that contributes to economic development writ large.
"[The SDGs] provide objective longer-term standards that help push the horizon out from the near-term electoral or political or news cycle, to think about where we are trying to go."
"[The withdrawal from UNESCO] is pragmatic, not a grander political signal."
“Education [is] the ‘super apple pie’ investment”
Dozens of countries could eliminate extreme poverty in short order...without a penny of extra foreign aid required.
The U.S. gives 40 percent of the [World Food Program's] budget. So if you cut 40 percent by 40 percent, that would come to 12 million people a year not getting access to food support.