Global Café: Meeting ‘Glocal' Challenges—Canada’s Responsibilities in a Chaotic World

Date: Friday, March 8
Time: 4:30 pm
Location: Edwards School of Business Room 18, 25 Campus Dr., Saskatoon

Free and open to the public

About this event

Meeting ‘Glocal' Challenges—Canada’s Responsibilities in a Chaotic World

Why our political system does us all a disservice as we head into predictable environmental, socio-economic and political crises, and what we can do about it

A talk by Jonathan Pedneault, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada

At age 17, Jonathan Pedneault smuggled himself into Darfur in the back of a pick-up truck filled with rebels to document this deadly rights and environmental crisis for a CBC/Radio-Canada documentary. By then, he had spent two years giving conferences to fellow students about genocide and Canada’s responsibility to prevent mass atrocities. That was his first foray into foreign reporting.

The son of a single mom, Jonathan was raised in the poorer suburbs of Montreal. An early understanding of how privileged he was to be born Canadian impacted everything he later set about to do. For Jonathan, privilege comes with immense responsibilities. And he is one to take the responsibility seriously.

Over the next fifteen years, Jonathan worked to report on crises throughout the world and advocate for greater accountability and global social justice.

Through his work, Jonathan interviewed fishermen in Somalia who had turned to piracy to fight off illegal fishing, documented sexual abuses by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, witnessed failed revolutions in Egypt and Libya and documented excessive force by police in places as diverse as Chile, Belarus and the United States.

With two years spent living in Svalbard, in the high Arctic, and years reporting from places affected by extreme weather events such as the Sahel and Central Asia or with refugees leaving drought and hurricane-affected Central America to face abuses at southern US borders, Jonathan has been in the belly of the climate beast. He knows what’s coming. And why we need to urgently get our act together.

This Global Café event is hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Department of Political Studies and sponsored by the Sustainability Office.

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