Key Takeaways from the 25th International Metropolis Conference in Berlin

Senator Ratna Omidvar Senate of Canada October 19, 2022 climate change, essential workers, forced displacement, Germany, immigrants, refugees, seasonal agricultural workers, temporary foreign workers

On October 18, 2022 Senator Omidvar gave a statement on her key takeaways from the 25th International Metropolis Conference in Berlin. Watch her speech:

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Honourable senators, I wish to thank Senator Tony Loffreda for his very gracious and kind comments about me yesterday. I was, sadly, not in the chamber. Let’s put it down to the vagaries of Air Canada. But I do really appreciate them. I should tell you that he, too, was a rock star, especially as he placed his substantive comments in the context of his own compelling personal narrative. Senator Loffreda, I’m happy to go with you on the road again any time. We do a good two-step.

Substantively, I came back with three distinct but interconnected challenges. The first is the incredible rise in global displacement. These figures are not to be taken lightly, colleagues. We’re now at 100 million globally displaced people. Along with this unfortunate rise in global displacement, there is another disturbing trend, which is the global meltdown in governance and solidarity.

Second, there is the looming challenge of climate migration. In 30 short years, the IOM, has estimated that we will see 1.5 billion — not million — people be displaced. We don’t know where they will go, and we don’t know how they will get to safety.

Third, there is the growing number of so-called low-skilled workers moving for work and filling labour market gaps in essential work — in OECD countries — without certainty for their future, as well as without any predictability for employers. In Germany, I was reminded by Germans about their field experiment with their guest workers, the Gastarbeiter. They paraphrased it to me as, “We wanted workers; we didn’t realize we were getting human beings instead.” Let’s keep that experience in mind.

In each of these buckets, sadly, there is less and less multilateralism, when, in fact, we need more and more. If there is a silver lining I came back with, it’s at the bilateral level. It is the policy coherence and values alignment between Germany and Canada, whether it is energy policy, trade, climate change or migration. As a member of the German-Canadian Parliamentary Friendship Group, I look forward to deepening these bilateral ties in the next couple of years under the capable leadership of our chair, Senator Boehm. Thank you.

Hon. Senators: Hear, hear.