Letter to the General Secretary of the United Nations: Financing for Development (FDD)

Your Excellency,

With hopes and expectations grounded in years of participation in United Nations summits—and rooted before that in the good earth of Christian social ethics—we write as representatives of the Canadian Council of Churches to express several convictions about the Financing for Development (FFD) process.

The thinking in this letter is in continuity with work we have done in co-preparing a background report with the World Council of Churches. We have expressed some of these ideas in dialogues with the Government of Canada, and through participation at the Preparatory Committee that has formed part of the lead-up to the Financing for Development summit. Through various stages of this debate we have been contributing proposals that address the growing wealth divide now distorting the global community. Our proposals aim also to counter the ecological recklessness now degrading our common home, planet Earth.

It is with these same goals—social equality and environmental prudence—that we participate in this Financing for Development summit, urging that in the first place justice be sought as “the heart of the matter”, so that the summit’s outcomes will lead to a stronger, healthier and more inclusive global community.