Group of 78 - Le Groupe des 78

November 23, 2021 Recording - Religious Leader Engagement - An Emerging Contribution to Peacebuilding
2021-11-23 15:00 - 16:30 (America/Toronto) | Webinar
Speakers

Lieutenant-General The Honorable Roméo A. Dallaire (retd)
Dr. Steve Moore
Brigadier General Guy Belisle

Moderator

Dr. Sylvie Lemieux

Outline:
Dr. Moore will speak to the origins of Religious Leader Engagement, inclusive of both Bosnian and Afghan operational environments (OEs). Chaplains were drawn to ministries of conciliation where building relationships and establishing trust with local/regional religious leaders led to enhanced communication and understanding within local populations. Brief overviews of operational anecdotes will demonstrate how chaplains aided Command and their Whole-of-Government partners alike. On completion of his doctoral studies, Moore joined the Concept Cell of what is now the Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre where the concept of RLE emerged—an operational adaptation to the Public Space (JIMP) of local populations in OEs and critical contribution to the Comprehensive Approach. Later endorsed by the Army Capabilities Development Board as a chaplain operational capability, padres now advise Command on the religious terrain (Religious Area Assessment) of an Area of Operation and, security permitting and under the Commander’s direction, engage local religious leaders in OEs at home and abroad.
Brigadier General Guy Belisle will speak of RLE and Religious Area Assessment (RAA) in the context of Canadian Armed Forces current operations. He will highlight the successful application of the respective capabilities within training systems and operations, both expeditionary and domestic. He will address the challenges that have been encountered with not only socializing the concepts of RLE/RAA, but also about the unique demand placed upon chaplains with reference to time and perception. He will conclude on the opportunities that exist for developing the capabilities and how they may be used in the chaplain service of the future.
General Roméo Dallaire comes to Religious Leader Engagement with an appreciation of the value-added of such an operational capability. The Royal Canadian Chaplain Service and the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security are presently developing collective training for chaplains, expanding their capacities to aid in the prevention and reintegration of child soldiers in local communities within operational environments. In his role of Commissioner with the Principles for Peace Initiative, General Dallaire will speak to the potential for RLE to assist in the reframing of present approaches to resolving conflict and establishing a sustainable peace, achievements that have remained elusive to the international community. Religious leaders of moderate voice within local populations offer an available means of better comprehending the historical, deep-rooted grievances indicative of intractable conflict with a view to ensure sustainable stabilization and security. Deemed as trusted community figures, their engagement in, what are often, nascent peace processes, serves to enhance ‘local ownership’, an essential component to the receptivity of other associated endeavours.
Speaker Bio:
Lieutenant-General The Honorable Roméo A. Dallaire (retd)
General Roméo Dallaire is founder of the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security, a global partnership with the mission to end the recruitment and use of children in conflict and violence. A celebrated advocate for human rights, General Dallaire is also a respected author, government and UN advisor, and former Canadian Senator. Throughout his distinguished military career, General Dallaire served most notably as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. He continues to work tirelessly to bring national and international attention to situations too-often ignored, whether the prevention of mass atrocities, the struggle that he and many other military veterans face with post-traumatic stress disorder, or the recruitment and use of children as weapons of war.
S.K. (Steve) Moore, PhD a Padre in the Canadian Armed Forces for 22 years, with operational tours to Bosnia during the war (92-93), Haiti (97-98) and doctoral research in Kandahar, Afghanistan (2006). His post-doctoral work led to the chaplain operational capability, Religious Leader Engagement (RLE), now being integrated into military training. He has advanced RLE within NATO and the Commonwealth, increasingly assimilating a whole-of-government application—concepts now being adapted to the civilian sector. A member of the Editorial Board of the Canadian Army Journal, his publications include Military Chaplains as Agents of Peace: Religious Leader Engagement in Conflict and Post-conflict Environments (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) and Religious Leader Engagement as an Aspect of Irregular Warfare: the dénouement of a chaplain operational capability (CANSOFCOM, 2020).
Brigadier-General Guy Bélisle, Chaplain General of the Canadian Armed Forces, is one of those rare individuals in uniform, having served as an Infantry officer prior to rebadging as a Roman Catholic Pastoral Associate and chaplain. His knowledge and experience as a Combat Arms Officer accounts for much of his effectiveness as a padre with Command and service members alike. Having served with the Royal 22e Régiment for 12 years, he deployed to Bosnia during the war (1992) and as a Padre with the troops both to Haiti, following the 2010 earthquake, and to Afghanistan a year later (2011). Padre Bélisle has held a series of senior positions within the Royal Canadian Chaplain Service prior to being promoted and appointed Chaplain General in June 2021. It is due to his keen grasp of the operational environment that he promotes Religious Leader Engagement, a chaplain operational capability now employed both domestically and internationally.
Dr. Sylvie Lemieux is a retired Lieutenant-Colonel Army Engineer and formerly an executive with the Public Service of Canada who, on two occasions, represented the Green Party of Canada (2008 and 2011). She is a graduate in Civil Engineering from Polytechnique, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Globalization and International Development as well as a Doctorate in Conflict Studies from Saint-Paul University. She is active as a member of peace and foreign policies NGOs and is presently the co-chair of CNANW.

January 16, 2022 Recording - Economic Sanctions: Legal and Policy Implications
2022-01-18 10:00 - 11:30 | Webinar
This webinar was hosted by The Rideau Institute, in cooperation with the Human Rights Research and Education Center, Univ of Ottawa and the Group of 78. It will explore the legal and policy implications of non-UN authorized economic sanctions, a policy tool that is increasingly favoured by Canada, other western states and regional organizations like the EU and the African Union.
Economic sanctions have become an increasingly favored tool of international relations over the last several decades, but they have also become increasingly controversial.
Speakers:
Professor Craig Martin, inaugural RI Senior Fellow, and author of the RI report, Economic Sanctions Under International Law, a Guide for Canadian Policy and EU sanctions expert, Professor Clara Portela, will be joined by moderator and RI President Peggy Mason for this timely discussion.
Craig Martin is a Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law, and the Co-Director of the Washburn International and Comparative Law Center. A graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada (B.A. Hons. His.), Osaka University, Graduate School of Law and Politics, (LL.M), and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law (J.D.), he teaches public international law, the law of armed conflict, international human rights law, international climate change law, and both comparative and U.S. constitutional law.
Clara Portela holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and an MA from the Free University of Berlin (Germany). She is a professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia (Spain), having previously served at Singapore Management University (Singapore) and the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris (France). She received the THESEUS Award for Promising Research on European Integration for her monograph European Union Sanctions and Foreign Policy. She has been a visiting scholar at Carleton University and a visiting professor at the University of Victoria.

February 22, 2022 Recording - The Impossible Dream: Bending the long arc of growth and profit toward social benefit at a time of climate emergency
2022-02-22 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Speaker: Merle Lefkoff, Phd,
Founding Director, Center for Emergent Diplomacy Santa Fe, New Mexico
Event Summary:
Dr. Lefkoff will examine the reasons why “sustainable investing” (sometimes called impact investing or environmental, social, and governance investing, ESGs) is hastening the exponential race toward global climate collapse, even as CEOs like Larry Fink of BlackRock, the most prominent investment leader in the world, promotes companies like BlackRock as the best hope for a more sustainable version of capitalism. Here’s the question she will address: Is it possible to be a good socially responsible citizen, while at the same time carrying out the fiduciary responsibility to make the most profit possible for the shareholders of a corporation?

Merle Lefkoff, PhD
Recently returned from facilitating a workshop at COP26, Merle is a social change entrepreneur whose passion and practice is devoted to the application of nonlinear complex systems thinking to surviving climate change on a much-altered planet. Merle holds a doctorate in Political Science from Emory University and has been a mediator, facilitator, and leadership trainer in active conflict zones around the world. She received a research appointment as Guest Scientist and Affiliate of the Center for Nonlinear Studies, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she worked on computer simulations exploring a range of negotiation strategies in the search for coexistence among competing adversaries. She led the planning group of NGO leaders at the United Nations launch of the Gross National Happiness index and is a member of the Integrative Peacebuilding Network in Ottawa, Canada.

A year earlier, former chief of the Australian Defense Force Admiral Chris Barrie, in his Forward to a policy paper analyzing climate-related security threats in Australia wrote, “our intelligence and security services have a vital role to play, and a fiduciary responsibility, in accepting this existential climate threat, and the need for a fundamentally different approach to its risk management, as central to their considerations and their advice to government. The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats.”

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June 15th Webinar Recording - Do Green Bonds Matter?
2022-06-15 13:00 - 14:00
Outline

Green bonds are one of the hottest options in the fight against climate change, a chance for everyday and institutional investors to match their dollars with their environmental values while getting a return on their investment. At a time when we need a seven-fold increase in climate investment around the world, every funding source has to be mobilized. But the details matter. What defines a green bond? How important are they as a source of climate finance? What difference have they made since they were introduced? How can bond buyers be sure their green investment dollars are going into legitimate climate solutions? Join us at 1 pm ET on Wednesday, June 15 to find out.

Speakers

Sara Alvarado is Executive Director, Institute for Sustainable Finance at Queen’s University. She is former Head of Risk, Canada Infrastructure Bank. Prior to that, she was Senior Officer, Infrastructure New Products & Special Transactions at the European Investment Bank based in Luxembourg. Before moving to the EU, Sara held positions at Manulife, Sun Life, and Scotia Capital. Sara is current Co-Chair at the World Economic Forum’s Infrastructure 4.0 Initiative. She is Board Member at Cambridge Memorial Hospital. She is a CFA charter holder and holds an MBA from Edinburgh Business School.

Mitchell Beer is Publisher and Managing Editor of The Energy Mix, a news site and e-digest on climate change, energy, and the shift off carbon. He traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency to 1977, in climate change to 1997, and delivered a TEDx Ottawa talk in October, 2019 on how to build wider public demand for faster, deeper carbon cuts. A proud moment was building a model wind turbine out of wooden stir sticks with his then-11-year-old daughter, and improv comedy practices are often the best part of his week.

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