Honourable, senators, I rise now to speak to Bill S-230, an Act respecting the development of a national strategy for soil health protection, conservation and enhancement.

I’m going to begin with a little art history lesson. In the year 1337, the Renaissance painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti was given a great commission: to paint a huge fresco on the walls of the Hall of the Nine in the Palazzo Pubbilco in the city state of Siena.

Siena was a proud republic, ruled over by a council of nine magistrates. Lorenzetti’s job was to create a work of art that would remind the magistrates and all those who came after them of the value of good government, of a city and community governed by the virtues of temperance, justice, prudence, courage, magnanimity and peace. The commission took two years, but the finished fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, endures as a masterwork of Italian Renaissance art.

On the one side of the hall are the scenes of good government. They show a happy city full of shops and businesses, customers and merchants, dancers and musicians – a bustling urban streetscape that looks, even now, like someplace I’d like to visit.

Next to the urban sophistication, we see an equally happy countryside. Rich green farmland with happy farmers working the land, fields and flocks and orchards, and, in the distance, wilder mountainsides covered in a thick forest of trees. A scroll of words above tells viewers that everyone may till and sow without fear, as long as justice remains sovereign.

But on the other side of the hall we see what happens when justice, temperance, prudence and courage fail, when we lose the capacity to be magnanimous. In the allegory of bad government the city has fallen into ruin with robbers rampaging through the streets. In the countryside, gone are the happy farmers and livestock. The land is brown, grey, barren, ravaged by drought and fire. The fields go uncultivated; the trees bear no fruit. Even the low mountains in the background look as though they’ve been strip-mined.

Lorenzetti’s frescos are almost 700 years old, but their allegory is as apt today as it was in the 14th century. A good government is one that looks after and protects the land – the agricultural land and the wildlands. A good city is one that lives in harmony with a healthy countryside. Let the land be destroyed, and peace and plenty disappear with it.

Now, I’m going to let you in on two secrets. I’ve never been to Siena and I’ve never seen the frescos of The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in person. The last time I studied art history was in my first year of university. Still, I’ve been haunted by the story and images of Lorenzetti’s masterwork ever since I saw some slides of it this summer. I wasn’t in Italy. I was, in fact, in Bonn, Germany, where I had the honour to be invited to attend the Global Changemaker Academy for Parliamentarians, hosted by the United Nations Staff College and the G20 Global Land Initiative.

Inspired by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the summer school program gathered 29 parliamentarians from 29 different UN member countries for a kind of boot camp on issues of soil health, land restoration and Indigenous land rights.

I was joined by members of parliament and senators from as far north as Sweden, as far south as Kiribati, from Suriname and Eswatini, Mongolia and Colombia, Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. It was a remarkable opportunity to meet with politicians, academics, UN experts, NGOs and advocates, all focused on the issue of preventing and reversing land degradation. And it put the recent work of our own Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry into a stark global context.

According to the United Nations, 90% of the earth’s soils could be degraded by 2050 unless we act now. As much as 52% of the world’s agricultural soils are already degraded. And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO, estimates that the world has only 60 years of soil remaining.

Around the world, land is degrading at a rate of 100 million hectares per year – land lost to urbanization, deforestation, industrial development, mining, pollution, over-cultivation and drought.

What are we doing to stop or reverse these dire trends? In November 2020, at the Riyadh Summit, the leaders of the G20 countries launched the Global Initiative on Reducing Land Degradation and Enhancing Conservation of Terrestrial Habitats. The ambition of the Global Initiative was to prevent, halt and reverse land degradation and to reduce degraded land by 50% by 2040 – a huge goal. How? By conserving land and halting habitat loss and land degradation; by promoting integrated, sustainable and resilient land management, primarily through nature-based and traditional practices; and by restoring degraded land through strategies such as reforestation, sustainable and regenerative agriculture and biodiversity conservation, among others.

On paper it all sounds tremendous. Alas, such grand international commitments are not so easily enforceable at local levels. It’s not enough to sign pledges and make promises. We actually have to act. That is why I am pleased to support Bill S-230, an Act respecting the development of a national strategy for soil health protection. The bill, sponsored by my friend and colleague Senator Rob Black, builds directly on the top recommendations from our groundbreaking — you should pardon the word — soil health study, Critical Ground.

The bill calls on Canada to designate soil as a strategic national asset and to recommend or make recommendations around the appointment of a national soil health advocate, part of whose job would be to raise public and political awareness of the importance of healthy soil to our environment, our agricultural economy and our food security. This would move our committee’s recommendations out of the report and make them law, ensuring that our soil report doesn’t — well — gather dust.

Now, at the risk of sounding cynical, designating soil as a national asset, even assigning someone the title of soil advocate may sound just as idealistic and intangible as the G20’s own Global Initiative, but I believe it’s a small, vital first step.

Most Canadians — and most politicians and policy-makers — are urban. We are not connected personally to the soil or the land. We’ve lost the intimate connection between the city and the country that those marvellous Sienna frescos celebrated.

So, when you present statistics about land degradation or soil health to most Canadians, their eyes glaze over. But the simple acts of designating soil as a strategic national asset and appointing someone to be soil’s political and public ambassador could help shake Canadians awake. It could also help Canada to meet its own G20 commitments to reverse land degradation.

In Canada, of course, protecting and restoring land gets complicated from a federal perspective. While agriculture is, in our constitution, a matter of shared federal and provincial jurisdiction, land management generally falls under provincial purview. In our confederation, it’s pretty much up to provinces, municipalities and counties to figure out how to reclaim mine sites, manage orphan wells and regulate land development.

As a side note, I tried explaining this constitutional limitation to my classmates in Bonn. They looked at me, perplexed. The MP from India said helpfully to me, “Couldn’t you just change that?” He didn’t quite understand why I hooted with laughter.

So no, we can’t rewrite the Constitution, and as an Alberta senator, I’d certainly not be one to argue that we should ride roughshod over provincial rights.

But a national soil advocate could assume a leadership role, convening provincial, territorial, Indigenous and municipal leaders to talk about how we can best preserve, manage and restore the land we share. And we need to have that conversation right now.

Canada is at an inflection point. Our traditional trade relations are in tatters. Our people don’t have enough housing in which to build their lives. The world’s political order is undergoing a tectonic shift, and no one knows what will happen next.

As a nation, we need to ensure our economic sovereignty and our long-term prosperity. Small wonder the momentum is accelerating for us to increase oil, natural gas and metallurgical coal production, to fast-track new copper mines, to explore for more critical minerals, to revitalize our nuclear power sector and to build more affordable housing on greenfield sites and productive agricultural lands. Many of these projects, including those that have already been designated projects of national interest, have tremendous economic and social merit.

Yet, while Canada is facing all kinds of economic and political uncertainty, the need to safeguard our domestic food security is also real and pressing. We need clean and healthy soil to grow nutritious food that is untainted by pollutants and carcinogens. And we need to preserve our agricultural land if we want to maintain and grow our export markets and ensure that we can feed ourselves, especially at a time when many Canadians are growing even more skeptical about the economic, political and health impacts of buying imported American food.

We must find a balance. We must find a way to ensure that we are not paving over, polluting or degrading our vulnerable natural ecosystems and our most fertile soil, nor running over the land rights of Indigenous communities and farmers.

We run, of course, into that perennial issue that the Senate cannot author a bill that requires the spending of money. In truth, I don’t know what it would cost to designate soil a national asset or appoint a soil ambassador, or if those costs could simply be absorbed by the Department of Agriculture’s existing budget. But I do know what it would cost if we don’t start taking the issue of soil protection and land degradation seriously.

Temperance. Prudence. Courage. Justice. Those principles, so beautifully depicted on the walls of Renaissance Siena, are as vital to good governance today as they were in the 1300s. And without good governance and care for our soil, our land will be left as bleak and barren as Lorenzetti’s darkest imaginings.

Thank you, hiy hiy.

Please, fire away.

I don’t know if any of them had a national soil advocate, but many were deeply engaged with these issues. If you are from Kiribati and your soil is literally being subsumed by the sea, the matter is very pressing. The MP from Namibia represented a party that represents people without land, and she was a passionate advocate for returning land to people who would husband and tend it.

In every country that was represented there, people were absolutely seized with this issue.

What was exciting about this gathering was that many of us did not know what the others were doing. I would like you to know, Senator Black, that I took with me all the QR codes for our soil study and made sure that every delegate and member of the UN had a copy of the code to our soil study. If they were not paying attention before, I’m endeavouring to ensure that they are now.