Paris, France – French President Emmanuel Macron addressed an angry nation on Thursday: He vowed to lower taxes, raise pensions and give more power to local governments.

Above all, he said he had listened and understood. 

“There are parts of society that have fallen by the wayside,” Macron said in a televised speech. “People who to some degree have been forgotten from our public discourse and our public policies.”

For almost six months now, thousands of yellow vest protestors have hit the streets of Paris and other French cities every Saturday, saying they are ignored, over-taxed and becoming poorer as the “one percent” get richer.  

In response, Macron launched the “The Grand National Debate,” in January. He attended hundreds of local town-hall”style meetings across France and solicited responses in thousands of questionnaires, giving the French a chance to vent their grievances. 

The results of the Debate caused a shift in the government, leading to policy changes scheduled to be announced in a televised speech April 15 – before the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral preempted it. 

Meanwhile, the speech was leaked. 

On Thursday, during an hour long speech, followed by a question and answer session, Macron introduced many of those changes.

He said he would review a “fortune solidarity tax” on top earners in 2020 and make adjustments to all French pensions for inflation starting in 2021. 

The policies are not really the problem any longer – the problem is Macron himself.

Martial Foucault, head of CEVIPOF

He also said he would shut down the prestigious Ecole nationale d’administration, a college that trains public servants. The school has been criticised as a breeding ground for the country’s elite.

He also offered a few surprises. Macron said he would restructure the parliamentary election system to give more power to smaller parties and make it easier for citizens to launch national referendums.

But for many watching, it was too little too late.

“It just feels like the middle class is always the one that pays while the upper class is still being protected,” said 49-year-old Sandrine Placier who watched Macron speak from a neighbourhood bar in Paris’s working-class 20th arrondissement (district). 

Even so, Placier did applaud Macron’s announcement that he would put an end to planned closures of a number of public hospitals and schools.

“Even if I find him arrogant, he won points with me there,” said Placier, a medical engineer in the public sector. 

According to an Odoxa poll released last week, the majority of French citizens support the reforms. 

“The policies are not really the problem any longer – the problem is Macron himself,” said Martial Foucault, the head of CEVIPOF, a think tank. “In a sense they believe Macron is no longer the right president to respond to this crisis.” 

Macron started his speech by saying he was “confident” that the measures taken in the first two years of his presidency “were the right ones.” 

‘He didn’t listen to what we said’

Members of the yellow vest movement, from both the far left and far right, have been united in their distaste for Macron.

They say he is a president for the rich and disconnected with the working class’s everyday struggles.

“He didn’t listen to what we said,” yellow vest figurehead Maxime Nicolle told French broadcaster BFMTV. “He started his speech by saying everything he has done over the last two years has been great and [the yellow vests] just don’t understand that. We understand very well, he is incapable of a mea culpa.”

More than 23,000 yellow vest demonstrators marched across the country on Saturday, with 9,000 protestors in Paris alone, according to the French Ministry of the Interior, holding signs reading “Millions for Notre Dame. What about the poor?”.

The nearly one billion euros donated by French billionaires to help repair the cathedral, they said, could have been used to ease inequality.

The protestors say the movement will continue, regardless of Macron’s words. 

“It’s important we continue, important for social justice,” said a protester on Place de la Republique square in Paris on Saturday, who goes by Voltuan. “This is a historic moment, a historic movement. We can’t stop now.”

According to polls, most French people are fatigued with the yellow vest demonstrations.

While there was support for the movement two months ago, around 60 percent now think they should stop their rallies.

Macron’s approval ratings, meanwhile, have climbed from 23 percent in December – after the protests began, to just under 30 percent. 

Analysts say it might give him enough political capital to usher in real reform. 

Last year, unemployment hovered around almost 9 percent while the economy grew well under 2 percent as buying dipped.

The economy in France, unlike Germany and other Western European countries, did not rebound strongly after the 2008 financial crisis.

I guess I’ll vote for him again – but he’s not my president.

Vincent Caplan, film editor

Macron, a former banker and economy minister, won the presidency with his new party “La Republique En Marche” (the Republic moving forward), promising to jumpstart competitiveness. 

But some economists say his strategy has unsettled many voters.

“He promised balance but I think that since his election, a lot of people have found an economic policy a lot less balanced than they anticipated,” said Shahin Vallee, an economist at the London School of Economics and former advisor to Macron when he was the economic minister.

Macron, with his upstart party, broke the political status quo, but now has an uphill battle.

“I’m among those that are really disappointed in him,” said Vincent Caplan, a 48-year-old film editor who said could only bear to watch fifteen minutes of the speech. “I feel like he’s trying to cut corners but not really succeeding.”

When asked about who he saw as an alternative, Caplan shrugged. 

“Who else do we have? Le Pen?” he said, referring to the head of the far-right National Rally party who ran against Macron in the 2017 presidential elections. 

“We already saw this scene play out once,” Caplan said. “So I guess I’ll vote for him again – but he’s not my president.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden has apologized to Anita Hill for her treatment during the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, a Biden spokeswoman said Thursday.

“Vice President Biden has spoken with Anita Hill,” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. “They had a private discussion where he shared with her directly his regret for what she endured and his admiration for everything she has done to change the culture around sexual harassment in this country.”

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The campaign did not answer specific questions, including about whether the former vice president directly apologized.

Hill told The New York Times in an interview Wednesday that she “cannot be satisfied” by Biden’s apology when she has doubts that the Democratic primary candidate has a true grasp of how his actions have affected her and other women who are victims of sexual harassment.

“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”

Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 and has been repeatedly criticized for his handling of Hill’s testimony during Thomas’ confirmation process, when she accused the now-justice of harassing her while acting as her supervisor. During the televised hearings, Hill faced intense questioning from an all-male, all-white panel of senators. She and Thomas are both African-American.

Hill’s remarks to The Times were published the day Biden officially joined the crowded pool of presidential candidates as a Democratic frontrunner, an attempt to resolve an issue plaguing his campaign before it was off the ground.

In the months leading up to the former vice president’s Thursday morning announcement, Biden also came under scrutiny when multiple women accused him of inappropriately touching them in an overly friendly manner.

Hill, a law professor, expressed concerns about these accusations during her interview with The Times and said she could not support Biden unless he did more to address his past actions.

“He needs to give an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw,” she told The Times. “And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”

Biden has publicly expressed regret about his treatment of Hill, but Hill told The Times that this was the first time he apologized to her personally.

“She paid a terrible price. She was abused through the hearing,” Biden said of Hill during the Biden Courage Awards ceremony in New York last month. “To this day, I regret I couldn’t get her the kind of hearing she deserved.”

The United Nations has passed a resolution to combat sexual violence in conflict zones, but only after it was watered-down amid objections from the United States. 

Washington threatened a veto at the UN Security Council vote on Tuesday over references to “sexual and reproductive health”, saying the wording amounted to support for abortion.  

Eventually, 13 countries voted for an amended text without the controversial phrase.

The final version also removed a reference to a UN monitoring body that would report acts of sexual violence.

What’s really behind Washington’s position? And how much is politics at play?

Presenter: Imran Khan

Guests:

Rina Shah – Republican strategist and consultant

Antonia Mulvey – Executive director of Legal Action World Wide

Angela Muvumba Sellstrom – Researcher at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, University of Uppsala

Source: Al Jazeera News

Montreal, Canada – Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte gave Canada an ultimatum this week: Take back dozens of shipping containers filled with Canadian waste that have languished near Manila for six years – or he will send them over himself.

“I will advise Canada, that your garbage is on the way. Prepare a grand reception. Eat it if you want to,” he said.

Legal and human rights activists in both countries have repeatedly demanded that Canada take back and dispose of the waste, which a Canadian company exported to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014.

A Filipino court even ordered the Canadian government to take back the waste in 2016, but nothing has been done.

Instead, just over 100 containers of household waste and other hazardous materials – more than two thousand tonnes that rights groups have said were first fraudulently labelled as recycling plastics – remain in and around the Filipino capital.

And now, Duterte has said he is prepared to “declare war against [Canada]” to remedy the situation.

“Prepare and celebrate because your garbage is coming home,” he said on Tuesday.

‘Not a dumpsite’

The president’s comments were welcomed by Aileen Lucero, national coordinator of the EcoWaste Coalition, a Filipino environmental advocacy group, who said she was glad to see the issue back under the spotlight. 

Six years have gone by since the first shipment of 53 cargo containers full of Canadian household waste arrived in the Philippines, Lucero told Al Jazeera in a telephone interview, and another 50 containers arrived in 2014.

About two dozen of those containers have been sent to landfills, while the others remain at ports in Manila and Subic, a town northwest of the capital.

“The Philippines is already suffering from our own household waste, our own solid waste. It is really difficult for us to receive garbage from developed countries,” Lucero said.

“The Philippines is not a dump site for the developed countries,” she said. “The waste is still here. It still needs to be sent back to Canada for its proper disposal.”

The issue at hand, explained Fe De Leon, a researcher and paralegal at the Canadian Environmental Law Association in Ontario, is “why did [the waste] end up there and whose obligation is it to deal with that mess?”

“In this case, when they uncovered the fact that there was household waste that ranged from regular dirty diapers to plastics to appliances to electrical material, that became the problem. That’s mixed waste,” she told Al Jazeera.

De Leon said that while some details around the way the waste was shipped remain unanswered, the rubbish should never have ended up in the Philippines in the first place.

“It should have been managed and disposed of safely here in our own country, within our own boundaries,” she said.

The case also raises questions, De Leon added, about whether the United Nations convention that governs shipments of hazardous materials between countries needs to be reviewed.

UN convention

That framework is known as the Basel Convention. 

An international treaty that sets out regulations for transnational transfers, and the disposal, of hazardous materials, the Basel Convention is central to what’s happening in the Philippines.

Entering into force in 1992 and ratified by 187 parties, including Canada and the Philippines, the convention outlines rules around what constitutes hazardous material, how shipments must be labelled, what documentation is needed, and the informed consent of countries taking in the waste.

The company that sent the rubbish to the Philippines first said it was recyclable plastic, but upon inspection, it turned out to be household waste, said Anthony Ho, a lawyer at the Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation in British Columbia.

“The Philippine authorities did not give consent to this Canadian exporter to be shipping household garbage” and therefore, “those shipments are considered illegal traffic under the Basel Convention”, Ho told Al Jazeera.

It’s, therefore, clear that Canada violated the convention, Ho said.

He said the treaty places the onus on the Canadian government to ensure illegal shipments are brought back to Canada within 30 days from when it was first notified of the exports.

While the Philippines told Canada in March 2014 about the waste, Ottawa had argued that it did not have the legal provisions to bring it back, Ho said.

Previously, Canadian law did not classify household waste as a hazardous material, and the government also said it did not have a way to pursue a company that was accused of an illegal transfer

Ottawa passed legislative amendments to address these loopholes in 2016, Ho explained, and he said the Canadian government now “has the legislative tools it needs”.

“If, at the end of the day, the state of export can’t compel the company to ship back the waste, the obligation rests ultimately on the government in question to ensure that the waste is transferred back for proper disposal,” he said.

Nonetheless, “the key enforcement mechanism,” Ho added, “is really political will and pressure.”

Canada ‘committed’ to solution

The Canadian government so far has taken no concrete steps to bring the waste back to Canada.

During a visit to the Philippines in 2017 to attend that year’s ASEAN Summit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was “theoretically possible to get [the garbage] back”.

Trudeau said, however, that Canada and the Philippines were still in discussions about how to deal with the issue, Filipino news outlet Rappler reported at the time.

“There’s still a number of questions around who would pay for it, where the financial responsibility is. This was at its origin a commercial transaction. It did not involve government,” Trudeau said.

But Lucero said that while many people in the Philippines took the Canadian prime minister’s words as a hopeful sign that things would soon be resolved, they have since been let down. 

“It is really frustrating for the Filipino people … It seems that they just issued those promises to silence us,” Lucero said.

“We need to have accurate and concrete timeline this time, not just a promise that they will take back. What we are asking them is when? When are you going to take back [the waste]? It should be as immediately as possible.”

This week, a spokesperson for Canada’s environment minister told Al Jazeera that Ottawa “is strongly committed to collaborating with the Philippines government to resolve this issue”.

In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Sabrina Kim said a joint working group “consisting of officials from both countries” is looking into the issues, “with a view to a timely resolution”.

Kim did not specify when a decision was expected, however, but added that Canada’s 2016 amendments to regulations around shipping hazardous waste aimed “to prevent such events from happening again”.

‘A critical moment’

Kathleen Ruff, director of RightOnCanada.ca, a human rights advocacy group in Canada, said words are not enough, however. “It’s time to take action,” she told Al Jazeera. “The question that comes up is … if Canada thumbs its nose at the law, why should any country obey international environmental law? It’s sending a terrible message … and it’s treating [people in] developing countries as second-class citizens.”

Still, Ruff said there is reason for optimism, pointing to comments Canada’s ambassador to the Philippines, John Holmes, made this week.

Holmes told Filipino news outlet ABS-CBN on Wednesday that Trudeau “committed and has recommitted to resolving this issue, including taking the waste back to Canada”.

Ruff also said a meeting next week in Geneva that will bring all the parties of the Basel Convention together is an important chance to strengthen global environmental protections.

She said two measures that are expected to be voted on may usher in important reforms. 

The first proposal, put forward by Norway, would outlaw exports of plastic waste, and the other would ban waste exports to developing countries, she explained.

“It is a serious global problem … We know that if you can just dump your waste, then there’s no incentive to lessen the amount of waste you produce because you can just make them disappear,” Ruff said.

“It’s a very critical moment.”