Scary news from Canada, which is on the verge of an electoral fascist takeover. The Conservative party of Stephen Harper is headed for a win in the elections of June 28.
While the current, Liberal prime minister, Paul Martin, helped out the coup in Haiti and has been a useful tool for US foreign policy and US/Canadian corporate interests, there are a few differences between him and Harper.
Harper is anti-abortion. Harper is anti-gay marriage. Harper is for openly racist immigration policies (Martin is for hypocritical policies). Harper is for openly supporting the US war on the planet (Martin is for doing so behind the scenes and selectively). Harper wants to boost military spending, get ‘tough on crime’, cut taxes and further undermine and privatize Canada’s fragile public sector, especially its public health care system (Martin is for dismantling these things more slowly and behind the scenes).
In the media, the rise of Harper’s Conservatives is being portrayed in terms of Canada’s dissatisfaction with the Liberals’ corruption after three terms in office. First of all, the Liberals are certainly corrupt — but the Conservatives’ record in power is far worse, and Ontario, the biggest battleground of the elections, just came out of two terms of hideous Conservative corruption and ought to know better than to elect these fascists. If people have to defect from the Liberals and punish them, why do they have to shoot themselves in the head to do so, especially when a third party with a decent platform exists in the NDP?
This is all rather like what happened in Spain, in reverse. Think about it.
In Spain, you had a hard-line right winger devoted to active subordination to the US agenda in Aznar. Despite his population’s desires, he took the country headlong into war and occupation in Iraq. This made his population a target for terrorists, and his population, who never wanted the Iraq war, paid the price. Then the population had a chance to punish him politically in elections, and did so.
In Canada, you have a hypocritical liberal government that decided not to jump on to the disastrous Iraq war openly, but to perform the historically normal Canadian functions of behind-the-scenes aid, followed by sacrificing the Haitian people’s right to self-determination to ‘mend-the-fence’ that insufficient subordination to the US agenda supposedly caused in US-Canada relations (see my commentary of last year for some revolting reactions from Canadian elites. Canadian elites revolted, and threw up a leader who promised to take Canada headlong into the Iraq war and occupation and whatever other imperial adventures the US plans. Now, if the population elects him, will we have to live what the Spanish lived through?
Unfortunately, Canada is probably more like the US than it is like Spain. The American media, and much of the public, couldn’t understand how Spain dumped Aznar after a terrorist attack. They saw it as ‘appeasement’, and everyone knows that a terrorist attack in the US would help the jingoistic right in that country, who people would flock to. The Spanish had the opposite reaction.
Which way would Canadians go, given the choice? Which way will they go? Will we have to find out?
