Naomi Klein had a good piece in the Globe and Mail about the international consequences of a Conservative victory yesterday. It was similar to what I wrote in this blog about a week ago. Canadians should read it, carefully. Here’s a quote — not the most moving in it, but a good summary quote:
It is a privilege not to be hated for your nationality, and we should not relinquish it lightly. George Bush has denied that privilege to his own people, and Stephen Harper would cavalierly strip it from Canadians by erasing what few small but important differences remain between Canadian and U.S. foreign policy. The danger posed by this act is not just about whether Canadians are safe when we travel to the Middle East. The hatred that Mr. Bush is manufacturing there, for the United States and its coalition partners, is already following the soldiers home.…
The hawks in Washington like to paint Canada as a freeloader, mooching off their expensive military protection, the continent’s weak link on terrorism. The truth is that around the world, it is blind government complicity with U.S. foreign policy, precisely the kind of complicity advocated by Mr. Harper, that is putting civilians in the line of terror. It is the United States that is the weak link.
I have often wondered about the maxim that “a people gets the government they deserve.” In the third world that ought to be modified to something like: “a people gets the government the United States installs or the murderous criminals the United States uses to try to overthrow the government the people wanted or never even wanted in the first place because it too had been installed by the United States or some previous imperial power.” But in the first world there really are choices — constrained ones, for many, but there are choices. It is usually other people who suffer the most for the choices first worlders make, but it does seem that Canadians are about to make a truly conscious choice to “relinquish the privilege of not being hated for their nationality”, to say nothing of other privileges won in decades of struggle. One of the most repugnant phrases in the whole televised debate series was seeing these politicians ask each other: “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?” Out of their mouths, it seemed rather ridiculous.
And yet. It seems to me that Canadians have more choices than most people in this world. So maybe we should ask each other. “Will you take no responsibility for that, sir?”
