What an odd article on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper today. The title: “China set to buy up Canada’s resources“. It’s as if the paper has never heard of the massive control over Canada’s natural resources exercised by the United States. Then you get the story talking about China’s human rights record (oh yeah, China has human rights problems — not like any other country with control over Canada’s resources).
What an odd article on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper today. The title: “China set to buy up Canada’s resources“. It’s as if the paper has never heard of the massive control over Canada’s natural resources exercised by the United States. Then you get the story talking about China’s human rights record (oh yeah, China has human rights problems — not like any other country with control over Canada’s resources).
Canada has an odd economy. It has some features of a third-world economy, with natural resource extraction by foreign capital featuring heavily. It has some features of a first-world economy, with research, development, education, and national capital supported by a government. And it has some features of an exploitive imperial economy, with multinationals exploiting resources and labour in poor countries. When “Third World” countries like China start acting like that, the whole chain of exploitation is going the wrong way. No wonder the Globe and Mail is incensed enough to make a front page story out of it.
