Category: Canada and Empire

So, people who follow this blog know I was pretty worried the last time around about a conservative victory. I created the ‘fear and loathing report’ to follow the election. This time I managed a measly two blog entries. Partly, admittedly, my blogging output has fallen off. I am trying to spend a little more time thinking and less time writing. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Partly though I suppose I am just more calm about the possibility of a conservative victory. Not because it wouldn’t be bad, by any measure I can think of. More because I realized if they don’t win this time, they’ll win next time. The liberals have been in power for too long. When that happens people vote conservative. That’s been the pattern over the past few decades. Then the conservatives run the country into the ground – run up the debt, destroy the public sector, engage in corruption – and then people vote liberal again.

That’s a kind of comforting mainstream analysis – to think of politics as a cycle. A few days ago I was feeling alarmist. I don’t think of history as a cycle so much as a spiral, anyway. But it seems to me the world sees these elections as pretty low-stakes. The winner will be pro “free trade”, pro intervention in other people’s countries, pro following the US military to disaster in Kandahar, pro occupation of Haiti, pro “getting tough on crime”, pro integration with the US, pro privatization, pro deregulation, pro dispossession of Palestinians, pro war profiteering. True, the degree to which the winner is reactionary remains to be seen, but there’s agreement on these fundamentals.

I tried discussing this with a colleague at work, explaining why I was seriously considering abstention (I didn’t abstain, I just voted).

“If you abstain,” he said, “you don’t have the right to complain about anything.”

“What if I reject all the available choices?”

“Then you should choose the least bad, or run yourself.”

“What if I reject the whole system?”

“Then pack up your sh*# and get lost!”

I thought that was a bit too “love it or leave it”. But I wasn’t stumped: “But I have nowhere to go. I reject the global system!” He shrugged and said he was torn between the Green Party and the NDP, both of which had reasonable platforms. I said I wasn’t impressed with the foreign policy of any of the parties.

“Your problem is that you’re at odds with the whole population. Of course the parties are going to reflect the population.”

An interesting point, that. Whether we’re voting or abstaining, whether we’re right-wingers or liberals or leftists or anarchists, we all want to believe we’re in tune with the population. Abstainers point to the 40% who don’t bother to vote. They’re the silent majority who’s with us – and you can add lots of those who do vote, because they’re just trying to choose the best of a bad lot. Liberals and conservatives just point to the electoral results themselves. Social democrats argue for proportional representation. The leftist thesis is that the media prevents certain issues and facts from reaching the population, distracts them, demobilizes them, and that if the population knew more, and felt more empowered, they would be inclined to be leftists. Can we take all that for granted, do you think? It’s what I go on as a working hypothesis, but sometimes, and it’s usually around elections when right-wing parties get elected, I wonder – if I am at odds with the majority, does that mean I should do something different?

A last thought for vote night. Maybe Canada isn’t so much going against the trend in the Americas as it’s 5-10 years behind the trend. The liberals discredited themselves. If the conservatives disgrace themselves (though it might not be giving them enough credit… they have some slick machinery, some smart advisers from Australia and no doubt the United States), then maybe the left will have a shot. That was how the PT in Brazil (and for that matter the Bolivarians in Venezuela) got in: the other parties went down in corruption. What the PT did with the power once they got it is another story.

Counterevidence: The PT got in because of a reputation for innovative management based on what they did in the state governments they controlled. If we make the analogy between the NDP and the PT, the NDP have won provincial power, and having gotten into power, proceeded to not distinguish themselves from those to the right of them.

Enough. It’s time to go watch TV.

So, the 2006 elections have gone well so far. Bolivia and Chile have both gone to the leftists. But Canada will be moving rightward.

It’s interesting to see how the editorializing on behalf of the Tories goes. It’s basically – the liberals are bad, and the tories really aren’t as bad as you think. Quite a sales pitch.

Even though my first inclination was to abstain this election because I wanted turnout to be low (points to anyone who guesses where I would have gotten a notion like that), I’ve found a reason to vote. Someone reminded me that the party you vote for gets $1.75 in federal funding. And in Canada apparently it’s harder for parties to raise funds from corporations, which is a good thing.

But what I wanted to do in this blog entry was to point out a few other things that are going on. Of course, these are not the sorts of things that should be debated by candidates or the public at election time, so it makes sense that they aren’t part of the electoral conversation (that’s sarcasm).

Like the bombing in Kandahar. The injured soldiers, the diplomat, dead. Canadian officials talking about preparing for more like that. Do the injuries and deaths have any relationship to Canada’s foreign policy? To the way Canada’s linked up with the US military in Kandahar?

Like bin Laden. The US Terror War, which has alienated the world, increased every kind of terror including the kind the US is at war with, and which everyone seems to agree Canada should get more into, not less (while everyone else in the world is trying to move away).

Like Haiti, where the elite is trying to set the UN up to do a massacre so that elections can be cancelled. Why would they do that? Because they can’t pick the winner. Which, incidentally, is why they got rid of the last guy. So, if these pre-planned massacres do happen and the elections are cancelled or just delayed again, what side of democracy will Canada be on? What are the different sides of this debate? Who is prepared to talk about what is really going on in Haiti?

More consensus: Americanization of the justice system (mandatory minimum sentencing). “Free Trade” (something that’s at the heart of the left shift in the Americas, but well outside discussion in Canadian politics).

No wonder Canada’s going against the trend. There’s a single issue in this campaign, “corruption”, and it is by nature moralistic, not ethical, let alone political. So much consensus, so little at stake. But so much at stake, too. We’re missing a lot.

So, there’s an election on in Canada apparently. Everyone else is doing it (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, Israel, Palestine, maybe Haiti), why shouldn’t we?

I didn’t pay much attention at first because I figured I’d already seen the episode: a report comes out, it turns out that the liberals are corrupt because they were in power, the conservatives want a chance to be in power so they can be corrupt, someone wins, there’s corruption, meanwhile Canada does large-scale dirty corrupt stuff (Haiti) and no one notices or cares.

Continue reading “Filth Canada!”

You can say this about our media operators: they are scientific.

Continue reading “Measuring the effect of the Leslie/Hillier propaganda op”

Between Hillier’s recent spate of commentary and Major-General Andrew Leslie’s recent poison on Candian airwaves, it is clear that there is some kind of media operation underway. The target is the Canadian population. The objective is to try to develop a level of racist bloodlust. The means is pretty basic American propaganda.

Continue reading “A syllogism for Major General Andrew Leslie”

The head of Canada’s armed forces is trying to start a race war. This general Hillier, who weeks ago explained the intensification of Canada’s military campaigns in Afghanistan with comments like: “These are detestable murderers and scumbags, I’ll tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties… We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”

That was Hillier’s contribution to poisoning the airwaves with hate.

Continue reading “Americanization and Hillier’s Race War”

I have had the honour of participating in a so-far small but I believe politically important campaign against Canadian war profiteering, focusing on a corporation called SNC-Lavalin. I gave a long talk to a group about the topic, with some information on the corporation and some thoughts on related issues, a few months ago. Today, the shareholder’s meeting of SNC-Lavalin in Toronto, was, in a sense, our first test.

The action started at 10am, since the meeting started an hour later. Turnout was small, and there are several reasons for this. The first and most obvious is that Canadian war profiteering, despite being a long tradition, is not well known and indeed, while most Canadians are against the war and occupation in Iraq, most Canadians also think Canada isn’t participating in the war and occupation in Iraq. So there’s the chicken-and-egg problem of needing to do actions like this to raise the issue, and that such actions will be limited in size so long as the issue is not well-known…

There are also serious organizational and resource limitations. I know personally many of the organizers of today’s event, and I can tell you that they are a bunch of fanatically devoted hard-working people who are stretched to the gills with the amount of work they are doing, with essentially no resources. Along with organization there’s also logistics – the shareholders might be able to go to the meeting during business hours. The only demonstrators who could go were folks who work in the afternoon or evening, or students, who were most of the demonstrators.

Adding to these difficulties was the appalling behaviour of the police. This is to be expected, and is taken for granted, unfortunately, but there were a few dozen people mobilized to raise issues that are of life-and-death for millions of people (and death for tens of thousands already), and the police responded with horses, paddy wagons, special surveillance equipment, and plenty of plain nastiness. They made several arrests that seemed to me to have been motivated by pure vindictiveness (and possibly training, wanting to try out violent techniques on more or less helpless people in a street setting). One of the arrests was far closer to a kidnapping, with several huge armed men nabbing a kid after the demonstration had already ended and speeding off in an unmarked vehicle. It was shameful for the macho posturing and for the political message conveyed – no the two are doubt related. The organizational and personal costs of these arrests are high, especially since those singled out for arrest were some of the most energetic and inspiring people who will now have to deal with whatever trumped-up charges the state will come up with.

For something to set against all these costs, I believe the demonstration was a political victory. Indeed, the costs might have ‘overshadowed’ the victory for us, but according to the Canadian Press article about the meeting, SNC’s first-quarter profit was ‘overshadowed’ by our protest.

The CEO of SNC-Lavalin, Jacques Lamarre, also provided (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps perfectly wittingly) proof, as if it was necessary, that Canada’s participation in the Iraq occupation should not be considered to be merely a matter of corporate participation, but was in fact official government policy. “As long as the Canadian government tells us you can sell to the U.S. government, we will do it,” he was quoted on the newswires saying. “We never make any sale . . . which is not 100 per cent approved and reviewed by the Canadian government.”

Tells something about the relationship between a corporation like SNC and the state, if the violently disproportionate behaviour of the police was insufficient to do so.

(On a more personal note, I had an odd verbal exchange with a police officer who I at first thought was merely trying to run me over with his bicycle, but turned out had come over to call me an ‘anti-semite’ for mentioning Israel/Palestine during my brief turn at the megaphone. You see, from what we’re able to tell, SNC-Lavalin is involved in building highways and settler-only roads in Israel and the occupied territories, and is thus helping apartheid and occupation there as well. I mentioned this role, and mentioned as well the well-documented and widespread use of torture by Israel against the Palestinians, showing how occupation and torture go together in Israel/Palestine as in Iraq. The officer said something like: ‘You know, I am just here to do a job, I didn’t have any problem with you people, but then you bring this anti-Jewish stuff into it. You’re a bunch of anti-semites’. I replied that it wasn’t about Jews. He said, approximately, that I didn’t know anything about it, because I hadn’t been there. I said I probably knew more than he thought, and that I’d been to Jenin. He said he’d been to Israel and that they were fighting a war there (suggesting, perhaps, that he was a volunteer in the Israeli army?) I knew nothing about. (He was quite wrong. I’ve seen his war. ) This went on for a while – I suppose I am sensitive to being called a racist, even when the person making the accusation is a violent racist himself. My friends thought I was putting myself in unnecessary danger talking to him. I suppose the image that came to my mind when he was talking to me wasn’t so much the wreckage that he and the people he identifies so strongly with have wrought on the people he has such contempt for that he can’t even acknowledge they exist – see Junaid Alam’s article, linked just above, for an interesting discussion of this – but Neta Golan, at the Qalandiya checkpoint, trying to reason with a similar fellow saying and doing similar things. That was a long time ago now, and I’m not Neta. But enough about that all.)

This was a long day, and the kind of day I’ve needed. This morning I was on a Jamaican radio program called ‘The Breakfast Club’ – discussing Canadian politics, more or less debating a University of Toronto professor called Nelson Wiseman. Wiseman provided a ‘mainstream Canadian politics 101’ for the Jamaican audience, and I tried to raise some broader issues (the coup and occupation and mass murder in Haiti, the Conservative agenda, the Liberal agenda being nearly identical to the Conservative agenda, etc.). The program itself was a kind of debate format, with a ‘left-wing’ host named Trevor Munroe, a trade unionist and professor, and a ‘right-wing’ host named Anthony Abrahams who had been tourism minister for Jamaica. Later tonight I had a conversation with some other activists who were quite impressed with Jack Layton’s budget move. I think it was good too, but we all agreed/lamented the absence of strong social movements at this stage who were capable of intervening and pushing support for a budget that is, symbolically, a sort of a big deal in that it is a reversal of the major fiscal policy thrust of the past few decades. In a sense it proves what David Orchard was saying to me in our interview months back: he said Martin isn’t afraid of thousands of people on the streets. He’s afraid of 3 seats in Parliament. And so with a few seats in Parliament did the NDP achieve this major reverse. Now if movements were capable of intervening, they could push to actually make the reverse real and expand it.

I will have much more to say about Canadian politics in the coming days, since we might be in for another Fear and Loathing election. Canadians who want the report to have a different brand are welcome to suggest them.

http://www.zcommunications.org/war-profiteering-and-us-by-justin-podur

[A talk given in Ottawa on January 21 to an anti-imperialist group at the beginning of a national campaign against SNC-Lavalin, a Canadian engineering firm with a huge number of contracts including a large bullet contract with the US Military].

Continue reading “War Profiteering and Us”