Book of the Month

What happened to Canada?

by A Guy Called LULU 1/30/2012 - 9:35 am

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada.

Read the full article at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporations_have_no_use_for_borders_20120130/

This post annoys the hell out of me. Not because I agree one bit with the direction Stephen Harper's right-wing government is taking my country's domestic and foreign policy. I definitely do not. No, it's because given that target-rich environment, Chris Hedges delivers just about the lamest, most tendentious and knee-jerk criticism I could imagine.

I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state.

I was here too, Chris. What did you see that I missed? You don't bother to explain. Not at all. 

Eventually, it becomes clear he's talking about the government's alleged crackdown on dissenters -- and about events that occurred in Ontario, not Montreal. Close enough, I guess. Anti-G20 activist Leah Henderson, recently sentenced to 10 months in prison, is his poster child. He quotes her at length.

What Hedges glosses over is that Henderson, along with five co-defendants, was accused of organizing the anarchist rioting that caused a few million dollars of damage to downtown Toronto in 2010. Also that she pleaded guilty at her preliminary hearing in exchange for that supposedly draconian sentence, which her lawyer negotiated on her behalf.

I'm sure Henderson sincerely believes that the best way to "fight the man" is to do so literally. I think she's wrong, and that violent spectacles simply undermine legitimate protests. Hedges never bothers to address that issue, even though it seems to me to be an important one if you're complaining about the supposed drift toward a police state.

(In passing, Truthout -- which ran the original article -- is a valuable source of opinion and reporting from the left. I just think this particular piece was crap.)  

by acanuck 1/31/2012 - 5:22 pm

I have traveled western Canada several times, most recently a moto ride through B.C. last summer as far as Stewert and into Hyder, Alaska. I expect to return to some part this coming summer. I have, in the past when traveling in possibly dicey places, kept in mind the advice to identify myself as Canadian if I find myself in a hostile environment among locals.
  I take hedges main point for which he uses Canada as his current example to be:

 
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington.

Hedges certainly is tendentious in his writing but that, in and of itself, is not grounds for any condemnation, IMO, though accuracy is. There are very good reasons to have an opinion and, if it is controversial, to then try to push that opinion into the public consciousness. You say the following:

 
This post annoys the hell out of me. Not because I agree one bit with the direction Stephen Harper's right-wing government is taking my country's domestic and foreign policy. I definitely do not. No, it's because given that target-rich environment, Chris Hedges delivers just about the lamest, most tendentious and knee-jerk criticism I could imagine.

Thanks for showing that Hedges may have been sloppy in one of his examples, that is, by not expanding a bit on the nature and the details of Henderson's actions and of her conviction or simply because they were not a good example to use. That surprises me a bit, he seems to be a good and an honest reporter, though one with an attitude about his convictions which he expresses tendentiously.
 I linked to this piece not to poke at Canada, a country I have always admired and enjoyed, but because I believe that the gist of Hedges' point is correct and worth noting and I hoped for some feed back from the few Canadiens here. Other than the specifics examples you noted that annoyed you a lot, do you disagree with the essence of his message?
 Anyway, thanks for the response, that is what posts and links are about for me, to see what others think. 

by A Guy Called LULU 1/31/2012 - 6:44 pm (re: acanuck)

Sorry to be so slow replying. The question "What Happened to Canada?" implies some big shift occurred. The only thing that happened was a general election last May that finally gave Prime Minister Stephen Harper a majority of seats in Parliament. In his two previous terms (from 2006 to 2011), he had to govern from a minority position, and needed to moderate his policies to win support from some MPs from the three other parties.

Now freed of that need, the hard-liners in his Conservative Party are driving the government agenda: dropping any pretense of a foreign policy independent of the U.S., military adventurism, weakening of the social safety net, lukewarm support for medicare, a rigid law-and-order approach to crime, watering down gun-control laws, favoring big business over the environment (pushing tar sands, exiting the Kyoto treaty) -- in short, Republicanism lite.

But Harper didn't win his majority through any massive swing to the right by Canadians. His party had about 37 per cent support in the 2008 election; last year it gained less than 2 per cent. In fact, voters moved to the left, dumping the centrist Liberals as the opposition party in favor of the New Democrats -- who proudly call themselves socialists and who pioneered universal health care.

So what we have is a right-wing government trying to implement the nastiest parts of its agenda while it has a free hand. In its fourth year, facing re-election, it will no doubt go back to governing from the center and hope voters have short memories. But Canadians -- especially the poorest and most vulnerable -- will suffer in the meantime.

 

by acanuck 2/1/2012 - 9:51 pm (re: A Guy Called LULU)

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