Canada: Country in Regression

by C. L. Cook

Canada is seemingly groping its way back to its brutal, pre-democratic, colonial past. Witnessing the state-sponsored hostility towards the citizenry in Toronto over the weekend, I can only conclude: Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party vandals were quite correct in rebranding the country when they took office in 2006. 

 

But where Mr. Harper and his reconstituted Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) collaborators erred was in minting themselves as only the 'New Government of Canada.' It would have been more accurate to say the CRAPers were the government of the 'New Old Canada'

 

In a nod to its new old direction, Harper and his elite pals gathered at the G20 decided to take the nation and the world way back to a time of serfs and general penury. This will be done, we peons are to understand, in the name of "deficit reduction."

 

Like its predecessor excuse to suck up the wealth of the people and distribute it to the leisure class, The War on Inflation, this new old war against government debt will do nothing to address the actual dynamics of debt; it will do nothing for example to stop spending ever greater amounts of public money on war and war preparation, neither will it lean ever fattening tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, nor curtail ballooning budget allocations for the burgeoning police and prison complex. No, as in the 1980's, the money to pay down the debt of nations will come out of already withered social programs.

 

Fittingly, July 1st, the former Dominion Day cum Canada Day, will see the introduction to the land a new tax. The Harmonized Sales Tax, (HST) that broadens the reach of already existent consumer taxes, is slated to being in British Columbia and Ontario where citizens will as of tomorrow pay more for almost everything they buy, even as they receive less for their money in services delivered, (Unless endless war overseas and an army of paramilitary police at home count as services). 

 

There is resistance to the new tax in B.C., but as seen on the streets of Toronto, and glimpsed in Victoria's rarely occupied Legislature, the governors don't give a damn about the wishes of their subjects, and they are armed and ready to bust heads and ditch the constitution if any doubt their dominion.

 

But, Canada's new old found degeneracy extends beyond its paltry border to the far off lands of its fellow former Raj member, India where today, as state media organ, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) reports a new old deal being signed to provide India's nuclear program. Canada ended its atomic association with India in the seventies when it was discovered India was using plutonium provided them by Canada to develop a nuclear arsenal. This was something the Indians had promised they would not do. It was also something that led to a nuclear arms race between India and neighbouring Pakistan.

 

Stephen Harper and his pals in the New Canada Government aren't worried India will break promises of proliferation, now that its relations with the neighbours is so much better than in the 1970's. Harper, says the CBC, is "heralding a new era in Canada-India relations" after signing a deal during the G20 with his opposite number, Manmohan Singh.

 

The deal means a boom for Canada's uranium business and a glowing future for resource towns across New Canada. The future is indeed so bright, we'll all be wearing old lead shades in the true north.