What happened to Canada? Chris Hedges faults Harper's rule and corporate power

No 398 Posted by fw, January 31, 2012

In a scathing attack in Truthdig.com, American journalist and activist Chris Hedges slammed Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper, asking “What happened to Canada?”

Here’s his opening salvo –

Chris Hedges

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. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

Hedges’ further critique of the Harper regime includes –

• Involvement in G-20 policing action that led to the targeting and imprisonment of a Canadian activist as a “’brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,”

• Attempts to characterize legitimate citizen opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline as being led by “environmental, other radical groups [with] funding from foreign special interest groups”

• Attempts to pit ‘loyal’ Canadians against ‘disloyal’ Canadians in the pipeline battles

To read Hedges’ complete piece, in which he asserts that “The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president” click on Corporations Have No Use for Borders by Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com, January 30, 2012.

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