The Toxic Right In Canada:Definitions, Locations, Characteristics. (Part One)

When Jean Chrétien was refusing to jump on the U.S. bandwagon to undertake an illegal, falsely-based, brutal, U.N.-disapproved war against Iraq, Stephen Harper urged Canada to go “shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S. And Stockwell Day couldn’t suppress his enthusiasm for the idea of sending Canadians into the U.S.-manufactured hell called the (endless) Iraq War. Even in recent days, Preston Manning, failed leader of the Toxic Right and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute, has made an argument (Globe and Mail Mar 11 05 A17) that we are betraying Canada’s war dead. How are we doing that? By not joining the U.S. in its insane and suicidal missile defence plan to control the world by military force. Not only is Manning willing to pervert and destroy Canadian language; he is willing to do so by claiming our war dead would want us to join U.S. frantic, brutal militarism. Using corpses of Canadian soldiers and the great First World War poem, “In Flanders Fields,” Preston Manning makes a claim that is conscienceless, ugly, and a perversion of the idealism of soldier poets like John McCrae. Language for the Toxic Right is made to be destroyed. Power Corporation and the Demarais may be Toxic Right, though I need to know a good deal more about their operations before I can say. (I’ve begun asking questions so that I may write about Power Corp here.) Certainly, the small article by Mark Steyn of the Alberta Report (now called the Western Standard) on Power Corporation and Jean Chrétien (greeted with delight by right wingers) is mostly yellow journalism. He suggests Chrétien kept Canada out of the Iraq War because of Power Corp oil interests and contracts with Saddam Hussein. Let us appeal to logic. Power Corp, we are told, stood to lose if Saddam Hussein was removed. The U.S., Britain, and their many allies were going to war with Iraq. There was no doubt a war was about to begin. No one doubted that Iraq would be brought to its knees, Saddam Hussein would be dethroned, and a government sympathetic to the U.S. would be set up. The U.S. was even saying in a loud voice that countries wanting to share in the spoils had better join the War Against Iraq and be quick about it. To serve the interests of Power Corp, Jean Chrétien should have taken the advice of Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day – to fight “shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S.A. THEN Chretien could have said: “Okay, we did what you asked. Now cut a deal in the New Iraq for Power Corp (to which I am personally related) to get its “share” of oil. Instead, Chrétien refused to go along with the war, cutting off Canada from U.S. approval and goodies. To say Chrétien kept Canadians out of the Iraq war because Power Corp had heavy oil interests and deals with Saddam Hussein - it just doesn’t make any sense. Power Corporation may be very bad. As for Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, I have fought them constantly. Neither – in my judgement – is a good Canadian leader. Martin is very suspect over the charges of secret moves to integration with the U.S. – though that conflict is not completely clear yet. To call them “The Toxic Right,” even so, is to blur definitions, to obscure differences, to wipe out the fundamental divide between the “Canadians” and the “anti-Canadians” in our public life. It is in the interest of the anti-Canadians, incidentally, to maintain and increase the blur. Jean Chrétien was and Paul Martin is too far right for many, many Canadians. Stephen Harper (and his CanWest public relations organization) have crowed that they - the U.S. Republicans in Canada – have re-shaped the Liberal government and moved it to the right. In that expression of joy they are probably correct. But the Liberal Party of Canada (to say nothing of the New Democratic Party) is not Toxic Right. Not yet. What is the political philosophy of the Toxic Right in Canada? Two, what is its attitude to Canada, to Canadian history and traditions? Three, what is its attitude to faith and belief? And four, what does it think about Canadian independence, about education in Canada? The political philosophy of the Canadian Toxic Right is market-economist, hyper-individualist, neo-liberal, annexationist, fundamentally anti-Canadian, and tirelessly engaged in the destruction of language as it has meaning for Canadians. When Thomas d’Aquino, mouthpiece of annexationist corporate forces in Canada (officially: Canadian Council of Chief Executives), says he is a “nationalist,” the only possible comment can be that he is engaged in the destruction of language in Canada. If he is a nationalist (as he said he is on the CBC in late March), Stephen Harper is a New Democrat, the Pope is a Muslim, Queen Elizabeth is an atheist, and Gordon Campbell didn’t sell B.C. Rail to CN. The market-economism of the Toxic Right and lies about its real meaning are keys to its existence. The Toxic Right believes a market economy must be the dominant power shaping all life and society. The implications of that idea have to be lied about. A market economy is an artificial, sick-capitalist structure forced upon society and upon the natural human and ‘resource’ wealth of the planet. It is hyper-individualist. That means the Toxic Right wishes to turn all relations between (and interactions among) people into saleable things, into commodities, into ways of making profit for some few, private individuals. Nothing must remain that is simply “human,” that has no financial value, that is the shared wealth of all the people, that belongs to a way of life that considers money, profit, buying and selling, and “the market” as present and perhaps useful but not fundamental to the definition of humanity, human nature, and what “being human” is about. A market economy is intended not only to make every human good saleable - a commodity - but also to create endless, useless, environmentally poisonous “needs,” and to undertake those activities for a small class of irresponsible, greed-driven hyper-individualists whose primary and continuing goal is the accumulation of private wealth and power. In Canada, the missionaries for a market economy see Canadian difference and a viable, independent Canadian economy as nonsense – and more, as impediments to the greatest possible accumulation of private wealth by the predator class. The Canadian economy and Canadian difference – for them - must both be erased. The hyper-individualism of the Toxic Right produced the National Post column I referred to in an earlier piece (Paul Kedrosky, “Enron’s Excellent Alberta Adventure,” Feb 6 05 FP 11). In the column Kedrosky celebrated the Enron manipulation of energy supply in Alberta to force fuel costs astronomically high and the Alberta government into using taxpayers’ money for palliative “rebates.” That kind of behaviour, the columnist said, is what corporations are about – working just inside the law to manipulate, deceive, outsmart, betray trust, AND TO MAKE PROFIT for private individuals. The “private individuals” don’t see themselves as organically part of the society, but as predators upon it, whose role is to find instances where manipulation, deceit, and betrayal of trust can be used to “outsmart” organized society and wring wealth from it. If that description seems to be the same as an ordinary description of criminals at work in society, so be it. If a market economy, market economism, and hyper-individualism are what I say they are, why do they prevail? Why do they have so much power in Western society now? They do so because the organized forces that back them – large corporations, political parties like the Stephen Harper/Stockwell Day/Peter MacKay Right Party in Canada, infiltrated governments in the west, whole press and media empires, and the overall activity of organized power in the U.S.A. – are immense and tireless in their physical and propaganda programs to validate a market economy and hyper-individualism. Canadians everywhere face that endless pressure. It comes from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Free Trade Agreements, almost all formal spokespersons and research sources in the U.S.A., and increasingly from so-called “Canadian” press and media – especially the highly manipulative and deceptive CanWest Global. The foreign and local forces reach into the lives of Canadians daily and affect their understanding. Take, just for instance, the organizations that give credit ratings and economic success indicators to Canadian provinces. They are constructed to test the power of market economism and hyper-individualism only. They are NOT constructed to measure economic justice, community viability, care for the vulnerable, or any humane quality of living. Your daily Canadian newspaper trumpets that B.C.’s credit rating has just inched up. First, a U.S. rating service, “Standard and Poor,” raised it last November. The latest rise is announced by the Dominion Bond Rating Service. (Sun Mar 16 05 D1 D10) What has nudged up B.C.’s credit rating this time? Spokesperson for Dominion Bond Rating Service Eric Beauchemin says that “improvements” are “evident in the three-year public service wage freeze, its [B.C.’s] tight labour force management and government restructuring.” (D10) Another way of saying that is to point out that “improvements” are evident because there is a large increase of the homeless in British Columbia, because supervision of the environment has been cut to destructive levels, because health care employees have been slashed and burned by the B.C. government, and because the Crown Corporations are being destroyed and sold off for suicidal short-term gain. And, of course, because the Campbell government is undermining universal medicare in the province. All, apparently, visible “improvements.” Dominion Bond Rating Service can glow with optimism about B.C. because it considers an “improvement” every attack upon the living standards of decent, ordinary people in B.C. But there is something vastly more ugly about the report of DBRS. To all appearances, it is an election campaign gimmick on behalf of the Toxic Right B.C. government by a Toxic Right “objective” economic institution. The bond rating review was unnecessary, but in a highly padded newstory, with Toxic Right “experts” weighing in favourably, CanWest and BDRS were able to produce electioneering material for the Gordon Campbell government at a key moment going into the election. How are British Columbian Canadians to cut their way through the calculated juggling and manipulation of facts to see the real condition of the their province? CanWest’s Vancouver Sun, the Dominion Bond Rating Service, and the Gordon Campbell government have no intention of letting the ordinary citizens see clearly and honestly the real condition of British Columbia. I write above that the political philosophy of the Canadian Toxic Right is to engage tirelessly in the destruction of language as it has meaning for Canadians. The BDRS report and its coverage by the CanWest Vancouver Sun about the “solid footing” of “B.C.’s economy” is a perfect example of the destruction of Canadian language. In that connection a few comments by Toxic Right spokesperson William Thorsell are helpful. He was editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, a close friend of Brian Mulroney, and is now head of the Royal Ontario Museum. He was, in the examples I use (and fittingly), praising the U.S. as a model for the ideal society. (Canadian Toxic Right people adore the U.S.A. and want to BE it. In addition, they lump all social and community organization for protection of the weak and vulnerable together as products of “utopian socialism” and “Marxist dictatorships.” ) Thorsell poured out his Toxic Right ideas when he was head of the Globe and Mail. They are even more meaningful today. Thorsell celebrates New York City as “alive,” and he celebrates the U.S. generally, because “the principles of the market economy prevail even into the heart of American politics…” (Globe and Mail, Sept 4 1993 D6) He is excited because in New York (but for him, obviously, not in Canada) he finds “vigour and rigour,” and “intellectual curiosity, wit, and information, strenuously and pleasurably argued.” For Thorsell and others of the Toxic Right, such a condition requires hyper-individualism and a market economy which - he takes for granted - produces “grime and crime,” a price “one is tempted to pay.” “Grime and crime” (meaning slums, oppression, and violence) are the natural results of a hyper-individualist society in which a predator class preys on the rest. Or as William Thorsell complacently writes (Globe, July 16 1994 D6), the “horrors and despair of the slum remain largely within it. The slum becomes a manageable fact of life, a world largely unto itself, with its own dynamics and rewards, even its own pleasures.” He celebrates that condition. “On a global scale the collapse of utopian socialism in the former Marxist dictatorships is already producing the vibrant, visible class distinctions that have characterized most societies of the past.” Most Toxic Right believers are less open than William Thorsell, who publicly looks forward to a return to the qualities of the old days that “characterized most societies of the past”: does he mean the 14-hour work day, child labour, and the charming culture displayed by “the horror and despair of the slum”? Market economism and hyper-individualism create a world in which ordinary people are set apart as animals to be used as animals. The political philosophy of the Toxic Right believes social predators should be prized because the political world for them is a world in which the goal of power may be reached by any means and in which ordinary people do not exist to be served by government but to be fleeced by it in cooperation with corporate capitalists. In B.C. the Gordon Campbell Toxic Right government has off-loaded a large number of employees in essential care services. Their wages have been slashed, and that with the complete approval of the B.C. Gordon Campbell cabinet. Those workers have been forced into (mostly) foreign-owned corporations which profit handsomely from the oppression of their Canadian (largely female) employees. If everything in society is to be governed by market economism, then little by little all working Canadians should be stripped of decent wages and social securities in order to provide increased profit for near-criminal and criminal hyper-individualists. The Toxic Right wants to end universal medicare, free and publicly assisted universal education, all Crown Corporations creating revenues for public expenditure, and equality of treatment for clients. The Toxic Right wishes to privatize all public services, water resources, parklands, and natural resources. Placed in private (often foreign) hands, enterprises in those areas will make policies of use based upon all services being saleable things - commodities, again - bought and paid for privately at whatever prohibitive prices. Those who can’t pay don’t get: education, health care, access to parks and wilderness, even energy to heat their living spaces. The political philosophy of the Toxic Right doesn’t only deny human equality; it denies fundamental human worth. It wants – along with its openly honest spokesperson, William Thorsell – to take Canada back in history; to what Thorsell calls “neo-feudalism”; to a place where ordinary human beings are denied humanity and are treated as cattle on behalf of hyper-individualists whose goal is to bloat themselves with wealth and power and to desecrate all the others. The “horrors and despair of the slum [will] remain largely within it,” with the exception, perhaps, of “grime and crime” that will leak into non-slum areas. The Thorsell view of the world is the view shared sometimes openly, but more often covertly, by the largest number among the Toxic Right. That is Part One on the subject of the Toxic Right in Canada. Part Two will follow. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 29, 2005]