Colonial Canada Now (Part Three). Lies, Damned Lies, And Hiding The Statistics.

Colonial Canada Now (Part Three). Lies, Damned Lies, and Hiding the Statistics.  The Truth About Colonial Sell-Out.

Public cover-up is often telescoped by the phrase: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” Not in Colonial Canada Now. The first two are in full gear: “Lies and Damned Lies”. Statistics, even now in Canada, however, often tell the truth.  They are fudged, fumbled, erased, disguised, misread, hidden, re-written – and more, by major press and media, politicians, civil servants, and ... and….

Because?  Because those forces in Canada – and major political parties – have given themselves to the destruction of Canada on behalf of the giant corporations reaming out, levelling,
“integrating” North America on behalf of the rich and the super-rich at the cost of everything that has made Canada a decent country.  How can it be stopped?  Who will stop it?  Why don’t Canadians know?  What’s going on?

I guess we should say here that the pressure on Canada to disappear into the U.S. has been growing intensely.  The bribable are all bribed.  The coercible are coerced.  The stupid are fooled. (And the revolutionary resistance still hasn’t awakened.) It’s forty years ago now that – in a public lecture - Mel Watkins (economist) drew a little picture of the world on the board showing the shrinking of the U.S. Empire.  “Good news?” he asked his audience.  Then he said that for every inch of land and every ounce of power the U.S. loses globally the pressure will mount on Canada.  Canada, he said, provides a land route directly to the U.S., a safe route to funnel every ounce of wealth from Canada into the U.S.A.  And that is what will happen, he said, unless ….

What’s going on? To start, the major press/media drop information of key importance to the people of the country into the trashcan.  That is not an occasional happening; it has to be major policy. Then major press/media sculpt and model and hammer falsehood into place. “O Come On”, you say.  “Give Us a Break. That’s Conspiracy Theory.  That’s Looneyville”. Okay, follow me for a minute. Why not read the recent Globe and Mail review of Mel Hurtig’s must-read book: “The Truth About Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing and Some Truly Appalling things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country”. That’s a great title, and it’s very Mel Hurtig – fighter for a decent Canada for about 50 years.  The Globe and Mail review, as I remember it, was by one of the Elegant Right Intellectuals of the Jack Granatstein, William Christian, Mark Steyn persuasion - who can turn anything into Rightest propaganda.

The review trashed Hurtig, trashed his book, and came as close as possible (without saying it flat out) that you’re an idiot if you read the book.  For those who care, the (vicious) review probably cost a few thousand sales of the book.  Nice work.  So much for the major (free) press and media in our democracy.  Take a look at a distinctly minor publication that prints 70,000 copies per issue.  It’s called Common Ground  (out of Vancouver) - the ground being health, environment, spirituality, culture – AND some hard-hitting looks at the world of politics.

The June issue should go into a Time Capsule for future Canadians.  The June Common Ground provides an absolutely terrifying image of the Canada we live in: Colonial Canada Now.  And it does so in three key features that you have to put together.  One: cover picture of, and interview with Jack Layton, leader of the NDP. Two: a story about CanWest MediaWorks [private corporate, near-communications monopoly (in B.C.), active leveler of journalistic quality, and “Americanizer” in Canada. Read Marc Edge, ASPER NATION, Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company, New Star Books, Vancouver, 2007.] CanWest is suing Health Canada.  Three: Mel Hurtig is interviewed by Common Ground about his new book.

Mel Hurtig doesn’t lie.  He doesn’t get his facts wrong.  He is not (some would say “Alas”) a raving, revolutionary Lefty.  He was, in fact, a pin-up boy for Canadian independence, winning the Order of Canada for his contributions to the country’s survival.(That was when there was still a handful of top policy-makers who wanted Canada to survive.)  Unlike the Globe and Mail, Common Ground lets readers see something of what the book is about.  But first….

First, look at the story about CanWest MediaWorks suing Health Canada (by Dr. Barbara Mintzes, UBC).  It’s about getting advertising revenue for papers and media.  It’s about CanWest wanting revenue, I would suggest, at any cost to people generally, at any cost to protection of the public from full-scale, huge pharmaceutical companies beating and beating and beating drums to get you to buy prescription drugs you probably don’t need.  Where did CanWest MediaWorks get the idea to sue the federal government because the Food and Drugs Act prohibits drug companies from hammering Canadians at every press and media opportunity to buy prescription drugs?  Why, from the U.S. of course, where last year drug companies spent $5 billion on that kind of advertising.

Under that wonderful U.S. system, the arthritis drug Vioxx (for instance), on the U.S. market from 1999 to 2004 was super, high-intensity advertised to ordinary people of the U.S.A. Vioxx was shown to lead to a high level of heart attacks, was removed, and its producer, Merck, “agreed to pay $58 million as part of a multi-state settlement against accusations that its Vioxx ads deceptively played down the drug’s health risks” (p. 8) The law against leak-ads coming into Canada from the U.S. is not enforced by the Canadian government.  Surprise! Why is there no enforcement?   You may have three guesses. That is no reason to permit the madness and mayhem to be in Canada, at all.  But, it would seem, CanWest MediaWorks wants just that madness and mayhem to originate here.  And it’s fighting in court to get U.S. madness clear across the continent.

Then there’s (three) the Hurtig interview about his book.  Quite simply, he reveals the failure of national press and media to report key information, instead to engage in “horrible distortions … to fit their ideology”. (p. 12) [Does that explain the Globe and Mail axe-job on his book?]

He reports that the Right Wing Think Tanks – CD Howe Institute, Fraser Institute, etc. - publish “reports” – often of questionable merit.  No matter.  “Mainstream” press and media copy them without a check on fact.  When National Post regular Diane Francis reports (quite incorrectly) that “Canadians buy up more companies in the United States than Americans buy up here in this country, which is absolute nonsense”, no one questions.  And, indeed, Hurtig points out “prominent Canadian executives such as the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada” contribute to the same kind of untruth.

“Oh well”, you say.  Is that a big story?  It’s huge, because Hurtig goes on to tell Canadians facts they can hardly believe. The facts  show the gentle, caring country they think they belong to is becoming more and more a dirty, Right Wing, moving-to-fascist state – a more and more repressive colony of the U.S.A.  We think we do well in relation to the world on matters of poverty, social services, taxation, education, and so on.

In the interview, Hurtig rhymes off the following facts.  Pay attention to them.  Of the thirty OECD countries (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) – most of the European countries - see how Canada ranks.  First, know Canada has the ninth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world (a way to say production of wealth). Huge. But Canada is 22nd of 30 in caring for poverty.  We land near the bottom - 25th - in social spending.  How good are we at keeping people out of low-paying jobs.  We are 21st – which means there are twenty countries in the OECD with fewer low paying jobs than Canada.  (Colonial countries specialize in providing the imperial country with low-paying jobs.) Twenty-one countries pay better unemployment insurance benefits (though our system has a gigantic cache of unused money).  To keep “competitive”, we’re told, we have to do research and development.  And so, of the 30 OECD countries twenty four do more than we do. Only five are worse than we are.  And in a larger comparison (by countries) of spending on education, Canada comes – wait for it – 91st.  The country that has the ninth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world is 91st in spending on education.  Only colonies or desperately poor countries are in that condition.  We are, obviously, not desperately poor.  And so….

Finally, taxes.  For the last forty years, big corporations have been taking over Canadian government, using it as a piggy bank – and to hell with the Canadian people.  Those corporations have been increasingly (by design) U.S. corporations. During that forty years corporations have paid fewer and fewer taxes, and the ordinary people have been paying more and more and more.  As is perfectly fitting in a colony (but not in a self-respecting country) Canadian (?) corporations (corporations in Canada) pay significantly lower taxes than corporations in the U.S.A.

We could go on.  Foreign ownership.  Attacks on medicare. High-level determination to make Canadians forget what Canada has, is, and can be.  It’s all there.  It’s all fact.  And it all points to the need to get and read “The Truth About Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing and some Truly Appalling things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country.” (And then to do something.  Militant.)

A perfect time then, wouldn’t you think, to turn to (one) the cover picture and the “Conversation with Jack Layton” recorded by Joseph Roberts in the same issue of Common Ground (p.21).  So turn to it.  It’s a chance Layton has that he won’t be given by CanWest or the other “majors”.  And what does he do?  Amost nothing.  Yes, he cares about Health Care.  Good. Yes, he cares about access to necessary pharmaceuticals.  Good.  Yes, he cares about the war in Afghanistan.  Good.  And he also supports proportional representation in the election system.

But there is no analysis.  There is no putting those matters into the bigger picture of destruction of the country, Canadian colonialism – to use Mel Hurtig’s words – The Truth About Canada.  Here is Jack Layton offered a wide-open chance to reveal and to take up the absolutely vital issues Hurtig takes up and to relate them to the Canadian desire for a healthy, peace loving, well administered country.  And he fails. He skims the surface.  He wants nice things.  Softly. Every politician in Canada fails with him.  Think of that.  Think of it.  I said in the last column in this series that the politicians of all parties in Canada have given up on Canada, that they devote themselves to the North American Corporate plan for Canada. I’m sure Jack Layton would deny that. But he doesn’t act as if he knows the trouble we’re in or as if he passionately intends to fix it. Nor does any other politician I can name.

In 1979 I led a party called The National Party of Canada – an independence party founded to stop what was happening and what has happened since 1979. The Party failed.  But we tried, and fought at it for five years.  In 1993 Mel Hurtig led a party called The National Party of Canada – an independence party to stop Free Trade, dirty North American integration – the things that happened since 1979 and have gone on happening.  Alas, the Mel Hurtig Party failed, too.  He’ll tell you why.

So the call is out.  “Third time”, they say, “good luck”. Now is the time for all good Canadians to come to the aid of the National Party of Canada – to found one, to fight it into success, to go at the facts Hurtig hands us all in his new book, and to change the history of the country, for good – and for the good.