Colonial Canada Now (Part Five). The Boulevard Of Lies.

Colonial Canada Now (Part Five).  The Boulevard of Lies.  Total Betrayal and the Decoration of Despair.

You can put together long-time Canadian sooth-sayer Mel Hurtig and the poster girl of U.S. “progressive imperialism”, Naomi Klein. Strange (you might say) bedfellows.  Mel Hurtig’s book, The Truth About Canada, appears to be the Canadian side of Klein’s “exposure” (?) of U.S. imperial globalization in her books and articles poured out from “the centre”.

But it isn’t so.  He (Canadian) writes of the total betrayal of Canada and Canadians in the service of U.S. gangster capitalism, identifying the bricks making up the Boulevard of Lies leading through the betrayal.  She (U.S. citizen) con-girl Canadian, pushes U.S. news (as the only news) into our faces, helping to blot him out.

He writes flat out of betrayal.  She, winsomely, decorates despair as if to say: “Forget Canada.  Only the U.S. matters.  Don’t worry.  You don’t really exist.”  I was impressed how – in her book, The Shock Doctrine, (U.S. publisher) - Canada cried out for attention, for some focus as example, for specific analysis as part of Klein’s general theory. (And didn’t get it.)  (Yawn)  Canada?  You must be kidding.  Get real.

U.S. citizen, Naomi Klein writes for the U.S. magazine of progressive imperialism, The Nation.  Regularly.  Wow!  Mel Hurtig never writes for The Nation.  I mean who in the U.S. has ever heard of Mel Hurtig?  Naomi Klein is debated in the Canadian flagship of sellout, the National Post, because, well, people in the U.S. notice her.  Mel Hurtig is summarily dismissed in a multi-book review in the Globe and Mail.  Con-boy Canadian Noah Richler does the job, you might say erasing Mel Hurtig.  The bold soothsayer’s book (just incidentally) points to Globe and Mail sellout (its patent fabrications?  its faking of NAFTA benefits?)  Noah Richler, reactionary son of reactionary father Mordecai, is sent in to attach concrete to Mel Hurtig’s feet.  Sent in?  Actually sent in?

Probably not.  In a Nazi death camp, for instance, who needs to tell the guards how to treat the prisoners?

Naomi Klein writes a column about Barack Obama, “exposing” his connections to reactionary, imperialist, U.S. red-in-tooth-and-claw economic theory.  I see the piece in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight (June 19-26 08), proudly re-printed from – of course – The Nation.  Naomi Klein is regularly featured (on U.S. politics) in the Straight.  And Mel Hurtig, long-time Canadian sooth-sayer nailing the story of the sellout of Canada? Does the Straight use him? (Yawn)  You must be kidding.

Naomi Klein plays the great imperial cross-dressing game: U.S.  news is Canadian news.  It isn’t.  Barack Obama, Hiliary Clinton, John McCain – three imperialist leaders of a desperate empire – will all knife Canada.  Period.  Start there.  Winston Churchill said it all for them after the Second World War: I was not elected Prime Minister, he said, to preside at the dissolution of the British Empire.  Of course.  Simple truth.

Imperial leaders run empires.  Empires hollow out, quell, suck blood from, and destroy colonies.  They always have.  U.S. news is not Canadian news except as a story of repression.  That’s not the story Naomi Klein tells.  It’s the story Mel Hurtig tells.  Attach concrete to his feet.  Drop him in Vancouver harbour.  Give her the front page wherever “progressive people” read.  Drive her, waving, down the Boulevard of Lies.  That’s what colonies do.

Begin there.  Imperial powers rape and pillage.  The U.S. is an imperial power.  Colonies destroy people who resist sellout, the Boulevard of Lies, the imperial power.  Canada, Hurtig remarks, is “opting for colonial status”. (p. 223)  Don’t expect to see him on the Front Page.

Hurtig traces the advanced state of our carefully hidden descent into colonial injustice and colonial despair through matters of child care, education, health care, aboriginal peoples, welfare, unemployment insurance, fraudulent tax systems, repression of history and culture, foreign ownership of the economy, “free” trade, military-arms trade-and social integration with the U.S., devastatingly corrupt energy and water policies and – yes – more.  Rot through and through and through Canada.

He tells the story simply, directly, and in plain English.  Noah Richler falsifies Hurtig’s efforts.  Of course.  The Georgia Straight (radical, alternative press) ignores them.  Of course.

The success of corporate lying and political lying and press/media lying in Canada makes Hurtig’s presentation of facts astonishing, surprising, horrendous.  Otherwise they would be well known and loudly resisted.  The battle lines for Canada were drawn – in our time – forty years ago.  Hurtig’s book, The Truth About Canada, echoes the words spoken and printed back then.

A surge of concern about Canada and its future moved through Canadians as the fires died down from the 1967 Centennial celebrations.  1968 saw publication of the Watkins Report (“Foreign Ownership and the Structure of Canadian Industry”), the Wahn Report, 1970, (“The Eleventh Report of the Standing Committee on External Affairs and National Defense Respecting Canada-US Relations”), and the Gray Report (1972) (“Foreign Direct Investment in Canada”).

All were products of the Canadian parliament, revealing growing dependency and colonialism in the country. Out of their work came the Foreign Investment Review Agency, the National Energy Program, and more.  All such effects of the national concern expressed, however, were either watered down or wrongly interpreted.  All, finally, were gutted.  Gutted.

The Reports named were paralleled by enormous activity in Canadian society, producing the National Farmer’s Union, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canadianization movement in the universities and colleges, the Canadian Artists Registry, the Committee for an Independent Canada, the Canadian Liberation Movement, the Council of Canadian Unions, the “Waffle” movement in the NDP, and much more, bursting like bombshells on the Canadian scene.

Perhaps symbolic of the resistance to demands for independence  was the treatment given the Gray Report.  Pierre Trudeau wouldn’t release it to the public.  At a Committee for an Independent Canada-provoked meeting in Ottawa, he said its release would upset the stock markets.  The Report only saw the light of day because it was leaked to and published by the monthly - Canadian Forum.

The imperial screws began to be tightened.  Mel Hurtig doesn’t record that U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Robinson, held “secret” meetings in Ottawa (with sympathetic sellout Canadians) to move to some device that would prevent Canada ever again making moves towards independence.  Their program to assure  that goal was … Free Trade. 

The three Reports named above told the story of Canada’s growing colonialism almost as if written today.  The Watkins Report is echoed over and over in Hurtig’s book: pages 107, 108, 132, 184, 191, 212, for instance.

So what do we know?  That the problem was laid out in plain language between 1968 and 1972, and the Canadian population worked actively forward while politicians (in the pay of corporations) moved slowly … backward.  Then the fully designed stripping of Canadian democracy was set on foot – its symbol being the Free Trade agreements.  The stripping continues in full operation under the (present) direction of Stephen Harper, a wholesale attack on the very legitimacy of Canadian government. (Where are you Naomi Klein?) And notice.  No Opposition Party is holding rallies in Confederation Square around Hurtig’s book, The Truth About Canada.

Mel Hurtig’s book shows us where we are now.  It is a deeply important Canadian document that could shape revolution in Canada, now.  So don’t read it.  Read Naomi Klein.  She’s prettier than Mel Hurtig, a U.S. citizen, and she writes about the U.S.A. in The Nation – about what’s most important to Canadians, the U.S.A.

[Hurtig reports (page 68) “... on average 84 percent of eligible immigrants to Canada become Canadian citizens…[while]…only 32 percent of U.S. immigrants who have lived in Canada for more than 30 years have become citizens”.  No surprise.  Imperials rarely want the citizenship of an inferior people they have colonized.]