Harper's Canada: Mockery of Democracy
By Eric Walberg
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, March
4, 2013
Given
Canada's neo-realpolitik internationally, it is no surprise that
Canadian domestic affairs are following an identical logic. In the past,
Canada appeared to stand apart from such settler colonies as the US and
Australia in dealing more fairly with its natives. John Ralston Saul
argues for the "originality of the Canadian project", that contained
elements of a rejection of the Enlightenment project of Europe/ the US,
which was based on secular rationality and liberal revolution. Canada
was never a monolithic nation state, but rather based on consensus,
incorporating the native philosophy of man as part of nature. Canada's
policy of constant immigration furthermore fuelled the need for a
multicultural "intercultural" ethic. It was never a 'melting pot' and
Canadians have always prided themselves on their lack of US-style
national chauvinism. (Europe is formally multicultural because of its
need for cheap immigrant labor, but old imperial nationalisms live on.)
Saul argues that Canada was 'founded' as a modern nation not in 1867
but in 1701 with the Great Peace of Montreal between New France and 40
First Nations of North America. This treaty, achieved through
negotiations according to Native American diplomatic custom, was meant
to end ethnic conflicts. From then on, negotiation would trump direct
conflict and the French would agree to act as arbiters during conflicts
between signatory tribes. The paradigm is a confederation of tribes,
consensus, the Aboriginal circle, "eating from a common bowl". The
treaty is still valid and recognized as such by the Native American
tribes involved.
French Canadians are generally
pre-French-revolution immigrant stock. Similarly Anglo-Canadians were
against the American revolution (a merchants' revolt against the crown).
The downside of this is Canada's enduring colonial mentality, and the
constant reassertion of conservative elites (Confederation, Borden,
Mulroney, Harper) and kowtowing to the Britain/ US imperial center.
(Diefenbaker was the one exception, defying US empire over stationing
nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, and he was shafted by US do-gooder JFK
and our own do-good Nobel Peacenik Lester Pearson.)
Sadly, this
contradiction in Canada’s conservative colonial heritage has meant that
the thread of continuity from the days when natives counted (it was
their land which the whites wanted to expropriate, albeit peacefully)
has now officially snapped, as Bill C-45, and the political and media
campaign against the native resistance shows.
Natives face not
only official pressure to give up their rights, but they face abuse,
even by those who are supposed to protect them. The residential
education programs, intended to forcibly assimilate native children by
wiping out their languages and traditions and replacing them with modern
(or rather ‘postmodern’) education, was exposed in recent years, even
eliciting an official apology from Prime Minister Harper himself. Most
recently Canada’s national police force stands accused of sexually
abusing aboriginal women and girls in British Columbia, Human Rights
Watch has revealed.
The Idle No More protest movement,
spearheaded by native activists, and joined by other Canadians who are
opposed to the Conservatives' agenda, is making alliances with similar
groups in the US who are opposed to the neoliberal agenda. At the
"Forward on Climate" march in February in Washington DC, Chief
Jacqueline Thomas of the Saikuz First Nation warned that the proposed
Keystone XL oil pipeline will not only threaten indigenous communities
living in its path, but the myriad of ecosystems that it will invade
(the equivalent of the empire’s military invasions around the world).
"When we take care of the land, the land [takes] care of us," she
pleaded.
Canadian Pitbull
Harper is counting on Canada's
past do-good reputation to see it through in its new, hardnosed role as
imperial pitbull. "Canada remains in a very special place in the world.
We are the one major developed country that no one thinks has any
responsibility for the [financial] crisis. We're the one country in the
room everybody would like to be," he boasted at the G20 summit in
Pittsburgh in 2009. The other G20 nations "would like to be an advanced
developed economy with all the benefits that conveys to its citizens and
at the same time not have been the source, or have any of the domestic
problems, that created this crisis. We also have no history of
colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about
the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them."
Harper should read a less tendentious history book. Canada is the
colonial success story par excellence, and continues to be. In most
colonies (for example, India), a small number of Europeans ruled over
much larger Indigenous populations. In order to make profits from a
colony, Europeans needed the labor of the people they had conquered to
amass profit.
Colonialism in Canada
was different. Here it took the form of
settler colonialism (other states with this type of colonialism include
the USA, Australia and Israel). “Settler colonialism took place
where European settlers settled permanently on Indigenous lands,
aggressively seized those lands from
Indigenous peoples and eventually greatly outnumbered Indigenous
populations,” writes analyst David Camfield. It destroyed the organic
cultures that grew out of relationships with those lands, and,
ultimately, eliminating those Indigenous societies.
What’s left
of the natives, with their very different way of life, ended up tangled
up in the legal system, desperately them trying to keep their original
treaties alive, though these treaties, with their many vague loop-holes,
have in any case proved threadbare over time. And watch out for
retribution. Native spokesperson Cindy Blackstock, who has spent more
than five years trying to hold Ottawa accountable for a funding gap on
the welfare of aboriginal children on reserves, found herself hounded by
government surveillance intended to discredit her, as recently confirmed
by a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal statement.
Similarly, (white)
Canadians who run afoul of the neocolonial role Canada plays abroad have
been burned. Gary Peters, an Australian national based in Canada, was
found complicit in “crimes against humanity”, and Cyndy Vanier -- of
involvement in organized crime and falsification of documents, for
helping deposed Libyan president Gaddafi’s son, Saadi Gaddafi, flee
Libya in 2011.
Canada has graduated as the consummate colonial
success story, and has now moved smoothly into its postmodern role as
‘supporter of human rights’ -- not by promoting disinterested NGOs and
providing lots of funding, but via invasion, exploitation and/or
subterfuge at home and abroad. This should come as no surprise, where
the indicator for success in economics and politics is not fairness and
consensus, but profit and engineered majority-rule.
Canada's own democratic traditions have
been trampled time and again by Harper,
who prorogued Parliament twice,
becoming the first prime minister ever to be found guilty of contempt of
parliament, and flagrantly ignores freedom of
speech by muzzling senior bureaucrats, withholding and altering
documents, and launching personal attacks on whistleblowers.
There is an ongoing investigation into voting fraud perpetrated by the
Conservatives in the last election.
That this reality continues
to be touted as Canada's success story is a sorry commentary on our
postmodern reality, where truth is in the eyes of the beholder, and
public opinion is in any case shaped by 'them that controls the words'.