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Currently viewing articles tagged with Stephen Harper.
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The Harper Offensive
An Oil Sands team, headquartered in London, has been run by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAIT) and is spread across eight foreign missions. They have monitored green activism, hired a PR company to try to improve “significant negative media coverage,” and shared “intelligence” with BP, Shell, Total and Norwegian Statoil, who they call “like-minded allies.”
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Now is the Hour: Say Goodbye to Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper assured Canadians that the G8 and G20 summit meetings brought the opportunity to demonstrate Canadian hospitality and leadership, with a hint that it might all lead to securing a seat at the table in the UN Security Council, among the big players, and perhaps with Stephen Harper in a starring role as World Leader. Instead, Stephen Harper blew it. Harper and his team must go. More and more Canadians are moved to gather the evidence, and I offer a sample in this article.
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Ahmadinejad’s Speech at the Durban Review
Your job just got a whole lot harder,” quipped Naomi Klein after Iran’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Ahmadinejad’s address on April 20, at the opening day of the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism. In the lead-up to the Conference, I had written and lobbied tirelessly to defend it against allegations that it was an anti-Semitic hate fest.
Naomi was right. The world’s powers instantly condemned the speech to banner headlines. President Obama called it “harmful” and White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs called the speech “hateful rhetoric.” Peter Gooderham, British ambassador to the UN said it was “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.” British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, labeled it “offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable.” And French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned it as “an intolerable call to racist hate.”
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Organizing the Canada-Israel Alliance
Under Paul Martin’s Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, the Cana-dian government has rapidly shed any pretense at having an independent foreign policy. In Haiti, Canadian forces joined their U.S. and French counterparts in carrying out the coup d’ tat of 2004, overthrowing the elected Lavalas government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and instituting a foreign occupation of the country. In Afghanistan, similarly, thousands of Canadian troops are engaged in combat operations to defend the U.S.-led occupation and allow the U.S. military to focus its resources on Iraq. For years, escalating Canadian support for Israel has been part of this trend. In recent months, it has become more unabashed than ever.
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Imperial Agenda
Back in January, when the Harper Tories eked out their election squeaker, Canadian foreign policy wasn’t even on the radar screen, despite valiant efforts by the anti-war movement to challenge Canada’s role in the occupations of Haiti and Afghanistan. Things will be different next time. As Canadian troops die in sizeable numbers for the first time since the Korean War, foreign policy could become a key factor in blocking a Harper majority.
It’s true that the military brass, key business organizations like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the political right are pulling out all the stops, and this may have some impact. The “red rallies” to “support our troops” are a well-orchestrated campaign to whip up patriotic fervour, and every time a bomb kills civilians in Kabul, the corporate media sings the “save the Afghan civilians” tune.
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Turning on Canada’s Tap
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat down with President George W. Bush in their first White House meeting on July 6, one of the “unmentionable” items on their agenda may well have been the question of bulk water exports from Canada. After all, Bush himself raised the issue back in July, 2001, when he talked “off the cuff” to reporters about growing water shortages in his home state of Texas and elsewhere in the country, saying he would like to begin negotiations with Ottawa on water exports from Canada. In Texas, he said, “water is more valuable than oil.” “A lot of people don’t need it, but when you head south and west, we need it,” Bush declared, adding that he “looked forward” to discussing the matter with then-prime minister Jean Chretien.
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Building A Grassroots Opposition to Harper
It hardly needs saying, but it should be acknowledged in any case: The coming period is not going to be an easy one for the Left in Canada. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been settling into Ottawa for the long haul. Harper has been exercising power calculatingly, confidently, ruthlessly. The spring budget was revealing. Cheered on by business associations and the mainstream media for its sober fiscal stance, it was critiqued by hard-right neoliberals for alleged fiscal prolificacy, even as it cut over twenty taxes and continued to bring down program spending in relation to a growing economy. An image of moderation was presented, even as neoliberalism was deepened. Addressing an alleged fiscal imbalance sometime in the future was enough to gain the support of an increasingly opportunist Bloc Québocois and to get the budget through the minority Parliament.
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Talkin’ Harper Cabinet Blues
Council of Canadians Chair Maude Barlow has described Stephen Harper as “the staunchest right-wing ideologue ever to occupy the Office of Prime Minister.” Not surprisingly, Harper’s dark-blue Tory cabinet looks rather like George W. Bush’s Canadian dream team, with its stamp of social conservatism and punitive predilections, as well as its enthusiasm for deep integration with the U.S., for plumping the military and for all the mantras of neoliberal policy: free trade, privatization, castrating the public sector. Here’s an unrepentantly selective profile of several key players.
From Harris to Harper
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Figuring Out and Fighting Harper
The January federal election results unexpectedly yielded a minority Conservative government. The Great Moving-To-The-Right Show is having yet another run. In Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada now has the most ideologically committed neoliberal in power since Margaret Thatcher. The five priorities Harper has announced — an accountability package, a cut in the GST, a market-based childcare system, a law-and-order agenda centred on sentencing and a reduction in health-care wait times through increased delivery flexibility — all reflect these commitments. These proposals are embedded in the overall strategic priority of aligning Canada even more tightly with the U.S. through increased overseas military commitments and further economic integration. Canada’s takeover of the NATO command in Afghanistan and increased troop deployment is already sketching in the new terrain. It could hardly be more pressing for the Left to take stock of what the Harper government is and might become.
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A Multi-Faced Crisis
In Canada, the political system has long been based upon the illusion of choice provided by a ruling party in power and an opposition party waiting in the wings. However, the Liberal corruption crisis in Quebec, together with the failure of the Liberals to make significant headway in the West, has stripped the ability of the Liberal Party to form a majority government.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that the Liberals are embroiled in the worst scandal of the past half-century, the Harper-led Conservatives have not been able to get beyond 35 per cent of popular support. The defection of Belinda Stronach, the Conservatives’ most visible moderate and urban member, together with the successful efforts of the religious right to win Conservative nominations throughout the country, confirms widely held suspicions that this party harbours a socially conservative agenda of intolerance. Harper’s Conservatives are thus condemned to their rural, small-town western base.
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