Harper: “I Bite my thumb at thee, Canada.”
The Conservatives are not on the same page as the rest of Canada. Many of us do not want to support anything about the Bush administration from its unwillingness to commit to Kyoto and legitimate environmental and climate change goals to the use of anti-ballistic missile defence, which can lead to the weaponization of space and potential arm races between nations.
The rest of the political leaders have shown they can listen to Canadians. They also have a better grasp of the reality the world and that supporting failed policies of the lame-duck American administration would be political suicide. Their concerns about the lack of transparency and the attempts by Harper to cosy up to the Americans show a lack of respect for the Canadian public.
NDP leader Jack Layton – “It seems to me that Mr. Harper is trying to do by the back door what he could never do by the front door if he faced Canadians, and that’s to get Canada involved in an arms race, to support George Bush’s manoeuvre, to expand the Star Wars undertaking,”
“I think he’s violating his own principles here, which were that Parliament should be deciding on such incredibly important matters of foreign policy,”
“This is all a part of Stephen Harper’s desire to follow the instructions from the White House and to enter into a deeper and deeper integrated relationship in North America, with the United States. It’s not where Canadians want to go, but it’s clearly what he’s had in his sights for some time.”
There is one thing that Layton is clear about and the majority of Canadians would agree and that is that we do not want to be so deeply integrated with the Americans and follow the will of their government so closely. Many Canadians favour good relations, which means open and free trade, being treated fairly at the border and not having to present a passport. But instead we’re being forced to provide passports to prove we’re not terrorists; our exports had protectionist tariffs slapped on and we have to fight to have NAFTA enforced.
The American government doesn’t want an ally; it wants someone to be its lapdog, since Britain is doesn’t want to take it up the ass any more, and others have decided that they’re tired of helping to forward a corrupt American agenda that seeks to destroy those who it disagrees with. Look at Pakistan, they’ve curbed a series of media freedoms and they get the slightest tongue lashing from the American government, yet Venezuela does the same thing and the American government can’t wait to embargo and sanction it out the ass.
This is the administration that the Conservatives are cosying up with. They don’t represent Canadian values.
This attitude that Harper is displaying at the G8 Summit on Climate Change only further displays his general contempt for the Canadian voting public. He is fine with making promises to get his agenda into the office but when it comes to living up to those promises, we see nothing good. Nothing he promised during the election is being tabled. This includes putting to a vote the idea to revisit missile defence.
Instead of putting it before parliament, he’s quietly making commitments behind close doors. That is hardly accountable and is lacking in transparency, two core principles he preached during his bid for election.
While Layton expressed a more indepth opinion on the matter, Dion is more straightforward, though his honesty is a little scarier than Layton’s.
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This is a terrifying thought. We’d be giving up our freedoms to refuse the Americans to make them happy.
Rejecting Kyoto achieves nothing.
Signing onto the ballistic missile defence would only make us a target for those who want an arms race. It would escalate international tensions. It would reduce our credibility as a peaceful nation. By setting up such a system, we’re saying we don’t trust anyone and that we’re ready to go to war if you look at us funny. Too American for my liking.
It has too much of a Cold War feel to it. The tensions during that time were great and it created a climate of distrust too many splinter groups who would want to destroy each other.
Having to spend more on defence, takes away tax payer dollars that could otherwise be used to invest the police forces across the nation, into healthcare, a viable childcare programme, education, fighting poverty, improving domestic infrastructure, improving our water and sewage systems, environmental preservation, economic development, investing in native reserves that give them opportunities to break out of the cycle of poverty and violence. There are so many other programmes and departments that the tax payer dollars into than national defence, the worthless war on terror (and the war in Afghanistan) and a ballistic missile defence system that has yet to show its workability as a defence solution.
Stumble It!
June 7th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Harper is completely missing the point. Canada has no enemies or immediate threats. Therefore, real national defence would be social programs like the ones Harper loves to cut. Why does he refuse to educate and empower his citizens during this time of peace, perhaps an eye of a hurricane, instead of waging war on impartial but hotheaded dictatorships?
June 8th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Yup, Harper can’t be trusted on missile defence.
But Dion can’t be trusted either. The Liberal Party has never said “no” to Star Wars. Their own policy paper on US relations says that a Liberal government would “Reintroduce Canada’s participation in the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) program.”
Once again the Liberals say what they think people want to hear in opposition, while at the same time planning to do go further than Harper has. Utter hypocracy.
Only the NDP has been consistantly opposed to Star Wars.
June 8th, 2007 at 11:32 am
You may be right about the Liberals saying what people want to hear but Martin did oppose it when it was initially proposed by the Bush administration, if I remember correctly. The policy may have changed since then.
The Liberals are in a hardspot because they did support the initial part of the War on Terror but now they’ve started to change and it makes them look weak and appearing weak on terror gives the Conservatives fodder to make the Liberals look like terrorist loving pansies.
However, I think that they only have it on paper as such because they may want to look in to for the future if it is shown to actually work. They opposed it initially on the grounds that it wasn’t viable given that all the tests to date at the time had failed and weren’t successful.
Reintroducing would probably rely on a variety of competing factors that would dictate if it was profitable to engage in the use of such a programme.
I agree that the only consistent party has been the NDP. I don’t know about the Greens or the Bloc, though I imagine given the nature (no pun intended) of the Green agenda, they would oppose it as they are similar to the NDP in politics and the Bloc, I’m not sure.