I’m having a hard time blogging these days. Not because there isn’t plenty to be outraged about. Too much in fact!
It is more that I see so many of my fellow Canadians falling for the bullying, obfuscation and downright deceitful practises of the Right Wing Coalition Party. Rove/Cheney politics is alive and well and living in Canada. While Obama may be no saviour in the United States, Ignatieff is even less so in Canada.
Fed on a diet of Faux “News” and Amercian “reality” tv we end up with such ignoble quips as this
“First we lost saying the Lord’s Prayer in school, then the Pledge of Allegiance, and now the singing of O Canada…”
See Alison at the Galloping Beaver
And while “Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon will not even return phone calls from lawyers for Canadian Omar Khadr, the last Western detainee in Guantanamo Bay.” the Right Wing Coaltion Party does have time to decide that elementary school students should be required to be indoctrinated with jingoism patriotism through the forced listening of canned O Canada music because
“We have soldiers in Afghanistan on a continuous basis rotating in and out and the least we can do is show pride for our country and our flag,”
Yes it is the absolute least we can do. No doubt they want the kids to be rabidly partisan..er patriotic so they can support a war that most of their parents [and the rest of the country] don’t. Gotchya
[Helps to have rabid jingoist when you need cannon fodder.]
When Canadians are losing their jobs, 129,000 in January alone, calls for changes to EI and other social safety nets are met with “We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it” However, there is no problem using taxpayers dollars, the same soon to be jobless taxpayers, to make it lucrative for their corporate buddies to keep cutting jobs and moving plants offshore.
Wadda nice version of Oh Canada,
J.K. Galbreath, from London, ON, moved to the USA – where he became Kennedy’s Ambassador to India. I recall him being asked on the CBC why he had deserted his ‘home, his native land” and his comment was that “countries are convenient economic units”.
I do not totally agree with that outlook, there is more to it than that, but he had a point.
On a more personal/political note, I’ve found it difficult to blog Canada since the possibility of a progressive coalition simply wilted, since no one seemed to mind very much that Harper used a pretty undemocratic tool to wilt it, since Stephane Dion (of whom I am not a particular fan) got his neck broken by the media, since someone I like less than Dion took over the reigns and coalesced with Harper, since a bunch of no-nothing fuckwits protested the joint Opposition letter to bring Omar Khadr back to Canada … and so on.
Hell, I guess I’m just saying what you’re saying. What I’m adding is that these recent “disappointments” come after about a week of feeling the most “hope” and certainly the most positive excitement I’ve felt in Canadian politics for longer than I care to remember. So for me, it’s not just the contrast with hopey changey Obama. It’s that we had our own moment. And we lost it. And we’re paying the price, no end in sight. Blah!