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| One of these small, cute, furry creatures is now Prime Minister of Canada. |
This Wednesday, November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau became Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister, replacing the Cuckservative Stephen Harper, after a landslide electoral victory. The win restored the Liberal Party to its position as the prevailing political force in Canadian politics (they’ve governed Canada for roughly 70 percent of the last century), as the electoral swing towards them was the largest-ever numerical increase in Canadian election history, with the Liberals moving up from third position before the election (36 seats) to a dominating first (184 seats).
Trudeau, has already been labeled the "prime minister of hugs," known for his omnipresent photogenic smile, which imbues him with a sense of bumpkin-like wonderment, rather than the marks of a piercing intellect – a modern ‘positive’ politician whose boyish goofiness makes it hard to call him ‘Mr. Trudeau’ rather ‘Justin’ – which, in gleeful derision, I shall now commence to do.
Justin no doubt inherited that breezy countenance as the result of a life served with a silver spoon and a political position passed down from father-to-son as name recognition and branding had more to do with this election than charisma or any other merit or policy. "Sunny ways my friends. Sunny ways," Trudeau told his enthusiastic supporters in Montreal. "This is what positive politics can do." What a dunce!
But Trudeau stood in sharp contrast to PM Stephen Harper, whose general snide demeanor and free market fixation, gave him the popular appeal of a tax consultant working to fix the mob’s books – which is essentially what Harper was. An article at ipolitics.ca had it right:
But the NDP, Canada’s so-called third option, has never really held considerable political power and has floundered since the death of former Party leader Jack Layton, survived by his Chinese-Canadian wife and fellow MP Olivia Chow, who is a vacuous and vain ethnic-vote-politician entrenched in Toronto’s Trinity-Spadina ‘Chinese’ ward. With her tenuous grasp on the English language, she attempted to capitalize upon the widespread sympathy for Layton’s death in an unsuccessful bid to become Toronto’s mayor. Meanwhile the NDP’s leadership role has been filled by Thomas Mulcair, imported from the Liberal Party. Last year, possibly as a response to charges of 'extremism' with regards to international trade, the NDP voted to take ‘socialism’ out of its party’s constitution, making it little more than a Liberal mirror, moving the party to the center and cancelling out the polarization of Duverger’s Law, with Muclair at the helm spouting liberal dogma:
Harper adhered to the Anglo-Franco bourgeois counter-traditions of the Right, represented by a heterodox belief in the volatile dynamism of the free market, but sugarcoating it with faux-traditionalist touches, like restoring pictures of the Queen Mother in government buildings and making snide, subracist references to ‘Old Stock.’
How the Right came to be regarded as the party of free market economics, i.e. classical liberalism, is one of those historically situated non sequiturs. The Tories of merry old England, who became Peel and Disraeli's 'Conservatives,' have forever tarnished the Right with the dishonor of Anglo-Franco laissez faire capitalism, a concoction brewed up from Malthus’ population theorizing, the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, and elements of Adam Smith, into a putrid cauldron of corporatist free market global capitalism, or "survival of the Jewiest."
In a kind of fitting twist of fate, which reveals the ultimate hollowness of much political ideology and discourse, Alberta in the 1930s was the only province or place in the world to elect a party based on C.H. Douglas’s system of Social Credit, something which greatly influenced the fascist poet Ezra Pound. The Social Credit Party in Alberta, like the Saskatchewan based Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which would later become the NDP, ran on a populist platform of critiquing capitalism and asserting regional power, and appealed to the agrarian-based petit-bourgeois – that is small, independent farmers.
However, when Alberta struck it rich with oil, they all but abandoned the platform of the Alberta Social Credit Party for a pro-business, laissez faire government, which itself retained some degree of regional populism – after all why should oil-rich Alberta pay for the welfare deficits of central Canada? The tables had turned and the beggar had become the lender, and their politics had changed with their material status in the world. No one will be surprised when Harper goes to work for an oil subsidiary in the next year or so.
Harper prorogated parliament twice, radically undermining parliamentary democracy and snubbing his nose at the people. His contempt was palpable, but what was it for exactly? Was it simply to pursue the objective of extracting and exporting of tar sand oil while also improving the conditions for international trade and investment for the 1-2% of Canadians who would benefit from that? Homo economicus cum laude Harper pushed through a highly criticized Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) with the Chinese last year, without Parliamentary oversight. Now, not only are our goods being produced by China, and our housing market inflated with their speculation, but our assets can be acquired by them in our own country.
An apologetic article in Macleans on the agreement, which also gives Chinese companies the right to sue Canadians if their business interests are jeopardized, makes the point that:
While James J. O’Meara, writing for Counter-Currents draws parallels between Justin and Donald Trump; from their hair down to their privilege, and suggests somewhat teasingly that “One suspects the word has gone out to the Canuck Cucks from their controllers in New York – Get Justin, he’s our worst nightmare: a non-aligned Kennedy." But Mr. O’Meara himself knows that this is simply not true, one look at the biggest donors of the Liberal Party will convince you otherwise, but there's always that breezy smile and all manner of hugs, kisses, and sucking up.
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Trudeau, has already been labeled the "prime minister of hugs," known for his omnipresent photogenic smile, which imbues him with a sense of bumpkin-like wonderment, rather than the marks of a piercing intellect – a modern ‘positive’ politician whose boyish goofiness makes it hard to call him ‘Mr. Trudeau’ rather ‘Justin’ – which, in gleeful derision, I shall now commence to do.
Justin no doubt inherited that breezy countenance as the result of a life served with a silver spoon and a political position passed down from father-to-son as name recognition and branding had more to do with this election than charisma or any other merit or policy. "Sunny ways my friends. Sunny ways," Trudeau told his enthusiastic supporters in Montreal. "This is what positive politics can do." What a dunce!
But Trudeau stood in sharp contrast to PM Stephen Harper, whose general snide demeanor and free market fixation, gave him the popular appeal of a tax consultant working to fix the mob’s books – which is essentially what Harper was. An article at ipolitics.ca had it right:
"Stephen Harper has moved beyond being the prime minister of Canada. He’s its CEO, making Canada the first democracy to tacitly embrace global corporate governance."Harper is as much to blame for the election results as any policy issues. Prior to the unexpected election landslide Duverger’s Law, which suggests that single-member electoral districts tend to favor a two-party system, was being applied to Canadian politics by political science majors and newspaper columnists, and being used to erroneously predict the imminent demise of the Liberal Party, to be replaced by the more left-of-center NDP. Harper himself is said to subscribe to this polarizing position:
"Duverger’s law is not merely a matter of academic theory. The leading believer in Duverger’s Law is none other than Stephen Harper. Harper’s deepest political goal was not just to defeat the Liberals politically but to eliminate them as a party. Gerry Nicholls, who worked with Harper in the 1990s in the right-wing lobby group the National Citizens Coalition, wrote in a 2011 Globe and Mail column that Harper’s 'desire to eliminate the Liberals is something he and I discussed way back in the days when we worked together at the National Citizens Coalition. His theory, as explained to me, was that conservatism would be better served in this country if Canada had a two-party system, one that pitted right against left, free enterprise against socialism, Conservatives against New Democrats. He believed that, in such a polarized political environment, a conservative-oriented party would have a huge advantage over its left-wing rival.'" (New Republic)What this also tells us is that Harper himself saw no real distinction between the Liberals and the Conservatives, both sitting too firmly in the center to become polarizing forces of the other. When it comes to the major issues – the Keystone pipe line, the controversial national security measure Bill C-51, the TPP, and other free trade agreements – both the Liberals and the Conservatives are in widespread agreement. In fact the NDP was the only party which expressed any opposition to these positions, but you would never know it by listening to the empty-headed rhetoric of Justin: Canadians, he said, had sent a clear message that it's "time for change in this country, my friends. Real change."
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| Chowing out on the ethnic vote. |
"I've always felt that social democracy was about removing inequalities in our society, so if those battles in past generations have mostly been about working conditions and on the economic, and some on the social side, I think that one of the biggest inequalities in our society today is between generations, and that's going to be a prime battle for the next election campaign."Harper was, if anything, a member of a specific interest group, born into the affluent WASP enclave of Leaside, Toronto, his father worked for Imperial Oil (Exxon), and when Harper moved to Alberta he worked for the major oil companies, whereby his oil links continued well into his administration, wherein he basically lobbied for oil interests such as the Keystone pipeline and the tar sands.
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| Harper: another oily politician. |
How the Right came to be regarded as the party of free market economics, i.e. classical liberalism, is one of those historically situated non sequiturs. The Tories of merry old England, who became Peel and Disraeli's 'Conservatives,' have forever tarnished the Right with the dishonor of Anglo-Franco laissez faire capitalism, a concoction brewed up from Malthus’ population theorizing, the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, and elements of Adam Smith, into a putrid cauldron of corporatist free market global capitalism, or "survival of the Jewiest."
In a kind of fitting twist of fate, which reveals the ultimate hollowness of much political ideology and discourse, Alberta in the 1930s was the only province or place in the world to elect a party based on C.H. Douglas’s system of Social Credit, something which greatly influenced the fascist poet Ezra Pound. The Social Credit Party in Alberta, like the Saskatchewan based Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which would later become the NDP, ran on a populist platform of critiquing capitalism and asserting regional power, and appealed to the agrarian-based petit-bourgeois – that is small, independent farmers.
However, when Alberta struck it rich with oil, they all but abandoned the platform of the Alberta Social Credit Party for a pro-business, laissez faire government, which itself retained some degree of regional populism – after all why should oil-rich Alberta pay for the welfare deficits of central Canada? The tables had turned and the beggar had become the lender, and their politics had changed with their material status in the world. No one will be surprised when Harper goes to work for an oil subsidiary in the next year or so.
Harper prorogated parliament twice, radically undermining parliamentary democracy and snubbing his nose at the people. His contempt was palpable, but what was it for exactly? Was it simply to pursue the objective of extracting and exporting of tar sand oil while also improving the conditions for international trade and investment for the 1-2% of Canadians who would benefit from that? Homo economicus cum laude Harper pushed through a highly criticized Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) with the Chinese last year, without Parliamentary oversight. Now, not only are our goods being produced by China, and our housing market inflated with their speculation, but our assets can be acquired by them in our own country.
An apologetic article in Macleans on the agreement, which also gives Chinese companies the right to sue Canadians if their business interests are jeopardized, makes the point that:
"[it] makes no sense to claim to be in favour of international trade but against international flows of capital.”But what if we are for neither, what if we support limited balanced trade, and emphasize self-sufficiency and autarky instead of offshoring and foreign debt accumulation? The article in Macleans makes clear the colonialist aspect of business with China:
"Canada runs a fairly large trade deficit with China: roughly $30 Billion per year. This means that as far as China is concerned, trade with Canada is essentially a matter of them accumulating large amounts of Canadian assets… Once you realize that capital flows are essentially the same thing as trade flows, the logic behind FIPAs become clear. Countries that are exporting goods in return for assets can reasonably expect to ask that these assets won’t be effectively expropriated by governments pandering to anti-foreign bias."God forbid a nation should have an ‘anti-foreign bias’ – yuck nationalism, who are you Hitler? Those "excitable nationalists and their wild imaginations"! Except that capital flows and trade flows are not "essentially the same thing." When a country like First World Canada ostensibly runs a large trade deficit with a country like China, the responsible thing to do would be to balance the trade. No one ever thought they were getting out ahead by incurring debt! Justin with his "positive politics" and Keynesian deficit spending are just going to increase the debt spiral.
While James J. O’Meara, writing for Counter-Currents draws parallels between Justin and Donald Trump; from their hair down to their privilege, and suggests somewhat teasingly that “One suspects the word has gone out to the Canuck Cucks from their controllers in New York – Get Justin, he’s our worst nightmare: a non-aligned Kennedy." But Mr. O’Meara himself knows that this is simply not true, one look at the biggest donors of the Liberal Party will convince you otherwise, but there's always that breezy smile and all manner of hugs, kisses, and sucking up.
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