For Trudeau Teletubbies, the jig is up!
2016Barry Weisleder 2016-10Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s protracted political honeymoon appears to be coming to a close. General ir ritation with his unctuous, almost unbearable lightness of being is taking hold—especially as his “sunny ways” imagery collides with the real actions of the Liberal gov ernment. One New Democrat MP scored media high fives when he compared Trudeau to the bright-colored charac ters in a British TV show for children who look like ba bies stuffed into cuddly animal costumes with TV anten nae on their heads and screens on their bellies. “How do you wrestle with Teletubbies who want to keep hugging you?”
Well, the group hug is over, and the jig is up. It turns out that Trudeau’s agenda is not that different from his pre decessor’s, the uber-Conservative PM Stephen Harper. What a rude awakening that must be for many of the folks who voted Liberal in October 2015, hoping and expect ing to get something completely different. A glance at just a few federal departments—environ ment, indigenous peoples, health care, and foreign af fairs—is enough to see the trend.
B.C. gas project approved On Sept. 27 Ottawa gave the green light to a massive liquefied natural gas project on the coast of British Co lumbia. The Pacific Northwest LNG would involve a pipeline across the province and a terminal to export the liquefied gas from northern B.C. to Asian markets. Touted as the largest private-sector development in Canada’s history, the megaproject is the first approved by Trudeau and provides a framework for upcoming deci sions on the merits of pipelines designed to bring Alberta oil to eastern and southern ports. Absent is the agreement of several First Nations communities who have serious concerns, including over the health of wild salmon habi tat.
Environmentalists, from the Sierra Club to the David Suzuki Foundation to the Pembina Institute, oppose the plan despite the 190 conditions attached to it by the feds. Even with a cap on the project’s greenhouse gas emis sions (one of the conditions), Pacific Northwest LNG would significantly raise B.C.’s greenhouse gas output. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency calcu lated that it would be “one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in Canada.”
How does that jibe with the promise by Catherine McK enna, the rookie environment minister, who proclaimed when she got her job last autumn that the carbon-reduc tion targets set by the Conservatives were a minimum. Now it’s clear that the Liberal government will be lucky to come anywhere near to meeting Harper’s low-bar tar gets.
In any case, shouldn’t Ottawa promote the spending of billions on making wind and sea wave turbines, solar pan els, and geothermal technology, rather than on conduits to increase the flow of climate-change-causing fossil fuels? Instead of obtaining a “social license” from indigenous peoples, as he promised to do, Trudeau has been issuing construction permits for BC Hydro’s Site C dam, over the objection of First Nations that have taken the government to court. An article in the British Guardian newspaper re ferred to Trudeau’s “lofty rhetoric” on indigenous rights NATO’s obliteration of Libya’s secular Gadhafi regime. A Canadian air force general commanded the NATO bombing campaign, which quickly opened up political space for al-Qaeda-linked fighters there and across the region. The Liberal government has said it will commit up to 600 troops to UN “peacekeeping” duties. Without saying where the soldiers will be deployed, National De fence, Global Affairs, and the RCMP conducted a “recon naissance mission” to Mali in August. Canadian military aircraft carried nearly 40 tonnes of equipment between France and Africa last year.
Notably, Canadian “aid” is not going to countries where Canadian-supported coups resulted in devastating human rights abuses, such as Honduras or Egypt. But why Mali? Does it have anything to do with Trudeau’s bid for a Unit ed Nations Security Council seat? Or could it be because Mali is a major supplier of uranium, or because Canadian gold mining operations at Nampala, which recently re ported positive cash flow for Canadian firm Robex, got Ottawa’s attention. Mali happens to be the third-largest gold-producing country in Africa.
Sometimes the prospect of immediate profits from min eral resources take a back seat to larger considerations of geo-political power. Canada is sending an additional 500 troops to Latvia for an open-ended mission to help its imperialist allies to scare the Russians. It’s a move so provocative that Mikhail Gorbachev (former top bureau crat of the USSR, and a strong critic of Vladimir Putin) warned: “NATO has begun preparations for escalating the Cold War into a hot one. All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defence, but actually they are preparing for offensive operations.”
(continued on page 11, in “Pension concessions sell out young workers”)