James Laxer: The Russian American struggle over Georgia

James Laxer has a good article on the Russian-American struggle on his blog. Laxer shows the connection between the conflict and the petro-imperialism of the U.S. As Laxer mentioned there are further aspects particularly the U.S. push to have Georgia and the Ukraine as well join NATO and thus ring Russia round with states allied to the west and protected by NATO. It is actually surprising that Russia has not made stronger moves before this to contain this development. Mostly it has engaged in rhetoric complaining about the moves. The Missile Defence system is another thorn in the Russian bear's side as well.
Changes in Russia are also part of what is causing this renewed conflict. In the morality tale that is peddled in the west the U.S. is spreading democracy and Russia is becoming more authoritarian. The spread of the authoritarian disease is so severe that Russia may soon be reconstituted as the Evil Empire minus socialism. However instead of socialism we have a new capitalist regime that is using nationalisation to regain economic power and rebuild Russia into a world power again. This is what really bothers the West. Some of the richest former oligarchs who made a bundle from the collapse and selling off of the Soviet Union are now in exile or in jail and their assets taken over by the state. Of course the oligarchs are still there but only those that go along with Putin's new economic policy that consists of renationalisation and getting better deals with foreign capital. Energy has been re-nationalised.
This is from ">spiked-on-line. Of course Chile's development was undertaken with the help of Pinochet!

There has been evidence of diminishing democracy since 1993 (including the use of tanks against parliament) but it has only recently received any critical attention. The West, silent during the wars in Chechnya, suddenly found its voice when the private oil consortium Yukos was taken over in 2003. According to a report that received little press coverage, Yukos had planned a merger with Sibneft and was arranging, in collaboration with Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, for a massive investment of US capital in the Siberian oilfields on the eve of the Iraq war.
The Yukos takeover was the first step towards renationalisation of energy, to the detriment of certain closely connected Russian and foreign interests. Putin rejected the Chilean-style course recommended by his economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, who resigned in 2005, protesting that Russia had changed and was no longer a free country (8).

The economic conflict with the U.S. and the rest of the west certainly involves the aspect that Laxer describes so well. Here is another snippet from mondediplo. This shows the significance of the re-nationalisation as a bid to increase Russian power and block the further takeover of key assets by foreign firms.

There was a major turning-point at the beginning of Putin’s second term in 2003, when he handed control of the crucial hydrocarbons sector to selected state undertakings. The sector had partly recovered from the oligarchs, who had acquired their holdings at knockdown prices during the privatisations of the Yeltsin era (5). Putin’s move to protect strategic assets does not preclude opening them to foreign capital; but, given the offensive mounted by the public energy monopolies Gazprom and Transneft, it isintended to block a US policy, instituted in 1991, aimed at diminishing Russian power. This policy was the purpose of Nato enlargement and the establishment of alternative energy supply routes to replace the Russian networks. Another of Putin’s aims is to recreate a common Euro-Asian economic area, possibly including a European-Russian partnership..........................

This is the developing much wider conflict developing under the morality tale peddled by the mainstream press. Laxer's piece follows:




The Russian-American Struggle Over Georgia
The outbreak of fighting in recent days between Russian and Georgian forces for control of the Georgian province of South Ossetia takes place against the backdrop of the geo-strategic struggle for control of the petroleum resources of Central Asia. Deeply involved are the Russians and the Americans.The Caspian Sea region is home to major petroleum reserves. Kazakhstan has proven reserves of 30 billion barrels of oil and Azerbaijan has reserves of 7 billion barrels. Georgia is crucially placed for the shipment of oil to world markets.For the Russian government, petroleum is a tool that can be used to launch the country as a renewed great power, allowing it to acquire considerable authority in the regions that made up the former Soviet Union. While Washington favors the rapid development of Russian petroleum because it provides an alternative for the West to Middle Eastern supplies, the Bush administration has been wary of policies that can reconstitute Russia as an economic and therefore military threat. While George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin made a great show of their personal friendship in the early days of the Bush presidency, this was soon followed by much frostier relations. At the heart of the tensions was petroleum.The battle over oil from the Caspian Sea region has involved selling arms to governments and to political movements intent on overthrowing governments. It involved major petroleum companies that were determined to cash in on the potential bonanza. And it involved battles over the pipeline routes that would be used to ship the oil to market. While the Russians wanted the petroleum from Azerbaijan to flow into their pipeline system and to markets from there, the US was opposed to the Russian route for this Caspian region oil. The preferred US route was to build a pipeline through Georgia and Turkey, the latter a staunch American ally and a member of NATO. The pipeline would carry the petroleum to a Turkish Mediterranean port and from there, by tanker, to markets.During the late 1990s, the Americans poured money into the region and feted the leaders of the Caspian Sea states at White House dinners. To make the pipeline economically viable----its price tag was $3.1 billion---the petroleum companies told Washington that government money would be needed. The US, UK, Japan and Turkey agreed to subsidize the project. In 1999, President Bill Clinton journeyed to Istanbul to initial the deal for the construction of the pipeline.The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, now completed, is one of the largest post-Soviet engineering projects. In May 2005, it began the delivery of oil along its 1,776-kilometer (1,104-mile) length from the Baku fields to the Mediterranean. The pipeline, operated by BP, included the participation of British, French, American, Italian, Japanese and Norwegian companies, as well as the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. It delivered 800,000 barrels of oil daily earlier this year, but has been temporarily shut down in recent weeks as a result of an explosion. The pipeline's capacity is expected to be expanded to about 1.5 million barrels a day in the near future. The pipeline is an economic, but also a political, venture. With Washington calling the shots in the background, a route that is secure from a Western point of view has been selected in preference to alternative and shorter routes through Russia or Iran.Raising the stakes still higher in this contest over pipeline routes was the question of how the petroleum of Kazakhstan would flow to markets. Washington proposed that Kazakhstan (located on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea) and the major petroleum companies should jointly construct a pipeline beneath the Caspian to link up with the BTC pipeline to Turkey. Some oil from Kazakh sources is now reaching markets via Russian pipelines, but the proposal to hook Kazakhstan up with the BTC route remains a live option.The US power play in the region was stepped up by the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the terror attacks on New York and Washington. Ostensibly to aid in its invasion of Afghanistan, Washington sent US forces to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. But when the Taliban government in Afghanistan was driven from power -- much to the annoyance of Moscow -- the US decided to keep forces in these countries indefinitely. In addition, the United States provided military instructors to Georgia. These moves helped tighten the American grip on the oil-rich Caspian Sea region.As the struggle continues, petroleum makes it a high stakes affair. The U.S. has gone so far as to propose that Georgia be admitted to membership in NATO, a development which Moscow staunchly opposes.

Good idea: Let's Re-open NAFTA

I see that I am not the only one who thinks that re-opening NAFTA would be a great idea! Here is an entry from James' Laxer's blog that gives some of the reasons why Canada should want to open the agreement. This is from Laxer's blog.

Obama and Clinton Have a Point: Let’s Take a Hard Look at NAFTA

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been squabbling over which of them is more serious about standing up to Canada on the shortcomings of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In her last ditch effort to seize victory from the jaws of defeat in Ohio (we’ll know the result tonight), Clinton has been accusing Obama of talking tough to hard hit workers while reassuring Ottawa that he’s only kidding.

Neither of these candidates is remotely pro-Canadian. As a border state senator, Hillary Clinton has been happy to bash Canada for its supposedly lax security whenever that suits her. Not that we should be surprised that the Democratic front runners could care less about Canada. That’s normal, despite the dewy-eyed proclivity of some Canadians to seek salvation from American politicians.

We ought to be thankful though to Obama and Clinton for insisting on the renegotiation of NAFTA if either of them reaches the White House.

Canadians have pressing reasons for taking a hard look at NAFTA.

NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement were negotiated at a time when petroleum prices were much lower than today and the world was much less queasy about petroleum supply than it is now.

When the Mulroney Conservatives negotiated the free trade deals, one of their major objectives was to ensure that no Canadian government could ever again pursue a petroleum policy that did not suit the oil companies, the Conservative government in Alberta and the U.S. administration in Washington. And while they failed miserably at gaining secure access for Canadian exports to the U.S. (witness softwood lumber), they succeeded brilliantly in tying the hands of Ottawa on petroleum.

Under NAFTA, Canada is required to continue exporting petroleum to the United States at a level which must not fall below the average of the past three years. This remarkable commitment stands even should the regions of eastern Canada that rely on imported oil fall short as a consequence of a supply interruption. Not only does Canada have no strategic petroleum reserve---a point driven home by the recent work of the Parkland Institute in Alberta---under the terms of NAFTA Canada must make exports of petroleum to the U.S. a higher priority than meeting the energy needs of Canadians.

From the start, NAFTA has been an “unequal treaty” for Canadians. The Mexicans, also major oil suppliers to the United States, are saddled with no such outrageous commitment, for the simple reason that Mexicans would never have stood for it.

With petroleum shortages now a real threat in the world, Canada needs to renegotiate NAFTA, and if the United States is unwilling to reach a deal that removes the petroleum export commitments as they stand, Ottawa should give notice that Canada will withdraw from the trade deal.

Under the Harper Conservatives and the newly re-elected Stelmach government in Alberta, the highest priority of Canadian economic policy is to increase petroleum exports as rapidly as possible, despite the ruinous environmental consequences, and the disastrous effects of the policy for Canadian industry.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has gone to war with Ontario insisting that the province slash its corporate taxes. By promoting the rapid increase in petroleum exports, the Conservatives are directly responsible for driving up the value of the Canadian dollar so quickly that Canadian manufacturing has had no chance to adjust.

The Conservatives have skewed Canadian economic development to the long-run detriment of all Canadians, including Albertans who face the reduction of large regions of their province to a polluted moonscape.

Thanks Barack and Hillary, for putting NAFTA back on the agenda. In our own national election, which can’t come too soon, Canadians ought to put the issue front and centre.

Intelligence, Ideology and Empire

This is from James Laxer's blog. His postings are not that frequent but are usually quite interesting. Other adventures in Central America include the defeating of the Sandanistas with the help of the Contras and also defeating rebels in El Salvador.
The CIA has helped along the "revolutions" in some former Soviet Republics such as Georgia and the Ukraine. Not mentioned are CIA campaigns against the Soviets in Afghanistan which were successful at the time but the jihadists have now turned against the US in the worst case of blowback in all time.
I suppose there has always been some pressure upon the CIA to deliver what the US administration wants but that pressure was upped tremendously during the younger Bush administration. Indeed, so dissatisfied was Cheney with the CIA that he formed his own special group to cherry pick intelligence.
I doubt that the US will be driven out of Iraq as they were out of Vietnam. The Iraq govt. will likely remain under strong US influence if not control. Even if most troops are withdrawn the US embassy and some bases will remain indefinitely.

Intelligence, Ideology and Empire

Those who wield power in the inner realms of the American state and in the elite circles of the American political class have greater access to information and raw intelligence than any comparable cohort of rulers in human history. What they lack, though, is judgment and perspective, and that renders all the mountains of information at their disposal next to useless.

Gathering intelligence, the job of the Central Intelligence Agency, along with the clandestine missions of the CIA, have been mainstays of American global power since the Second World War, when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) preceded the CIA in the brave new world of extending American power through a host of dirty tricks.

New York Times writer Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA was one of the most important books of 2007. Weiner relates the story of the establishment of the CIA and the six decades of its history.

As the title implies, it has mostly been a history of failure, and regularly of catastrophic failure, from the viewpoint of the managers of the American state. As it turned out, the CIA’s clandestine operations often undermined the agency’s ability to gather reliable intelligence.

Some of the spectacular pratfalls of American intelligence are well known, for instance, the myriad attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosives and poisons and if these didn’t work, American spooks considered deploying a powder that would cause the Cuban leader’s beard to fall out, the theory being that this would undermine his standing with the Cuban people.

Over the course of the Cold War, the CIA dispatched hundreds of its agents to the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and other Communist countries, often to their deaths, and almost always with nothing to show for these efforts in terms of intelligence or successful subversion.

The agency did have its major triumphs, among them the sponsoring of the 1953 coup in Iran that removed the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq that had been dedicated to wresting control of Iranian oil from British and American petroleum companies. What followed was the repressive regime of the Shah with its torture chambers, imprisonment of political opponents, and policies tailor made to suit Washington and London. The long run consequence of the coup was the permanent distrust of America by Iranians, a factor in the current relationship between the U.S. and Iran.

In 1954, the CIA helped turn out the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, playing a pivotal role in generating violent struggles that consumed the lives of two hundred thousand people. As in Iran, the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Arbenz government has heightened anti-Americanism across Latin America over the past half century. The CIA’s close working relationship with the Pinochet regime following its seizure of power in Chile on September 11, 1973 (in Latin America, September 11 has its own meaning) and the death of democratically elected Salvador Allende, have contributed to antagonistic feelings toward the U.S. in South America.

Western Europeans have long known and resented the fact that the CIA pumped millions of dollars into buying politicians and election outcomes in Italy and other Western European countries during the post war decades.

In addition to clandestine ops that failed or those that succeeded with long-term negative consequences for the U.S., there have been spectacular intelligence failures. The CIA told the White House, on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that the Soviets would not invade and they told the administration of George Bush the Elder in July1990 that Saddam Hussein would not send his armed forces into Kuwait.

When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made his notorious appearance at the United Nations on February 5, 2005---just weeks before the invasion of Iraq---to insist that the U.S. had hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, CIA director George Tenet stood at his shoulder, silently bestowing the agency’s imprimatur on the Bush administration’s claim that action was needed. In this instance, the White House exerted immense pressure on the CIA to unearth evidence that would support the case for invasion.

In early December 2007, all sixteen U.S. intelligence services, including the CIA, issued an assessment that concluded that Iran had ceased its program to develop nuclear weapons in 2003. This time the intelligence services were releasing a finding that clashed directly with the case the Bush administration had been developing that if Iran built nukes, war could be the result. The response from the White House was barely controlled fury. Administration spokespersons insisted that the finding could be wrong and that America must not let down its guard. Apparently the spooks, having been badly burned in Iraq, were not prepared to do the Bush administration’s bidding in Iran. With only a year to go before a presidential election, infighting involving the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies had reached a new pitch.

What’s wrong with American intelligence? With all its toys, money and training, why has the track record of the CIA been so poor from the standpoint of U.S. policymakers?

Part of the answer has to do with the clash between the needs of those collecting intelligence and those engaged in clandestine ops.

There is a larger answer, though. From the very beginning, the rules of engagement of the CIA have made it clear that the United States government has no respect for the sovereign authority and the rights of other countries, and this includes democratic countries and close American allies. Buying politicians, helping fix elections, seizing captives to torture in secret CIA prisons, and assassinating foreign leaders have been normal operating practice from Day One. It’s not that the U.S. is the only nation in the world to engage in such practices, but the glaring contradiction between these methods and the insistence of American leaders that their country stands for freedom, human rights and self-determination for all peoples, has soured much of humanity on America.

Finally, there is the imperial mindset which has doomed the rulers of empires throughout history, from the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome, the viceroys of the British Raj to the best and the brightest in Washington. Those who imagine themselves to have a right to rule others, because they believe they have a superior culture or because they have a bigger economy or a stronger military, have never learned how to understand those they dominate. Even if the next U.S. president is considerably brighter than the present occupant of the White House---how could he or she not be---efforts of the new administration to fix the problems of U.S. intelligence agencies are likely to falter for that oldest of reasons. The Americans, like the rulers of the great powers that preceded theirs, cannot understand that peoples everywhere want to run their own affairs. That’s why the American invaders were not showered with garlands when they invaded Iraq, and it’s for that reason that they are being driven out of that country just as an earlier generation of Americans was driven out of Vietnam.

How the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair really matters to Canada

This is from James Laxer's Blog. The article's real importance is to show the devastating effect that NAFTA had in limiting Canadian economic policy and how it tied it in with the US policy aims. It is interesting too in showing how German right wing politics using Schreiber as an agent managed to influence what happened in the Conservative Party here ending up with the election of Mulroney. The Liberals were not at all blameless in the NAFTA affair though. In 1993 they ran on a platform of renegotiating NAFTA but never did so. As an except from this site shows.
Despite this many Canadian politicians have made peace with the agreement, including most of the governing Liberal Party of Canada, which campaigned in the 1993 election to renegotiate the teaty but then took no steps to do so and even signed an extension of the Free Trade Agreement (the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA) in 1994

How the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair Really Matters to Canada

There are many Canadians whose interest in the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair does not extend beyond the delicious anticipation of watching the 18th prime minister of Canada explain to a Parliamentary Committee why he accepted bags of cash which he took some time to declare as income.

The affair does have a much deeper importance, though, which is rooted in the way key decisions were made in Canada during the crucial decade of the 1980s. It was the decade when Canada signed on to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The FTA, and is successor NAFTA, drove a stake into the heart of Canadian democracy. Under the terms of these treaties, Canada was required to accord “national treatment” to U.S. firms, meaning that Canada could no longer discriminate in favour of domestic firms in its taxation and subsidy policies. Nor could Canada create new publicly owned firms to compete with U.S. corporations without paying out crippling financial compensation to them.

Moreover, the FTA took much of the control of the Canadian petroleum industry out of Canadian jurisdiction. It stipulated that Canada could not have a two-price system for its petroleum in which Americans would pay the world price for Canadian oil imports while Canadians would pay a lower price. And it committed Canada, at any given time, to sell at least as much petroleum to the U.S. as it had sold on average over the preceding three years, even if this were to mean petroleum shortages for eastern Canadians who were reliant on imported oil.

The Mulroney government made all these concessions to the Americans without gaining unfettered access to the U.S. market in return. American trade law remained in place alongside the FTA, allowing the U.S. to mount countervailing duties against Canadian exporters to protect U.S. producers---as the United States has repeatedly done in the case of softwood lumber.

What has all this to do with Karlheinz Schreiber?

We know that, acting on the instructions of his Bavarian masters, whose leader was Franz Joseph Strauss, Minister President of Bavaria and the dominant voice in the Christian Social Union, the fervently right-wing partner in German politics of the more moderate Christian Democratic Union, Schreiber helped finance the overthrow of Joe Clark as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

In 1993, the PCs held a federal convention in Winnipeg and a review of Clark’s leadership was on the agenda. Strauss and his CSU henchmen saw it as their role to support the rise to leadership of conservatives of their ilk in the right-wing parties of the West. In their eyes, Joe Clark was an old-fashioned conservative, a red-tory who was too firmly Canadian for the new era of globalization. As was revealed in 2001, on the CBC program, the Fifth Estate, Mr. Schreiber helped fund the effort to fly delegates to Winnipeg who would vote against the leadership of Joe Clark.

Schreiber explained that he gave money to Walter Wolf, a member of the group that was determined to dump Clark. Schreiber put it pithily: “It’s expensive to travel, right? For this is what Walter Wolf collected the money, and then get the people in which worked for you, and you paid their fare, and perhaps he said to you, they need some money for their wives, they want to go shopping, or whatever, for the hotels.”

When Clark received the support of 66.9 per cent of the delegates, short of the 70 per cent he felt he needed, he called on the party to convene a leadership convention, the convention at which Mulroney succeeded him as leader.

Schreiber and the Bavarians had played a role, quite likely decisive, in nudging the support to dump Clark above the thirty per cent level at Winnipeg. With Mulroney as PC leader and later as prime minister, Schreiber and his associates felt they had a man with whom they could come to understandings.

Franz Joseph Strauss, in addition to being the leader of the most right-wing brand of mainstream German politics in the post-war decades, was involved in the 1970s in the founding of Airbus, the European civilian aircraft manufacturer that challenged American Boeing for the multibillion dollar business involved in selling aircraft to the airlines of the whole world. Strauss became chairman of Airbus in the late 1980s and held that position until his death in 1988.

For the past several decades, the Europeans and the Americans have been fighting a no-holds-barred struggle to sell their respective aircraft to the world. The Europeans have subsidized and bribed their way to success, while the Americans have used Department of Defense contracts to buttress their national champion.

Both sides wanted to sell their planes to Air Canada. In 1988, government owned Air Canada signed a contract to purchase 34 Airbus A330s and A340s. Not only Boeing, but the U.S. government, was heartily annoyed by this victory for the European competitor. And the details of how this came about remain highly controversial.

What matters more than how the deal was or was not lubricated, is that during the 1980s, Canada was being put out of the business of fostering national industrial champions so that it could play in the big leagues. And this benefited both the Europeans and the Americans.

If the Europeans got the Airbus contract, the Americans got the FTA, with all its arrangements that made it impossible for Canada to support its own industries. While neo-con Canadian politicians from Mulroney to Harper sold the line to Canadians that governments should stay out of the marketplace, the Europeans and the Americans spent billions ensuring the success of their industrial champions, with all the employment, technological, strategic and sleazy benefits that went with that.

What mattered when Karlheinz, everyone’s favourite Christmas uncle, helped replace Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney, is that the door was opened to the globalization deals in Canada in the 1980s that helped shove this country down the global ladder to the position we occupy today as suppliers of oil sands oil to the Americans and greenhouse gas emissions to the planet.

What I can’t fathom are the media pundits whose line of analysis is that what went on in the 1980s was the bad old days of influence peddling and that all this has happily been put behind us. Are they kidding?

When Brian Mulroney came to power and made his deals, Canadian democracy was fundamentally weakened. We live today in the nether world of plutocracy, in which those with big money ensure that they get the arrangements that favour them. They twist arms, fight wars, educate economists to peddle their line, and yes, they bribe whenever and wherever it is necessary.

Ontario is Harper's whipping boy.

This is from James Laxer's blog. I think that Harper realizes he needs to target the cities. After all he appointed Michael Fortier from Montreal to cabinet even though he does not even have a seat in the legislature! I guess this is Harper's view of accountability!
Laxer's argument re Ontario being shortchanged in seat redistribution seems reasonable. If the lack of space in Parliament is actually the reason for not giving more seats to Ontario to be fair they could have reduced other province's seats rather than taking them all from Ontario.
Laxer is also correct that with the decline of manufacturing we will more and more depend upon exporting raw goods. We will be hewers of wood and drawers of water but mostly pumpers of oil and natural gas. Under NAFTA we are to help ensure that US energy needs are met and at relatively low prices. It is not only Ontario cities that are in trouble and neglected, northern Ontario that is resource based also has problems because of decline in forestry products export due to the housing slump in the US and protectionism.

Ontario is Harper’s Whipping Boy

The evidence mounts that the Harper government’s political strategy is to turn Ontario into the whipping boy of Confederation.

On a host of issues, the government is steering a course that blatantly negates the interests of Ontario. The most obvious case in point is the government’s bill to add twenty-two additional seats to the House of Commons after the 2011 census. The Harperites would give Alberta five extra seats, B.C. would get seven more and Ontario would have an additional ten. The change, to reflect population growth, sounds fine except that if the goal is rep by pop Ontario should get twenty additional seats, not ten.

Once the change is made, the Western Provinces, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces will not be under-represented in the Commons, but Ontario will be. Why not give Ontario the twenty extra seats the province is due according to population? Government House Leader Peter Van Loan explained on CBC television that there would be a problem squeezing that many more seats onto the floor of the House. (Even my three-year-old granddaughter could come up with a better one that that.) His solution: just give Ontario ten fewer seats. His rationale: ten seats are a lot. Thanks Peter, but for people whose early education included arithmetic, it’s transparently unfair.

With the government’s bill, Canada is back to old-time election rigging. Alberta and B.C. are more likely to vote Conservative than Ontario, so give them the seats they are due while short changing Ontario.

The government’s anti-Ontario stance does not stop there.

It extends with a vengeance to manufacturing and the cities.

Without serious attention behind paid to this crucial matter, because of our strong commodity exports, Canada’s industrial sector is being ripped to shreds. Disproportionately, that affects Ontario where the majority of industrial jobs are located. Tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in manufacturing. The crisis, which is of historic proportions, could lead to the permanent destruction of the country’s industrial base. At risk are operations in the auto, steel, chemical, rubber, and other industrial categories.

The long-term consequence of NAFTA, high petroleum prices and the mad dash to develop the oil sands in Alberta (green house gases be damned) has been to return Canada’s economic strategy to the export of resources, resources and more resources. In recent times, economists and political scientists have regarded the staples theory of Harold Innis---the idea that Canada’s economy turns on the exploitation of resources for export---as outmoded.

Look again. The staples economy is back with a vengeance, with all its attendant risks of boom and bust.

The hyper-exploitation of the oil sands is chiefly responsible for the soaring Canadian dollar. When the American economy slows appreciably over the next year, the Canadian dollar will fall, but by then the damage to the battered manufacturing sector may be irreversible. Expecting the sector to rebound in a recessionary environment nourished by a lower dollar alone is too much to ask.

Closely linked to the manufacturing crisis is the nation’s urban malaise. That too, while not limited to Ontario, is centred in the Greater Toronto Area with its six million inhabitants.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that with their 19th century classical liberal (aka neo-conservative) ideology, the Harperites don’t think it matters that our cities are shackled to a 19th century constitutional order. More cynically, since the nation’s major cities, with the exception of Calgary and Edmonton, don’t figure in the Conservatives’ target ridings, their plight is of no consequence.

The GTA and other major Canadian metropolises are being allowed to lapse into shabbiness and inefficiency as infrastructure is not renewed. Public transit---essential in larger cities and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions---is surviving on crumbs.

Canada desperately needs a constitutional order in which municipalities are brought out from under the shadow of provincial jurisdiction and are outfitted with the fiscal means to thrive. In the absence of constitutional change, the federal government, with its surpluses, needs to transfer GST and other tax revenues to the cities, from which those taxes were generated in the first place.

With his forty per cent strategy---aimed at winning enough votes in the right places to win a majority of seats in the next election---Stephen Harper couldn’t care less about the fact that vibrant cities are the key to the nation’s development in the 21st century.

The Conservative government’s guiding principle is that what’s good for the oil patch is good for Canada. That view of things alone is enough to foster an outlook that is systematically anti-Ontario.

Long used to being the cream-fed pet of Confederation, and resented for it, it’s difficult for Ontarians to wake up to the urgent fact that with Stephen Harper at the helm, they’re getting their asses kicked.

In Bishop's Robes, Jim Flaherty Meets the Retailers

This is from James Laxer's blog. Flaherty is a great purveyor of flatulence. His pompous hot air may have some minor effects but as Laxer says it doesn't really propel prices downward.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
In Bishop’s Robes, Jim Flaherty Meets the Retailers

At a highly publicized meeting on Parliament Hill today, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will exhort the nation’s retailers to bring prices into line with the stronger value of the Canadian dollar. The gathering bears a strong resemblance to a conclave of medieval warlords with the local bishop. From time to time the bishop would meet with knights, lords, knaves and other grandees to urge a little Christian charity on them.

Keep the pillaging, looting, mayhem, and theft from the local peasants to a minimum he would urge. Not only would this win points for them with the Almighty, it would do much to prevent the peasants from revolting. And the peasants are always revolting, he might add.

Naturally those present at the gathering understood that the bishop would take no earthly action to ensure compliance with his stated wishes. Moral suasion was the name of the game.

When Jim Flaherty meets with the Retail Council, Walmart and all the other marts, he is there to urge them to do the right thing. They should give Canadian consumers true value for their puissant loonies.

Like the medieval bishop, Flaherty is a man a principle, of fixed principles. He believes in the celestial workings of the unregulated market. Let the forces of supply and demand, of wages and profits operate like a finely tuned timepiece and all will be well. There will be no legislation to require retailers to treat Canadians fairly when they purchase automobiles, books, household appliances and clothing, the finance minister has already said.

Why bother to hold the meeting at all if Flaherty plans to take no action to ensure that Canadians get fairness?

As a man of his creed, the finance minister believes that words from the pulpit can have an effect. For their part, the retailers are grumbling. They don’t want to be seen at a confessional where they are cast in the role of the sinners. The price gap between Canada and the U.S. is someone else’s fault, they insist. Blame the manufacturers, the distributors, labour and the geography of Canada, just don’t blame them.

At the conclave, Flaherty will be sure to explain to the retailers that spending an hour or two wearing a hair shirt in a his presence and perhaps conceding a few alms to consumers is better than the alternative: a meeting at a future date with a political leader who might actually do something.

What is the logic behind Canada's Afghan Mission?

This is from http://www.jameslaxer.com/blog.html.As I understand it, there are already "reformed" Taliban in the Karzai government. "Reformed" means simply that they support the Karzai government not that they have changed their views in any other way. Already the old Taliban style Department of Virtue and Vice has been restored and an unfortunate Muslim who converted to Christianity was whisked away to asylum in Italy before he was executed.
The Karzai offer is meant simply to split the Taliban. By the way the US, that makes a regular practice of claiming there should be no negotiation with terrorists applauds the Karzai offer. These guys aren't supposed to make sense.
Laxer makes the excellent point that those favoring the mission say that we are promoting democracy etc. and keeping the country from being over-run by these Taliban terrorists while Karzai bribes them with offers to become part of that "democratic" government!



Uh….what is the Logic behind Canada’s Military Mission in Afghanistan? Please, Run that Past Me Again

The members of the Harper government have argued that Canada needs to fight in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and to sustain the government of Hamid Karzai. While the Karzai government upholds the rule of law, is committed to democracy and the rights of women, the Taliban is the implacable enemy of civilization, on these and a host of other matters, according to the Harper government.

Recently, the Karzai government has been negotiating with elements of the Taliban, and Hamid Karzai has said he wants to bring Taliban leaders into his administration.

What the hell is going on?

The head of the government we are fighting for, the man who is supposed to symbolize all that is decent in Afghanistan, wants members of the terrorist insurgency to join with him in ruling the country. Representatives of the Harper government have made it clear that Canada does not approve of negotiations with the Taliban, but that it’s up to the Karzai government to decide on its own policies. (Having dispatched troops to help Afghans uphold the government they really want, we could hardly try to dictate to the government in Kabul, could we?)

So, what are we doing in Afghanistan? Hamid Karzai does not seem to regard the members of the Taliban as beyond the pale of civilization the way Stephen Harper does.

Are our troops fighting and dying to improve the bargaining power of Hamid Karzai in restructuring his government with members of the Taliban in it? How is this conflict worth the life of even one more Canadian soldier?

Harper's 40 per cent solution: James Laxer

Duceppe is anxious to have an election since he feels the BQ must distinguish itself from the Conservatives or do even worse at the polls. The NDP did well in the Quebec byelections so it may be ready to fight an election soon. It is the Liberals who are in disarray and may give Harper his majority. However if they pull together Dion might just surprise everybody. As he himself says points out one of his virtues is the people underestimate. However, his performance during recent attacks on Jamie Carroll his aide has been underwhelming.
The following step Harper has taken is to put poison pills in the Throne speech no doubt and to claim that any vote on a Bill mentioned in the Throne speech will be a confidence motion. It sounds as Laxer claims that Harper is angling for an election that he thinks he might win. However he may hope that the opposition will try to keep the government going and the Liberals make perfect asses of themselves-more perfect asses!--and then force an election when the polls look better for him.
This is from Laxer's blog.Harper’s Forty Per Cent Wager

The unveiling of the Conservative get-tough-on-drugs initiative is the first salvo in the Harper government’s fall offensive whose strategic goal is to secure an electoral majority by Christmas.

The law and order approach mostly directed at soft-drug users is red meat being heaped on a platter for Harper’s core constituency---older white men in suburbs and small towns who resent just about everybody else.

The reason the former head of the National Citizens’ Coalition is dancing a jig these days is that he thinks that in a quick election he can win the 40 per cent of votes he needs to cobble together a thin majority government. He doesn’t have the 40 per cent yet, but with his party’s coffers bursting and his opponents in disarray, he believes he can do it.

Meanwhile, each of Harper’s foes lives in his or her delusional nether-world:

• Worst off is Stephane Dion who party has fallen prey to struggles over who is to succeed the leader of the moment when he expires on the field of battle. Dion, a fundamentally decent man, who would be a moderately progressive prime minister, has been a dud as leader, a flop in English Canada and even worse in Quebec.
• Gilles Duceppe, who feels support for the Bloc ebbing away, wants an election as soon as possible so he can hang onto enough seats to retire with dignity.
• Jack Layton, fresh from the NDP’s stunning by-election victory in Outremont, and now with an impressive Francophone lieutenant in Thomas Mulcair at his side, thinks this is his chance to challenge the Liberals for the lion’s share of the centre-left vote.
• Elizabeth May is riding the Green Machine. The Greens are more a sentiment than a party.

Particularly in English Canada, Harper’s opponents are bent on slaying one another, leaving him free---he anticipates---to win the big prize. At the moment, well over 60 per cent of Canadian voters don’t want Stephen Harper. But that won’t stop the opposition leaders from acting out the last scene of Hamlet and inflicting grievous wounds on one another.

Only if the wider public takes ownership of the upcoming election, the most consequential since the free trade election of 1988, is there any hope of forcing the opposition parties to focus on stopping Harper. The need to stop Harper becomes glaringly apparent when we contemplate a few of the consequences of handing him complete power for five years:

• On Afghanistan, Harper has backed away from his previous pledge to base any post February 2009 role for Canada on a “consensus” among the federal parties. At his press conference in Ottawa this week, Harper said he will rely on the support of a parliamentary majority. After he wins his election, the “consensus” will be reduced to his party alone, and in this top-down government, that means Harper alone.
• Five years with Harper in control means that during the crucial struggle to grapple with greenhouse gas emissions, Canada will be on the side of the US in promoting so-called voluntary emission standards. Production in the oil sands will expand, and northern Alberta will spew ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The oil patch will make a ton of money and Calgary’s favourite son will preside over a nation with its dollar above par, and a shrinking manufacturing base in central Canada.
• With a majority under his belt, Harper can afford to pander to his growing Christian fundamentalist base. Unlike Mike Harris in Ontario who limited himself to helping the rich at the expense of the poor, Harper will not hesitate to saddle social policy with faith-based initiatives borrowed from south of the border.
• Half a decade of Harper in complete control will propel this country down the road to much deeper integration with the US. The plans are in place, the corporate sector is on board. Two decades ago, “free trade” robbed Canada of control of its petroleum industry, and ended the idea of a Canadian industrial strategy. The next step will reduce this country to a series of weakly linked resource producing regions on the northern edge of Manifest Destiny.
• The central goal of Harper’s social policy will be to cut taxes so as to limit Ottawa’s capacity to spend effectively on health care, childcare, higher education and the quest to raise the quality of life of aboriginal communities. The Canada that is spoken of as one of the last bastions of a civilization in which the rich have not run away with everything will be no more.
• And just for a chaser, Harper will privatize CBC television.

The majority of Canadians don’t want this agenda, and will not want it while it’s being inflicted on them. And the opposition politicians in Ottawa can be expected to rise in Question Period and denounce it all as it unfolds. They’ll have their seats. But what the Hell will the rest of us have?

Bush, Harper and Friends: An Environmental Production in Five Acts

Laxer does not post all that often but when he does it is original material and usually quite interesting. This is from his blog.

The Bush-Harper approach is to use the Green flag to attack the Greens.
By spouting green rhetoric without tough action Bush and Harper actually contribute to global warming by increasing the ambient hot air that will cause some people to fall asleep when they need a cold blast to wake them up to the dangers of global warming.

Bush, Harper and Friends: An Environmental Production in Five Acts

At a White House-sponsored climate change conference in Washington DC this week, President George W. Bush told participants that he favoured a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as long as each nation decides “for itself the right mix of tools and technology to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective.”

Bush steadfastly refuses to commit the United States to any scheme of mandatory emission reduction obligations. The US-led process---Stephen Harper is an enthusiastic participant---is transparently aimed at sidelining the UN-organized talks that are to begin in December in Indonesia. The UN talks will attempt to draw up a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol which would take effect in 2012.

The UN agreement would involve tough, mandatory commitments of the kind the Bush administration rejected when it refused to sign on to Kyoto. Even though Canada ratified Kyoto, the Harper government has dropped any attempt to reach its targets and supports the Bush administration’s view of the way ahead.

The Bush approach has been evolving for years. To avoid inconvenience to big corporate polluters and the free enterprise system, the Bush approach has been an unfolding drama in five acts: deny; deceive; delay; defang; and deep-six.

1. Deny. Act One was the outright denial that if global warming was occurring at all, it was being driven by the emission of greenhouse gases as a consequence of human activities. Following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan who believed that trees were a source of pollution, George W. Bush and Stephen Harper thought the global warming theory was a sneak attack on free enterprise cloaked in the garb of science. Beneath that garb were anti-capitalist demagogues.
2. Deceive. When outright denial became an embarrassment in the presence of people who could read and write, the corporate allies of Bush and Harper turned to deception, in the form of cooked “science”. Petroleum and coal companies sponsored their own studies, designed to cast doubt on the validity of the global warming hypothesis. Corporate funded “experts” emerged to claim that no evidence existed to suggest that human activity was responsible for climate change. The “experts” were much like the tobacco company-financed “scientists” who used to pour cold water on the connection between smoking and lung cancer.
3. Delay. As the case made by genuine scientists became more definitive, and almost universally accepted, Bush, Harper and friends turned to delay. Instead of signing on to the Kyoto targets and the process which will design more rigorous targets for the future, they changed the subject to that of finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “while keeping our economies growing” as Bush said this week. For Bush and Harper, economic growth was the lodestar that was never to be compromised. If reducing greenhouse emissions could be achieved without slowing growth that would be fine.
4. Defang. Not happy with the Europeans and others who were determined to reduce emissions even if this proved costly, Bush, Harper and friends have launched a process with a cheerier outlook. They are joining the battle against greenhouse gas emissions as long as this does not discommode big industry and big energy. It will all be voluntary, putting the future of humanity in the hands of technology and the corporations. If the free market can’t save us, then what can?
5. Deep-Six. This week George W. Bush, with the support of the Harper government, launched a flank attack on the international campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto process has been a unique initiative in the history of our species to counter a unique threat. Bush wants to share in the rhetoric of that struggle because he has no political choice. But his loyalty remains where it has always been, with the great corporate legions, and their drive for profits. That loyalty, the product of ideology and material greed, is rooted in the faith that the corporations will come up with an answer and catastrophe will be averted. And if not, at least this generation of corporate leaders will still reap their rewards.

John Tory: Where's the Beef

This is lifted from James Laxer's blog.
Perhaps some Tory commentator can fill us in on where the beef is in Tory's platform. Laxer does point out some of the inconsistencies between Tory's claims and his actual performance. The article is mainly a critique of TOry but he does have closing praises for Hampton's policies. Poor McGuinty is just a thin hare!
I certainly agree that Hampton's energy policies make more sense than either those of the Liberals or the Tories who both opt for greater nuclear power development.

John Tory: Where’s the Beef?

John Tory looked every inch the premier in last night’s televised leaders debate. Or, at least, he looked like the old time Conservative premiers of Ontario in the days before Mike Harris. I can remember an evening at Queen’s University decades ago when John Robarts was premier and Bill Davis was an up and coming star. They both wore scrumptious navy blue suits, just like John Tory did.

Meanwhile Dalton McGuinty seemed to be a very thin hare caught between Tory and Howard Hampton.

With John Tory as their leader, the Conservatives have found a man who gushes compassion. They have dispensed with the “axe-murderer” look achieved by Mike Harris and by the man with the slick-back hair, Ernie Eves. Tory painted McGuinty as a premier who has allowed people to suffer for the past four years. Tory appeared to care about students, seniors, wage and salary earners and he even took a shot at the super rich for the low taxes they pay in comparison to low income single mothers. Fortunately, I had a box of tissues on hand so I could weep along with him.


Who’s kidding who!

John Tory plans to drop Ontario’s health tax at the same time as he claims to care about health care. He bleeds for students but will do nothing to hold down their tuition. He is a dedicated crime fighter, but failed to commit himself to supporting a call for the banning of hand guns in the province. He complains about the province’s job creation record, but is a member of the party that at the federal level is sandbagging Ontario with its full steam ahead approach to the Alberta oil sands---which are spewing out greenhouse gases, driving up the dollar too quickly, causing massive job losses in Ontario, and bringing in insufficient royalties for Albertans. He claims to support public education, but he would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars a year to faith based schools.

Where’s the beef, John Tory?

That’s the question that needs to be posed over and over again in the closing weeks of the campaign. John Tory’s compassion is not backed up by commitments to make life a little less comfortable for his friends on Bay Street and the Post Road, so that much more can be done to help those who need help.

On the other side of the bruised premier stood NDP leader Howard Hampton, who does have some very intelligent ideas. His proposals for saving energy instead of building nuclear plants, and for holding down electricity rates to help keep Ontario competitive are excellent. So is his commitment to roll back tuition fees for students. Many of my students now go to school part time because they can’t afford the tuition. Hampton’s pledge to raise the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour immediately is crucial. In a province, where the rich have never had it so good, it’s time for those at the other end of the spectrum to get a little closer to a living wage. Hampton’s platform is well thought out. Alone of the leaders, he actually has ideas for strengthening Ontario’s economy during a time of difficult transition.

James Laxer: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq

This is from Laxer's website. There is a Messianic strain in Bush's foreign policy that is somewhat akin to a crusade. But there was the same crusading against communism and the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. While Bush as a fundamentalist Christian may also personally believe in this crusade Bush is not alone in determining policy. The neo-con cabal many associated with the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) set out their aims before 9/11. The terror attacks and the war on terror provided an ideal vehicle by which to set their dreams of US hegemony in motion and gain US and even global support for these aims.
I think that the faith based aspect of the invasions was a buttressing factor but not likely a determining one. There was huge support for making sure that Afghanistan did not continue as a terrorist training ground. Certainly this did not justify an invasion and regime change in Afghanistan but it was great enough that the US had many allies in invading Afghanistan and being instrumental in overthrowing the Taliban. The Taliban by the way never directly attacked any other country and the US had been involved in aiding the Taliban to stop poppy production. Allies simply agreed with the US that Afghanistan needed to be neutralised as a haven for jihadists.
The Iraq case is actually quite different. There is no way that it could be convincingly tied in with terrorism although some pundits tried to link Hussein with terrorism. The main ties of Hussein with terrorism were with the Palestinians not Al Qaeda terrorism directed against the US but terror used as resistance against Israel.
In fact the Iraq invasion was justified primarily in terms of Hussein posing a threat to the US through getting weapons of mass destruction. It is true that Hussein's brutal rule was often used as a butressing argument it only became a key reason after it was shown that there were no WMD.
Laxer is certainly right about US policy makers not considering the longer term results of their actions. The US view is saturated with hubris. Policy makers think that US might and rightness will make everything come out all right. If it doesn't it can be easily fixed since the US has the largest and most effective military machine in the world that can subdue any opposition. As Laxer shows it has not at all worked out this way.
While Harper may also think that allied with the US it can remake Afghanistan this is not the main part of Harper's realism. It is just part of his selling of the mission that we will make Afghan a viable democracy with the rule of law and the beginnings of a prosperous market economy. Another aspect of his "realism" is closer alignment with the US. This fits in with his increase in military spending. Co-operating more closely in realizing US foreign policy aims will he thinks give us greater clout and some of the spoils associated with being hegemon.

On the 6th Anniversary of September 11: Utopianism and Reality in Afghanistan and Iraq


The US-led invasions that followed the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan and Iraq were nothing less than vainglorious attempts to remake countries in ways they could not be remade. These have been latter-day crusades, just as much the product of apocalyptic religious fervour as those undertaken in the Middle Ages. They will end just as badly.
The September 11 attacks provoked a wave of messianic thinking of the sort that previous crises have generated at other times in American history. The Bush administration responded with the idea that to counter an act of such evil, a war must be declared whose purpose was to banish evil itself. A year after the attacks, George W. Bush declared: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, Bush focused on the positive side of the determination to rid the world of evil: “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof.”
It is not that the US did not have material objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oil, the transportation routes to oil and natural gas and the quest for strategic military advantage in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia mattered. But the language of the President was apocalyptic and absolute.
To understand the invasions, Bush’s words need to be taken seriously. The most important motive for the military missions was to transform Afghanistan and Iraq in America’s image. Without the messianism, the idea that it was America’s God given task to remake the world, these invasions would have been unthinkable. Following the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that “God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”
Certainly the president was reaching out to the religious right with these statements. But it is a mistake to think that Bush and his advisers are not subject to the messianism they express.
Hard as it is four years after the assault on Iraq to remember this, the invasion was undertaken in the last flush of the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the brief era of the End of History and the Borderless World when the notion reigned supreme that liberal capitalism was the way ahead for all of humanity. The architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom actually believed that American forces would be met by cheering crowds and feted with bouquets of flowers.
Those who launched the invasions did almost no serious thinking about long-term consequences. In Iraq, the invasion unleashed chaos and suffering---four million people have become refugees. It gave Al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq which it had never had before and it handed enormous power to Shiite theocrats with strong links to Iran. The report by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, that there has been modest military progress in the country as a consequence of the surge in American troop strength there, has been treated by observers as little more than a political message to improve the position of the US for its endgame in a failed war. In war, it is a rule of thumb that statements by a commanding general are aimed at winning the propaganda struggle, and are not exercises in truth telling.
In Afghanistan, the invaders have wandered into a thicket of long-existing struggles between the Pashtun in the south---from whom most of the Taliban emerged---and other tribal groups in the north and other parts of the country. Without being sufficiently aware of what they were doing, the western invaders became embroiled in tribal and factional struggles that extend from Afghanistan into neighbouring regions of Pakistan.
The Harper government and other proponents of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan like to portray their approach as one of hard-headed realism. They are sailing under false colours. From the start, the idea that the West could successfully conquer Afghanistan and impose a western style government on that country has been a utopian fantasy.
The Taliban has had the tactical wit to align itself with the poppy growers and drug warlords they formerly opposed when they ran the country. That has drawn the US, Canada and other western powers into an opium war so that many Afghans now believe the West threatens their livelihood and that the Taliban is their protector.
The government of Hamid Karzai has begun quiet negotiations with elements of the Taliban. A deal in the not distant future is entirely possible. The result of such a deal would not be democracy, the rule of law and equal rights for women. It would mean an altered configuration of power in Afghanistan, with new Pashtun and Taliban elements in the government and some former Northern Alliance factions out of it. It would not bring peace, but rather a continued armed struggle, with a different list of players on the opposing sides.
The US and NATO could well seize on a deal with parts of the Taliban to declare victory and pull most of their troops out.
In the meantime, Canadian soldiers are fighting and too many are dying in campaigns to retake terrain they have previously taken only to have the Taliban reoccupy it later. Small gains are made building and opening schools, but these are often nullified by an insurgency that remains potent.
The Harper government and other backers of the war have resorted to hiding behind the soldiers to escape their own responsibility for the mess we are in. The exhortation that we must all “Support Our Troops”---something, which if meant literally virtually all Canadians do---is being used to silence critics of the mission.
The preposterous result is that a Canadian government that calls itself “conservative” is floundering in a failing crusade. Meanwhile those who want our troops brought home are the ones who adhere to the traditional conservative idea that wars should only be fought when they are unavoidable and that they should never be fought in aid of messianic missions to reconstruct the world.
Our politics has been turned inside out in ways that are deeply puzzling to almost everyone. Conservatives have become utopians, even if at times they are embarrassed by the rhetoric of George W. Bush. Meanwhile those in other parts of the political spectrum have become the skeptics, those who warn that the world cannot and should not be subjected to violent campaigns to transform it in the name of liberation, campaigns whose tangible results are death and dislocation on an enormous scale.

James Laxer on John Tory's Education Policy

This is a good critique of Tory's push for funding of faith-based schools. As Laxer notes it is a bit odd and rather risky that Tory should push this issue so hard. Of course some groups will be in strong support but perhaps there will be a majority backlash in defence of the public school system.

On Education: John Tory Starts a Culture War

John Tory, Ontario’s Conservative leader, has enjoyed a reputation for moderation and judgment. In light of this, it has come as an unwelcome surprise that Tory has embarked on a radical strategy, no less disruptive than Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution, in his bid to lead his party to power in the upcoming provincial election. The traditional approach for a moderate opposition politician, as Tory was presumed to be, is to campaign on the defects of the sitting government, showing how it has failed to keep its promises, and capitalizing on scandals and administrative lapses.

Tory and his handlers have obviously decided that this timeworn method will not succeed in toppling Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals. Instead Tory has started a culture war. He hopes to win by injecting highly divisive hot-button issues into the campaign. The tactics are borrowed from the playbook of the American hard right.

At first glance, Tory’s proposal to provide public funding to faith based schools can be seen as nothing more than an attempt to extend to other religious denominations what Roman Catholics already enjoy.

In fact, his goal is not to engage in a debate about the rights and wrongs of public support for Catholic schools, a policy that is rooted in the Constitution of 1867. His goal is to launch a 21st campaign to stress the fault lines in Ontario society and to win power in the process.

If the Ontario government were to fund faith based primary and secondary schools, two consequences would be highly likely. First, public funding for Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox Christian and other faith-based schools would inevitably open the door to legal challenges from still other faiths and sects for the funding of their schools as well.

Analogies with the Catholic case for funding are misleading because the existence of Catholic schools, whatever one thinks of this, is constitutionally based. This means that the presence of publicly funded Catholic schools cannot be used as the basis for court challenges on behalf of other faiths. Once some other faith’s schools are funded, though, this situation would be completely altered. Tory’s proposal, if implemented, would throw the courts open to plaintiffs arguing for the support of all manner of sectarian schools.

Second, assurances from advocates for the public funding of faith based schools that this would not lead to a massive exodus of students from public schools provide cold comfort. In a rapidly evolving multi-cultural society such as Ontario’s, against the backdrop of rising assaults on secular norms in many countries, it is foolhardy to suggest that the availability of publicly funded sectarian schools would not lead to a flight from public schools.

At present, public schools are a meeting ground for people from diverse backgrounds, a key to Ontario’s success as a society that has done better than most others in realizing the benefits of diversity, and avoiding the pitfalls. Public funding of sectarian schools is bound to generate campaigns to win parents over to the idea that to be true to their faith they should send their children to a school whose students are members of their faith alone.

That Tory has his sights set on a radical debate about public education can be grasped from his flirtation with the idea of introducing creationism into the school curriculum. The Conservative leader threw this stink-bomb into the debate and then appeared to back off a little.

His mention of creationism sent a coded message to those whose religious convictions motivate them to launch a wide-ranging attack on what they see as today’s Godless, secular society.

Creationism, the idea that the earth was created by a divine-being a few thousand years ago and that humans once walked with dinosaurs, is bogus science. It has no more place in a school curriculum than the notion that the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth---ideas that were once held by powerful religions whose leaders were prepared to execute those with different views on the nature of the universe.

What Tory was doing was letting religious fundamentalists know that he is not unsympathetic to their aspirations.

Beyond the fundamentalists, there are other interests at play. Look at the coalition Tory has supporting him on the funding issue. In addition to those who support public funding for faith based schools there are the advocates of public funding for private schools. It is not accidental that private schools that draw their students largely from upper middle class families see the current election campaign as a golden opportunity for their own cause.

And they are not the only ones. A campaign is in full swing in the United States to establish a new multi-billion dollar market for the private sector through the privatization of much of the public school system. Education is seen as a lucrative field in which private companies can move into the designing, managing and supplying of schools. The neo-cons and business interests who support the establishment of charter schools (some public, some private) and other privatization initiatives make the case that the public school system is an unproductive monopoly dominated by teachers and teachers’ unions. They look forward to the day when this public monopoly will be dismantled and parents will be free to “choose” the types of schools their children attend.

In the process, the public school system will be reduced to a last resort option for the poorest and least powerful segments of society. Out of this will come billions of dollars in profits for those who have had the foresight to spot a golden opportunity.

The Ontario Conservatives are not telling the electorate where the path they have chosen will lead. But we were not born yesterday, Mr. Tory. We have seen this motion picture before.

Jim Flaherty: The Auto Workers' Free Market Friend

This is from James Laxer's blog.
Ed Broadbent's old stomping ground is going to the dogs, that is the Conservatives, the running dogs of the US imperialists as the old Maoists would say. However, Canada is valuable mainly as a source of natural resources such as oil, gas, wood, and minerals. As long as we continue to supply the US with those and help its energy security by developing the oil sands everything is OK. The workers at the GM plant in Oshawa elected a Conservative. I wonder if this will have any effect on their voting patterns.


Jim Flaherty: The Auto Workers’ free-market friend in Ottawa

G M’s announcement last week that it will cut 1200 jobs at an Oshawa, Ontario truck plant is the latest signal that the nation’s manufacturing sector is in deep trouble.

CAW economist Jim Stanford told the Toronto Star that “economic research over the years has shown that the spinoff effects in total add up to about 7.5 jobs” for every automobile job that is eliminated. The effect, therefore, of the GM job cuts will be the loss of about eight thousand jobs in a host of companies that supply the Oshawa truck plant as well as in local restaurants, building businesses and a variety of service industries. Many of the lost jobs in the auto parts sector will be south of the border in American plants that supply the truck plant.

Manufacturing layoffs are becoming an ever more common occurrence in Ontario, as core industrial employment is cut back, and the nation’s heavy industries are hollowed out.

Because the overall economic health of the country appears relatively robust, the growing crisis in the auto sector and in manufacturing as a whole has been masked.

Since the late 1990s, about 10,000 auto assembly jobs have been lost in Canada and over the past six years, 13,000 jobs have been cut in the auto parts sector. This year in addition to the General Motors jobs cuts, Chrysler has decided to eliminate 2000 jobs in Ontario.

One might expect that Jim Flaherty, Canada’s Finance Minister, who represents the riding of Whitby-Oshawa, where many of the workers who are about to lose their livelihoods reside, would be working overtime to save auto jobs.

On the contrary, he seems philosophical, content with the stance his government is taking. He told a reporter that he was “concerned” about the GM announcement and mentioned his recent budget’s faster write-offs for capital investments in machinery and equipment for manufacturers as evidence that the government is doing a lot for the auto industry.

At a time when the effects of the rapid surge in the value of the Canadian dollar and the slowdown in US auto sales are combining to threaten thousands more auto jobs, Flaherty’s faster write offs will be about as effective as a finger in a dike during a storm surge. Everybody knows that in a slowing market faster write offs don’t generate additional capital investment.

Flaherty is, and always has been, a staunch right-wing conservative, proud of never having interfered with the celestial functioning of free markets. That’s why he can be philosophical about the loss of good jobs in his riding. “People who have been losing jobs have been getting other jobs,” he noted.

He makes it seem so easy. What alternative jobs will those who are laid off be getting and for what kind of pay? What about workers in Oshawa and Whitby who are trying to pay down their mortgages?

While Flaherty fiddles, we stand to lose a big chunk of our manufacturing sector. And we’re not likely to get it back.

It’s hard to know whether Flaherty is intelligent enough to understand that his ideological outlook favours capital at the expense of labour, or is a bone-headed true-believer who thinks free markets are socially neutral. For the auto workers in his riding, it doesn’t much matter.

Their powerful MP won’t do a damn thing for them. Flaherty and the other members of the Harper government don’t believe in the concept of an industrial strategy to nurture and protect high paying jobs in key industrial sectors.

The trouble is that although the ways they do it may have changed, the French, Germans, Italians, Swedes, Japanese and South Koreans carefully protect their vital industrial sectors. And the Americans do exactly the same thing through the backdoor route of defence spending to procure equipment from key industries, including the auto industry.

Maybe it’s time for auto workers to find an MP who isn’t a neo-con boy scout who is dumb enough to think our competitors play by the free market rules they profess and don’t follow.

James Laxer on the Stelco Sale

I thought that at one time Laxer was a socialist but in this article he seems to be a great defender of the Canadian nationalist bourgeoisie against the encroachments of global (particularly US) capital. There is no call for nationalisation of private companies or of worker control. Historically many Canadian owned companies have been far from progressive.
Probably most Canadian capitalist are themselves internationalist and don't care a whit about whether companies are owned in Canada or elsewhere. Anyway most large companies now will have shareholders from all over.
US foreign policy is to make Canada a reservoir for much needed energy, water, and mineral raw materials and that would probably occur whether or not companies involved were globally or Canadian owned. You have a government committed to serving as a handmaid to the US, that is the problem.

U.S. Steel Takes Over Stelco: Requiem for what was once a Canadian Owned Industry

US Steel, historically the mighty American rival of Stelco, the Steel Company of Canada, has reached a deal to take over its Canadian rival for $1.16 billion. With Stelco in foreign hands, the once domestically owned industry will be wholly under the control of companies based outside of Canada.

Last year, Dofasco was sold to foreign interests and earlier this year, Algoma Steel and Regina-based Ipsco were purchased by foreign companies.

The take over of Stelco marks the end of the century long saga of Canadian owned steel companies. The steel story was a remarkable one because unlike automobiles and petroleum, where foreign owners predominated from near the beginning, Canadian companies ran the industry.

And it didn’t happen by accident. What made the Steel Company of Canada especially noteworthy when it was established in 1910 was that the company reversed the usual pattern of Canadian economic relations with the outside world. Instead of exporting a raw product for manufacture elsewhere, Stelco imported American iron ore and coal to produce steel in Hamilton, Ontario. It was Canada’s rejoinder to Pittsburgh.

Stelco was created as a deliberate act of national policy, involving both British and Canadian entrepreneurship. The notion was that an industrialized country required its own steel industry, owned and controlled domestically.

Recently the C.D. Howe Institute---that ever faithful lobbyist on behalf of foreign ownership and deeper integration of Canada with the US---released a report arguing that this country needs far more foreign investment.

The C.D. Howe Institute and its scribes are wedded to the theory that all mergers and acquisitions are beneficial because they promote greater productivity and higher returns on invested capital. The only thing this theory ignores is the real world. Repeated studies have shown that in manufacturing industries, Research and Development facilities and parts, components, and capital equipment manufacturers grow up around a central producer such as Stelco. These networks are crucial sources of cutting edge innovation and of employment, much of it highly skilled. Shift the ownership of the key company outside Canada and the R and D and other network functions will also shift outside the country. The net result, as will be the case with Stelco, will be lost innovative activity and employment.

The timing of this boggles the mind. The middle to long term outlook for producers of steel and other commodities is extremely bright in today’s global economy. Only a dull and unimaginative business community was choose this as the moment to lose its control of the steel industry, and only a witless government would stand by and allow it to happen.

How much of Canada would the C.D. Howe Institute put up for sale? Based on their track record---all of it. Perhaps their final act, when everything else has been sold, will be to put themselves up for sale and turn out the lights.

James Laxer on Ignatieff

Yet another article on Ignatieff. I thought Laxer was left wing but this simply ignores a lot of the features of Ignatieff's article. Apparently for Laxer the phony rhetoric about spreading democracy and human rights is OK. He has nothing critical to say on Ignatieff's position on the NATO mission in Kosovo. The articles by Mallick and Salutin are much more critical. Laxer seems to think that Ignatieff is a good guy and will be a great asset to Canadian politics now he has put Iraq behind him. Ugh!

Michael Ignatieff: Putting Iraq Behind Him


Canadian politicians are very mulish when it comes to admitting that they have ever been wrong about anything. That’s why when Michael Ignatieff proclaimed that he had been wrong about the invasion of Iraq, in an article in the New York Times Magazine, it mattered.

In his article, while Ignatieff says much and leaves much unsaid, he is clear in stating that his judgment had been wrong about the Iraq invasion.

Ignatieff attributes US failure in Iraq to the fact that it was a country “of which most Americans knew little”, and that those supporting the invasion were wrong in supposing that “a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.” He adds that those such as himself who championed the US mission were wrong in believing that “because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq.” He says that people such as himself did not grapple sufficiently with the hard questions like: “Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror?” On the subject of leadership, he says this of George W. Bush: “It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing.”

Ignatieff dismisses the warnings of those he says predicted catastrophe in Iraq in advance for ideological reasons, those he says are always disposed to think the Americans are in the wrong. It is not surprising that Ignatieff has little time for those who opposed him from the beginning on Iraq. He sees them as having been right, but for the wrong reasons.

What Ignatieff does not tell us in the article is whether he has re-thought his position on the American Empire in light of Iraq. This is no small matter. Ignatieff framed his support for the invasion of Iraq as a telling case in which the American Empire was needed to act on behalf of those who had nowhere else to turn if they desired human rights and the rule of law. “The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike,” Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 2003 two months before the invasion, noting that critics “have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.”

Has Ignatieff now changed his mind about the utility of empire, empire lite, the American Empire? He doesn’t tell us.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. At length in the article, Ignatieff discusses the differences between a theorist on the one hand and a practicing politician on the other. He is at pains to tell us that while he was the former in the past, he is now the latter.

Throughout the course of Canadian history, ambiguity on the question of empire has been a hallmark of our most distinguished Liberal prime ministers.

Liberal prime ministers have always been well-disposed to the United States when they have come to office. But they have learned on the job how difficult the Canadian relationship with the empire can be.

Wilfrid Laurier received his education in office in the days when it was the British, not the Americans, who dominated our lives. Leading a country torn between pro-imperialists (mostly Anglo-Canadians) and anti-imperialists (mostly French Canadians), he once proclaimed: “I am neither imperialist, nor anti-imperialist. I am Canadian.”

When Lester Pearson came to office in 1963, he was regarded as a great friend of America, and was welcomed on board by President John F. Kennedy, who had detested Pearson’s Tory predecessor, John Diefenbaker. Pearson learned how short the leash for a Canadian prime minister can be when he was summoned to Camp David by JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was furious because Pearson had called on the White House, in a speech delivered in the US, to order a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam. At their meeting, Johnson seized Pearson by the lapels and pulled him to his feet. After leaving office, Pearson described his meeting with LBJ as “my trip to Berchdesgaden” (a reference to Hitler’s Bavarian retreat).

Today people forget that when Pierre Trudeau came to power, he was notably pro-American, once proclaiming that after he retired he might choose to live in New York. Trudeau abominated nationalism, not just Quebec nationalism, but Canadian nationalism as well. During his days at 24 Sussex Drive, Trudeau dealt with five US presidents, but his views of America were mostly shaped by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. When Nixon proclaimed his New Economic Policy in the summer of 1971, he delivered a severe blow to Canada. Trudeau learned the lesson that Canada ought to care about Canadian ownership of major economic sectors, particularly the energy sector. Nixon helped push Trudeau down the road to the creation of Petro-Canada as a publicly owned corporation, and later to launch the National Energy Program, whose central goal was fifty per cent Canadian ownership of the petroleum industry.

The members of the Reagan administration detested Trudeau, regarding him as an untrustworthy ally, who could not be brought into the loop on matters such as the US occupation of Grenada in 1983. The Reagan White House joined forces with the oil companies and the multinationals in their assault on Trudeau’s economic nationalism. By the time he left office, Trudeau was seen in Washington as an anti-American pinko.

If ambiguity on empire and learning on the job have turned up on the CVs of former Liberal prime ministers, including Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, what are we to make of Michael Ignatieff, who while not the leader is one of his party’s brightest lights?

Ignatieff returned to Canada to pursue the leadership of the Liberal Party with two strikes against him. The first, his decades-long absence from the country, is quickly fading with the passage of time. Ignatieff got himself elected to parliament, made a strong run for the leadership of his party and has performed effectively as the Liberals’ deputy leader. Those who thought he was just a Harvard intello have been proven wrong by Ignatieff’s stellar performance during Question Period. By far the most effective opposition politician in the House, Ignatieff has savaged the Tory front bench, regularly getting the better of Stephen Harper.

The second strike against Ignatieff was that he returned to Canada as an apologist for George W. Bush, and an advocate of empire and the invasion of Iraq. He appeared in the guise of a would-be Tony Blair. While Canadians have bred their own poodles for Reagan, Bush I and Bush II---their names are Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper---Liberal voters are not looking for a poodle.

For Ignatieff to realize his full potential in Canadian politics, he had to put his support for the invasion of Iraq behind him. He has now done that.

And although he voted in the House of Commons to extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan to February 2009, he has become one of the most effective critics of the shortcomings of the mission.

Ignatieff’s major impact on our politics to date has been to force federal politicians to recognize Quebec as a nation within Canada---a step long overdue.

He has now cleared the debris aside so he can demonstrate just how much political talent he has.

posted by James Laxer

Afghanistan: Looking for Canadian Sovereignty

This is part of a much longer series that is available at Rabble. Laxer is usually quite interesting and makes many good points but I find this selection wanders a bit and sometimes is vague. There is not the bite that there was in his earlier work during the time of the Waffle movement. There isn't even a whiff of socialism in this portion of his commentary.


Afghanistan: Looking for Canadian sovereignty



>by James Laxer
July 16, 2007

(Mission of Folly: Part ten —2) In this new age, while Canadians have had very little leadership on this score from political leaders or intellectuals, they have moved in the same direction as other peoples in cherishing the survival of their state. Canadians have had a curious history on the question of national sovereignty in recent years.

From the political right, once a strong source of support for a sovereign Canada distinct from the United States, Canadians now receive continentalist rhetoric, buoyed up by neo-conservative notions that the strong state is anathema to a free people. Neo-conservative ideas propel Canada toward descent into a series of regional extensions of the United States, tethered together by a weak federal government.

On the political left, the tradition of left nationalism has been strong and has had a major cultural impact. Left nationalism propelled the campaigns against the supine acceptance of American corporate ownership of the Canadian economy and played a seminal role in the resistance to free trade.

In recent years, however, other voices on the left have been far less concerned with national sovereignty. Some of these voices have been highly derivative of the ideas of the American-centred anti-globalization movement. For them, the compelling questions in the world turn on the relationship of the rich nations of the north to the poor nations of the world.

Canada's struggles to maintain its sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States have meant little to those with this point of view. Intellectually, in any case, they remained enamoured of the liberal anti-state ideologies that flourished during the brief post-Cold War era. Ironically, where the state is concerned, they shared much in common with neo-conservatives.

Those who believe that Canadian sovereignty needs to be sustained and extended should establish a set of goals.

If a major objective of Canadian foreign policy should be to foster a sustainable global environment, Canada will have to reacquire sovereignty in the critical area of the petroleum industry. Under the terms of NAFTA, Canada must continue to maintain petroleum exports to the U.S. at the level they have reached over the preceding three years. As conventional Canadian oil production declines, Canada is becoming ever more reliant on oil sands production to sustain and increase overall petroleum output.

Using present production methods, which involve the use of enormous quantities of fresh water, large scale strip mining, the injection of clean natural gas to produce oil from the sands, and the emission of a huge volume of greenhouse gases, increasing oil sands production condemns Canada to a dirty global environmental role.

For Canada to achieve its environmental objectives, at home and abroad, the present American lock on the oil sands has to be broken. This will require either an amendment to the NAFTA Treaty, to remove the Canadian requirement to supply the United States with petroleum, or the abrogation by Canada of its place in NAFTA. Withdrawing from NAFTA would position Canada within the trade regulations of the World Trade Organization. For those who fear that leaving NAFTA would place Canada in the line of fire for U.S. retaliation, the backup of the regulations of the WTO should be kept in mind.

There are other crucial goals that need to be addressed as elements of Canada's bilateral foreign policy with the U.S. Recognized as important by successive Conservative and Liberal governments, but with little action to back it up, is the need to sustain Canada's claim to its Arctic territorial waters. Both the United States and the European Union refuse to accept Canada's claim to the Northwest Passage as Canadian waters. The Harper government has now announced plans to spend money on the acquisition of ships to patrol our Arctic waters. An Arctic patrol fleet should be the first new military undertaking in line with a new foreign policy.

Sovereignty also requires Canada to halt and reverse steps toward the concept of a Fortress North America alongside the United States. Canadian refugee and immigration policies should be de-linked from those of Washington. In the past, linking refugee policies to those of the U.S. would have resulted in consequences most Canadians would have lamented. After the U.S. backed coup in Chile in 1973, thousands of refugees were admitted to Canada. A refugee policy linked to that of Washington would have prevented those Chileans from reaching solace and a new life in Canada.

Canada should also halt the move toward interoperability of Canadian with U.S. military units. Interoperability is not a technical matter, although it is often portrayed that way. It is a political choice. The assumption underlying it is that Canada's main military operations will be alongside the Americans, or more accurately, under U.S. command.

The premise of the alternative foreign policy, outlined here, is that Canada's first military priority should be to patrol the nation's territorial waters, especially those in the Arctic. It flies in the face of elementary logic for a country to integrate its armed forces with those of a country with which it has an ongoing, indeed deepening, dispute over territorial sovereignty. Would the Americans integrate their armed forces with those of a state that disputes Washington's claim to an important portion of U.S. territory?

The second priority of the Canadian military which also does not require interoperability with U.S. forces, should be to prepare for participation in international missions that fall under the heading of the “Responsibility to Protect.” The Responsibility to Protect, recognized by the United Nations as an international obligation, arises when peoples face catastrophes, whether natural or man made. The tsunami in south Asia in December 1995 is an example of the former. The Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing in Sudan are examples of the latter.

Is it possible in a world dominated by the United States, and its potential challengers, most notably China, to find ways to address humanitarian catastrophes that are not bound to end up simply opening the way for the achievement of imperial aims? In the 21st century, is humanitarian intervention nothing more than the equivalent of missionary efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries that provide a fig leaf for imperial aggression? Must we face the hard truth that humanitarian interventions cannot be conceived in good faith until empires have been reconciled with nation states and international law? And will this predicament become worse as the American Empire faces increasing challenges from China and other actors over the next 20 or 30 years?

If those such as Michael Ignatieff, who would rely on the American Empire to deliver aid to suffering people do not have the answer, two other possibilities remain: reform of the global system from above; or transformation of the system from below. Should reform from above, to which we will return, prove a failure, as well it may, that leaves transformation from below as the road ahead. Uncertain, uneven, and explosive, upheaval from below will erupt in those cases where poverty, exploitation and authoritarianism, as well as ethnic and religious oppression, can be effectively countered by force.

Where and when such volcanic eruptions may occur in Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia, the one certainty is that the consequences will not be those that warm the hearts of liberal democrats, with their preference for pluralism, the rule of law, civil liberties and fair elections. But where liberals have made themselves the allies of global corporations and obscene income and wealth inequality, the pale light of their abstract quest for justice will scarcely bring warmth to those who suffer. Liberals could well end as sponsors of justice the way medieval churchmen were sponsors of charity.

What then of reform from above?

Efforts at transforming the UN have been undertaken many times in the past, and almost always, with meagre results. More often than not what has stood in the way of reform is the unwillingness of member states to cede power so as to make the UN more of a supranational authority and less of an intergovernmental organization. The five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), armed with vetoes, have always been, and remain today, jealous of the clout this gives them. On top of this, the United States, with its unique power, has shown its unwillingness to submit to any international regime or regulation that it sees as threatening its right to control its security and retain its full sovereignty.

One could conclude that that is the end of the matter.

At present, initiatives to reform the UN to enable it to be much more effective in delivering humanitarian aid are being seriously pursued in a number of places. Let us explore one possible way forward.

As potential actors, hope lies with a number of countries that are relatively wealthy, but that lack the capacity, military and economic, to vie for global power. What is needed is a system for undertaking humanitarian interventions that is as insulated as possible from imperial power rivalries. Of course, perfection in this regard is unattainable. Let's concede, at once, some of the limitations. Humanitarian interventions are not possible in regions that are directly controlled by great imperial states (for example, Tibet, or Panama or Colombia.) And they are not likely to be possible in zones in which rival imperial powers are in active contention with each other.

In other cases, however, it could be possible to launch a system, under the auspices of the United Nations, in which the notion of the Responsibility to Protect can be acted on in clearly defined cases of humanitarian catastrophe. Second tier countries, while often closely tied to imperial powers — as Canada is to the U.S. — also have their own interests and aspirations which include a desire not to be completely subsumed within the weltanschauung of the world power.

It is worth investigating the proposition that an international role for such countries as purveyors of humanitarian interventions, acting through UN mandates under the rubric of the “Responsibility to Protect” could be established. For such countries to invest their treasure and their manpower in these missions would carve out a significant global role for them. Further, it would, in many cases at least, remove the taint of imperial aggression from such interventions.

No one ought to contend that such missions would much reduce the spheres of imperial power in the world. Indeed, such a role for second tier states would deal with situations the U.S. and the other imperial powers would rather avoid. This point is crucial, because it means that a space could be found for action that does not imply a direct confrontation with the power of the United States and its major competitors.

What countries could fall under the heading of second tier countries that could be recruited to play such a role? The criteria for inclusion could be rather broad. First, there ought to be a crucial restriction. The list should not include powers that possess nuclear weapons. Obvious candidates for the list would include Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, Australia and New Zealand. Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa could qualify. More controversial would be Germany and Japan.

What could emerge from this sort of initiative could be a new layer of power directed at alleviating humanitarian crises. This international mission could reduce human suffering, and arguably, could contribute to a safer world.

In conjunction with a Canadian commitment to enlarging the capacity of this country and others to act under the UN rubric of the Responsibility to Protect, Canada ought to move swiftly to providing 0.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product for Official Development Assistance. This goal, first included in 1970 in a UN General Assembly resolution as a target toward which developed countries should move, has for far too long been evaded by successive Canadian governments.

Canada's Afghanistan mission, conceived with little thought, has taught an important, if costly, lesson about the falseness of seeking to enhance Canada's global position through participation in the armed struggles of the Anglo-Sphere. Even though Canadians have paid a disproportionately high price in blood in Afghanistan in relation to that paid by our allies, there has been no increase in the influence of Canada on other nations. In the wider world, the effect of the Harper government's foreign policy has been to reinforce one perception of Canadians that is already strongly held — that we amount to little more than an extension of the United States in thought and in action.

That is highly unfortunate because another perception of Canada has been taking hold in the wider world in recent decades. That perception is of a country that is genuinely a refuge of liberty and tolerance, a human space where the world's travails can be addressed in a calm and compassionate way.

In the narrower world of the Anglo-Sphere, the consequences of the Harper government's foreign policy have been telling, and not a little ironic. In Afghanistan, Canada measured up to the standards of sacrifice of the Americans and the British, but the impact on Washington and London has been negligible.

On softwood lumber, Washington pushed a completely self-interested bargain on Canada, taking no account at all of the fact that “Steve” was at the helm in Ottawa. On the Mahar Arar case, the Bush administration refused to take the Syrian-born Canadian off their watch list despite the request from the Harper government that they do so in the aftermath of an exhaustive Canadian investigation. The much touted friendship between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay meant nothing when the chips were down.

As for wider public opinion in the U.S. and Britain, Canadian casualties were simply not noticed by the American and British media. They were no more inclined to cover Canada after the sacrifices than before. As it has turned out, the supposed realism preached by Canadian neo-conservatives has produced no tangible benefits for this country.

It is time to turn the page and move on, to stake out a foreign policy that is rooted in self-interest and the quest for a better world, the combination that is needed in a country whose best days are in the future.

James Laxer is a professor of political science at York University in Toronto. This is the last part of a multi-part series on Afghanistan that has run regularly on rabble.ca. The complete work, Mission of Folly, with appendices, sources and acknowledgments is available to download in PDF.