Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Canada

The Québécois, A Nation, Sort Of

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While our own MacKenzie Brothers are hanging out in Munich’s Bier Gartens their home country has decided to make one of its provinces more special than all the others. The Quebecois has been named a nation within a more-or-less unified Canada. What next? A seat in the UN for Quebec? A separate Olympics hockey (the ice variety) team? Foie gras fighting it out with sweetbreads for national food of the Quebecois?

Apparently Michael Ignatieff started all of this by suggesting such a move on a French language TV station in Quebec province that he figured no one outside of Quebec would tune in to. Till now, Ignatieff was viewed as the reincarnation of Pierre Trudeau and at least one of the MacKenzie brothers suggested he was smarter than all of the U.S. cabinet put together. The jury is still out on that claim – probably a close call – but this move does not provide much support for it.

Canada Leaves Green for Brown

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Canada is making it into the German papers more than it used to, but it’s not always for flattering reasons. It used to be that the only Canadian stories worth carrying had to do with grizzly bear attacks, Quebec separatism (almost always misportrayed) and sports; Steve Nash is Dirk Nowitzky’s best friend or Canadian thugs won another match against European skilled squads. The latter has however disappeared of late as Sweden showed it could beat anybody in any number of ways, including thuggery.
Bur now Prime Minister Harper actually gets his photo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, just like the fantastic twins now ruling Poland. And that’s a bad sign, because the twins never get in unless they’ve done something extremely silly. So there was Harper making a speech in which he attempted to announce that Canada was getting out of its Kyoto commitments. This did not go over well, to put it mildly, and now this decision will have to be reconsidered. A Canadian prime minister should know he’s in big trouble when the foreign press begins to compare him very unfavourably to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Great White North confronts the invisible fence

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US President George Bush has announced that Boeing has been awarded a multi billion dollar contract to build a 10,000 kilometer long “invisible fence” along the Mexican and Canadian borders, similar to the one that dog owners place around their backyards to keep fido from leaving the property. 18,000 towers, outfitted with motion detectors and cameras, will ensure that US citizens enjoy the kind of internal protection previously offered to populations behind the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall and the North Korean no-go zone.

Canadian authorities were taken by surprise by the announcement of the end of what used to be called “the world’s longest undefended border”. Recalling that more than 37,000 Hungarians showed up in Canada when the Iron Curtain was briefly breached in 1956, Canadian aid societies have begun to make preparations for the expected flow of refugees moving north across the mountains before the watchtowers are in place. In Whitehorse the Yukon government has asked for a 2-year delay to make certain that the 200,000 strong porcupine caribou herd is on the right side of the border lest they get permanently lost amidst the oil drilling equipment dotting the wildlife refuge on the Alaska side of the border. Should the herd cross while under detection, it is feared that an energy crisis will be inevitable as the detectors and cameras become challenged beyond their capabiilties.