Politics and Press

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

Canada

Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen

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The rankings for most livable city on earth have been led by the usual suspects, in differing order, for the last decade: Vancouver, Zürich, Geneva. This year a couple of other European cities began to make inroads, not old favourites Paris or London – too expensive, too overdeveloped and too prone to violence – including Copenhagen, the beautiful Danish capital immortalized by Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen in the most absurd film biography ever made. Hans Christian Andersen had as many dark sides to his ultra-neurotic personality as anyone you could imagine and it is precisely these descents into a threatening and dangerous underworld that characterize his greatest works, apparently simple fairy tales that are full of deadly threats to any kind of attempt to discover a kitschy Disney paradise in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.

On the weekend wonderful Copenhagen erupted into the kind of social violence that you could never imagine happening in other leading European pretenders to the most livable city throne, Stockholm and Munich, cities that my brother and I would be happy to place in competition with Vancouver. They would certainly lose due to the unmatchable splendour of the wilderness within easy reach of Vancouver, not to mention its own waterfront, but they have plenty to offer before they fall behind, one of those things being the relative serenity of their societies. Citizens of Stockholm and München do not find it necessary to challenge the police in ritualistic semi-warfare, as do the citizens of Berlin or Paris, but increasingly such events are becoming established in Copenhagen. On the weekend it was 1000 youths once again engaging the undermanned Copenhagen police force in a running battle featuring tear gas and non-lethal weapons. And once again, the Danish police could not really control crowds looking for trouble. This time it was once again demonstrations recalling the anniversary of the tearing down of a youth centre. Previously it had been violent, even fatal, bouts with the motorcycle gangs or neo-Nazis, and then there are the ongoing semi-violent confrontations concerning the somewhat off-limits alternate settlement of Christania. Copenhagen’s most unruly group may in the long run however turn out to be its large Muslim minority, which is feeling increasingly alienated in a way that is not the case in neighbouring Sweden. If this nasty uneasy relationship continues to sour, Copenhagen will end up light years away from the Danny Kaye version of it.

The Great White North looks at the Map

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Colleague Jeff has supplied a convincing overview of Canada’s difficult role in the Arctic. Canada likes to mythologize its great open spaces in the wild north, creating emblems ranging from lines in the national anthem – “the true north strong and free” – to films like “Nanook of the North” to art like the sandstone sculptures and Baker Lake prints that southerners pay plenty of loonies to own to Stan Roger’s great song “The Northwest Passage” to the Edmonton Eskimos football team. Norm Kwong, one of their legendary players and perhaps the only major (ethnically) Chinese football player in history, recalls once hearing an Edmonton matron in the audience for one of his interviews tell her neighbour, “See I told you they were real Eskimos”.

But what Canada, the world’s second largest country, hasn’t done is provide military support for its mythology, making it vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the first and third largest countries, which face it in the Arctic. Instead it has slugged it out with tiny Denmark (controlling gigantic Greenland) in a farcical struggle over miniscule Hans Island. The excuse for lack of muscle in the Arctic has been strictly economic in the past, but this may be changing because the tide of Canadian public opinion has swung for the Arctic, and that has the politicians’ ears. Almost twenty years ago Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cancelled Liberal plans for ice breakers for the navy, something which both Norway and Denmark manage to finance, and the US and Russia have both ice breakers and nuclear submarines out on Arctic patrol. In its lead editorial today, the conservative Vancouver Province advised the government to lease ice breakers if they are too cheap to build them, but to get them before it is too late to the newly announced far north military base with deep water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and to the beefed-up existing bases. Canadians will soon see whether their government is serious when it says it will provide protection for Canadian values from sea to sea to sea.

Canada Takes on Russia: Cold War II?

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Bob and Doug McKenzie are on assignment in the Arctic, traveling with Prime Minister Harper who visited the Arctic to plant the Maple Leaf to lay claim to its rich mineral deposits for Canada. This trip was in response to Russian President Putin’s sneak attack last week with two miniature submarines planting the Russian flag somewhere beneath the North Pole. These moves are partially in response to global warming which is melting the Arctic ice cap in direct defiance to U.S. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma who claims global warming is a fraudulent tool manufactured by the infidels (e.g. Democrats and non-Christians).

As described in the NY Times, the race for mineral rights in the Arctic looms as a possible Worldwide Cold War as the Danes race to the region to map their own claims that the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,240-mile underwater mountain range, is attached to the Danish territory of Greenland, making it a geological extension of the Arctic island.

Norway and the U.S. also make claims to rights in the area but the U.S. is apparently banking on winning the Iraq War sometime in the next century and stealing all of their oil to power the next generation of Hummers. Talk of moving Vice President Cheney’s office to the Arctic was squelched by White House sources, as “wishful thinking by the American people”.

The world watches these developments with anxious concern mixed with admiration for the audacity of Canada as it takes on the Russian Bear while the U.S. waits to move in after the dirty work is done.

In other news President George W. Bush refused to add 5 cents to the federal tax on gasoline saying it “would be premature”, and that “ we will cross that bridge when we have the funds to fix it.”

Canada goes to war

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Sixty-six Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. The death of each one of them has received front-page coverage in leading Canadian papers, and the CBC runs the risk of becoming repetitive with its films of funerals and returning coffins. Sixty times as many US soldiers have died in Iraq, but in total their stories have probably not been told as prominently, movingly and dramatically as have those of the dead Canadian soldiers in their home media.
The US effort in Iraq now surely seems doomed to catastrophic failure, at least partly because, as Senator Joe Biden recently put it, Americans have lost any desire to keep sending their kids to their deaths in the meat grinder of Iraq. At the same time the Canadian armed forces are having no trouble finding record numbers of recruits, despite the daily scenes of violence and death in Afghanistan. There is certainly some opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The socialist NDP Party wants the troops brought home immediately, the opposition Liberal Party wants a withdrawal at the end of the current mandate in 2009. But in general there is a perhaps surprising amount of general public support for the sudden display of Canadian military strength in what is considered a just cause.
Prime Minister Harper announced this week that Canada would design and build, at a cost of 3-4 billion dollars, 6-8 frigates with moderate ice-breaking capabilities to patrol Canada’s increasingly threatened Arctic water routes, particularly the Northwest Passage. For the first time, a Canadian submarine will be present in the Arctic this summer and Harper has promised to build a deepwater port in the Arctic. Critics of Harper’s announcements demanded more not less for the Arctic, including the 3 full icebreakers he had claimed he would build. These are enormous expenses for the world’s second-largest country, with one-tenth the US population, caught in the Arctic between the first and third largest, both of whom have shown they can afford nuclear ice breakers. But it seems to be an expense that Canadian citizens are willing to pay and that’s at least partly because the Canadian military has managed to begin to regain something of the stature it once enjoyed as a result of its powerful presence in both the First and Second World Wars. It may not yet be punching above its weight, as it did back then, but it seems at least to be returning to the weight class to which it rightfully belongs

The War on Drugs: Nonsense and Insensibilities

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A short item in the NY Times today tells of a Canadian psychotherapist who was stopped at the border by U.S. immigration officials who searched his name on the Internet and learned that he had written in an academic journal about his experiences with psychedelic drugs in the  1960’s. The article continues:

He was asked by a border guard whether he was the author of the article and whether it was true. Yes, he replied. And yes.

Mr. Feldmar was held for four hours, fingerprinted and, after signing a statement conceding the long-ago drug use, sent home.

Mike Milne, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Seattle, said he could not discuss individual cases for reasons of privacy. But the law is clear, Mr. Milne said. People who have used drugs are not welcome here.

“If you are or have been a drug user,” he said, “that’s one of the many things that can make you inadmissible to the United States.”

Since the psychotherapist gave up drugs in 1974 he could hardly be deemed any more of a threat than – oh let’s say, the border guard who did a random and arbitrary internet search and added one more nail in the twin coffins of a sane immigration policy and an effective war on terror.

The good news is that this raises the possibility of extraditing known cocaine user George W. Bush to whoever would take him – maybe Iraq? Not Canada certainly.

The Air India Fiasco Turns Brutal

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Before the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the single most deadly terrorist attack in North America happened when an Air India flight originating in Vancouver blew up over the Irish Sea killing all 321 people on board. Simultaneously a bomb blew up in the Tokyo Airport killing some baggage handlers It exploded at the wrong time and failed to bring down its target, another Air India flight. Both of these bombs had been placed on the planes at Vancouver Airport and the RCMP has spent many millions of dollars and more than a decade failing to convict the men who had planted them, Sikh proponents of an independent Sikh state in the Punjab. Police in India subsequently shot down one of them and another pleaded guilty to a minor charge in Vancouver, but the ringleaders continue to escape punishment.

Now evidence has been growing that the RCMP and CSIS, the Canadian security service, actually knew much more about these plans at the time than they have been willing to admit. The bombers had been followed, their conversations taped, and the RCMP ordered to send out a bomb-sniffing dog to the plane when it made a stop in Montreal. The Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario last week announced that at the time he was working on security matters and by chance came across a message warning of a plot to blow up an Air India flight on the weekend it really happened. When he drew it to the attention of the RCMP they dismissed him abruptly, informing him that they were on top of the case. When the officer with the sniff dog went to the Montreal airport he discovered that the plane had just left and the dog could only sniff 3 suitcases left behind. Such shocking revelations, coming to light so many years after the events, have left the large East Indian community, which provided most of the victims on the flight, in disbelief. The former premier of British Columbia, the moderate Sikh Ussal Dossingh, who himself had been beaten to a pulp decades before by Sikh extremists, wondered openly whether he didn’t have to conclude that they had discovered evidence of a cover-up by the RCMP, and that such lax handling of a deadly threat could only be explained when one considered that the plane was full of East Indians, most of whom were Canadian citizens, and that the RCMP simply didn’t consider a threat against such an Air India flight in the same manner it would have employed if it had been a bomb threat against an Air Canada flight. These are dark conclusions by a distinguished level-headed man, and suggest a very dark side of the Canadian mosaic, much different from the one normally displayed.

A Canadian weekend

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Anyone under the delusion that Canada and the United States are really one very big country in North America, competely dominated by the latter, might have spent this Easter weekend in the larger one, Canada, to gain a more realistic perspective.
It was the last weekend for NHL regular-season hockey and virtually nobody in Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal wasn’t paying attention to the results. (The first three made it into the playoffs, the last two managed to knock each other out.) All of the Canadian teams will be playing against teams housed in US cities, which will, as a whole, be very uninterested (here we can except Detroit) in the next two months of the NHL playoffs while Canadians will have daily entertainment covered on the national tv network, the CBC. US hockey fans will have to turn their aerials to the north.
On Easter Saturday there was a 3-hour wait at the British Columbia-Washington border crossings as many thousand Canadians had their traditional Easter weekend visits to the gorgeous tulip fields of the Skagit Valley in Washington wrecked by the vigilent US defence forces dealing with terrorism. Apparently no terrorists were caught in the lineups, although the photographer on assignment for the Vancouver Province newspaper was convinced to not spend the rest of his day trying to get across the border for his annual tulip-field shot. There are no 3-hour border waits left in Europe – well, truckers entering Serbia or Ukraine claim they suffer such harassments – and it is hard to see what the US gains from convincing its neighbours to spend their money at home.
Then there is the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge in eastern France, where Canadian troops succeeded in overrunning German positions, after Brits and French had failed for years, losing many thousands of soldiers in the attempts. Military buffs are convinced that this operation, in which 3500 Canadian soldiers were killed in one day, is the glue around which the nation was formed. Others point out that the murderous war continued right on nonetheless.
On Easter Sunday, six Canadian soldiers were killed in the murderous fields around Kandahar, Aghanistan, where 2,500 of the 11,500 soldiers deployed are Canadian while most NATO countries continue to refuse to send their troops – apparently individual German soldiers can refuse to take part in operations they object to on ethical grounds. And on Easter Monday, the leaders of Canada, France and Great Britain gathered at the spectacular Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle. There, on soil deeded to Canada by France, the Queen of England, who is also still the Queen of Canada, demonstrated more power in her 80th year than the rest of her family combined will be able to do when the question of succession in Canada arrives. The Prime Minister of France was best-dressed and had the best hairdo while the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, a supposed lightweight who is beginning to punch above his weight, profited from his natural informality and the presence of his very pleasant family, whom most Canadians, to their approval, had never seen before. Back in Ottawa, the Governor-General, the Queen’s representative in Canada and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, presided over ceremonies at the War Memorial. Dressed in a long white coat and black fur hat to fend off a winter still hanging around in eastern Canada, Michelle Jean, the very attractive young black bilingual immigrant from Haiti who is now the Governor-General, would have caught the immediate attention of even the Prime Minister of France. Just a month ago she was in Kandahar, she noted, and in battle dress. It’s not the image the world – not to mention the United States – has of Canada, but they have simply failed to note the dramatic changes taking place in the world’s second-largest country, something most Canadians are not unhappy about. As the world’s second-largest source of both oil and water, Canadians are watching that southern border even more suspiciously than do the border guards wasting their (and out time) at Blaine, Washington.

Once again, Quebec goes to the polls

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On Monday, Quebeckers once again have the opportunity to shake up the rest of Canada (ROC) by going to the polls. It seems very unlikely that the newly-elected government will be the same as the current one, that is run by a federalist Liberal party with a majority under the current premier Jean Charést. For the first time in 125 years, it seems inevitable that there will be a minority government in Quebec, as the traditional two-party federalist-separatist (Liberal-Parti Quebecois) voting pattern has been broken by the rise of a third party, Action Democratique du Quebec, under their young leader, conservative populist Mario Dumont. There seems to be general agreement that he has run the best campaign of the three party leaders, resulting in polls showing a virtual three way tie in popular votes and an absolutely unpredictable distribution of party numbers in parliament under the winner take all riding system.

But political junkies strongly suspect that M. Dumont’s spectacular rise in popularity and his potential role as kingmaker (if not king) on Tuesday may be mainly due to dissatisfaction with the other two leaders and their parties. In particular, Andre Boisclair, the young erratic leader of the Parti Quebecois, has managed to convince even many separatists to at least park their votes with Mario Dumont, who, unlike M. Boisclair, has pledged not to hold a referendum on separatism, which many separatists don’t want at this point, convinced they would once again lose. Dumont has also vowed not to go onto a coalition with the Parti Quebecois. Many separatists also look with favour on that, hoping that a leader of the Parti Quebecois may soon arrive who reminds them a lot more of party-founder René Levesque than does error-prone M. Boisclair. So it seems that the most likely result of Monday’s election will involve some kind of coalition brokered by Dumont and Charest, with a probable Liberal premier of a minority government and the Action Democratique holding the balance of power.

A tale of two countries.

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Condoleeza Rice made short hop up to Ottawa last week, perhaps to try to smooth ruffled feathers after George Bush once again failed to mention Canada in his discussion of countries contributing to the war effort in Afghanistan. But she was there long enough to be confronted by the unanimous verdict of the Canadian Supreme Court – 9-0 – that it was unconstitutional for the government to override the judicial system or the Canadian Charter of Rights in dealing with suspected terrorists. Shortly after that a solid majority in the House of Parliament voted to retire special legislation that had made circumvention of the usual legal practices in the wake of the attack on New York and Washington a possibility. The differences between the two countries five years after that attack could hardly be more startling.

While the US has allowed that terrible day to turn it into something of a rogue fortress state, demanding visas for citizens of the great majority of countries and passports for all visitors including soon neighbours travelling by car, Canada has changed very little other than by displaying increased vigilance by police authorities at border crossings and closer surveillance of suspicious groups in urban areas. A recent poll showing that almost 50% of foreign travellers considered the US (and not Russian or China) to be the most unwelcoming place to try to visit, while 2% chose Canada, shows one of the potential long-term consequences of these policies. According to a recent article in the NY Times, foreign business people are beginning to avoid travel to and meetings in the US. It may be that Canada will prove to have been a bit too naive in its mild response to terrorist threats, but it would be a hot winter day in the Yukon before you’ll find any Canadians who wish they were holed up behind the walls of a fortress.

Canada and France, Round five

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So the French have managed to do it yet again. The magnificently named socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal announced in Paris to visiting separatist Parti Quebecois leader André Boisclair that she favours “the sovereignty and liberty” of Quebec. Mme Royal, who declined an invitation by the provincial government to visit Quebec and apparently has never been there, received thundering blasts from both the premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, and the new federal Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion, telling her to mind her own business. The tone of these responses should give her some idea of how France’s relationship would be with her NATO ally should she become president. Dion, a dual Canadian/French citizen with an honours PhD from France’s most elite graduate institute, reminded Mme. Royal of historical developments she seems to have overlooked, and didn’t even mention the liberation of France in 1944 by, among others, Canadian troops.

“The problem with her declaration” said Dion from Quebec City in his native French, “is that we have been free longer than the French because we had responsible government while they were still in the midst of debating empires and revolutions. So Canada is a pioneer of freedom and always will be…. I don’t understand. We do not interfere in the affairs of a friend country”.

After Charles de Gaulle trumpeted his infamous “Vive le Quebec libre” in Montreal forty years ago, he was ordered out of the country. Mme. Royal may find she has trouble getting a visa to even enter.