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The Ugly Canadian II: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy

By Yves Engler | Dissident Voice | June 30, 2017

When Justin Trudeau looks in the foreign policy mirror who does he see? Someone very much like Stephen Harper.

On the world stage Canada under Trudeau the Second has acted almost the same as when Harper was prime minister. The Liberals have followed the previous government’s posture on issues ranging from militarism to Russia, nuclear weapons to the Gulf monarchies.

Aping the ancien régime’s position, the Liberals recently voted against UN nuclear disarmament efforts supported by most countries of the world. As such, they’ve refused to attend the ongoing Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination.

Earlier this month the Liberals released a defence policy that calls for 605 more special forces, which have carried out numerous violent covert missions abroad. During the 2015 election campaign defence minister Jason Kenney said if re-elected the Conservatives would add 665 members to the Canadian Armed Forces Special Operations Command over seven years.

The government’s recent defence policy also includes a plan to acquire armed drones, for which the Conservatives had expressed support. Additionally, the Liberals re-stated the previous government’s commitment to spend upwards of one hundred billion dollars on new fighter jets and naval ships.

Initiated by the Conservatives, last year the Liberals signed off on a government-contracted $15 billion Light Armoured Vehicle sale to Saudi Arabia. Trudeau has also maintained the Harper created Canada-Gulf Cooperation Council Dialogue, which is a platform for foreign ministers to discuss economic ties and the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The GCC includes the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, which have almost all intervened in the devastating Saudi-led war in Yemen.

The Trudeau government has continued to isolate Canada from world opinion on Palestinian rights. They’ve voted against numerous UN resolutions supported by almost the entire world upholding Palestinian rights.

The Harper regime repeatedly attacked Venezuela’s elected government and in recent weeks the Liberals have picked up from where they left off. The Liberals have supported efforts to condemn the Nicolás Maduro government at the Organization of American States and promoted an international mediation designed to weaken Venezuela’s leftist government (all the while staying mum about Brazil’s imposed president and far worse human rights violations in Mexico).

In March the Liberals renewed Canada’s military “training” mission in the Ukraine, which has emboldened far-right militarists responsible for hundreds of deaths in the east of that country. In fact, Trudeau has significantly bolstered Canada’s military presence on Russia’s doorstep. Simultaneously, the Trudeau government has maintained Harper’s sanctions regime against Russia.

Nearly two years into their mandate the Liberals haven’t restarted diplomatic relations with Iran or removed that country from Canada’s state sponsor of terrorism list (Syria is the only other country on the list). Nor has the Trudeau regime adopted any measure to restrict public support for Canadian mining companies found responsible for significant abuses abroad. With regards to Canada’s massive and controversial international mining industry, it has been status quo ante.

A recent cover of Canadian Dimension magazine provided a cheeky challenge to Trudeau’s bait and switch. Below the word “SURPRISE!” it showed a Justin Trudeau mask being removed to reveal Stephen Harper.

The sober reality is that Trudeau represents a continuation of his predecessor’s foreign policy. I might even need to redo my 2012 book The Ugly Canadian, but this time with the tagline “Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy”.

Yves Engler is the author of A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Canada in Africa: 300 years of aid and exploitation.

July 1, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Which Canada are we supposed to commemorate?

By Greg Felton | July 1, 2017

“He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

A country’s history is the living inheritance of all its citizens; unfortunately, they have little say in how governments “spend” their inheritance. The elected “trustees” determine the direction that a country takes and so become part of history, which means that they have the power to edit and co-opt the past to promote their present political and popular legitimacy.

In nominally democratic states like Canada, such co-optation is especially evident at a milestone, a time when a government stands atop the historical pyramid to bask shamelessly in the achievements and reputations of those who came before. Justin Trudeau, our current prime minister—or is that “photo-op minister”—is the very definition of such shamelessness: a callow, image-obsessed dilettante who brings no qualities to public office and equates schmoozing with governing.

Marking 150 years of nationhood should be a time for national unity, political optimism and satisfied reflections on the past, yet none of these applies. A political, moral, social and economic chasm divides the Canada of 1967 from the Canada of 2017. The only obvious similarity is that Trudeau is the son of the 1968 prime minister. To imply any sort of cultural or political continuity over these last 50 years amounts to spreading disinformation.

Unlike most Canadians, I can remember a Canada before “terrorism,” before neo-conservatism, before NAFTA, before MTV, before the Internet—when politics determined economic policy, not the other way around. I grew up self-consciously Canadian because I knew that my country was the sort of rational, humane democracy that Americans could only dream of.

Unlike the U.S., Canada does not worship the three toxins of God, guns and greed. This is a generally tolerant, peaceable, secular country where government was expected to participate in the economy, not be an impotent bystander. Our mixed public/private economy mitigated the inhuman cost of unenlightened self-interest, especially regarding medical care. In other words, the Canada where I grew up was a place where political debate was possible, regulation of foreign investment was defensible, and public spending was ethical. It may sound odd, but I grew up accepting the permanence of the idea of Canada. This was true even during the 1970s and early ’80s, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s pandering to Quebec and his grand obsession with national unity alienated much of Western Canada. We were a querulous nation, but a nation, nevertheless.

In foreign/military policy, Canada may have clung too much to the security blanket of UN peacekeeping, but its reputation as a humanitarian nation and an upholder of international law was never in doubt except where Israel was concerned. This Canada would never deliberately attack another country or engage in provocative again.

Now, jump to Canada 2017: a politician, professor or citizen who challenges the canonical dogma of privatization, free trade, lower corporate taxes or industry deregulation can expect to be marginalized or denigrated as a “socialist” or “communist.” To seek alternatives to U.S./Israeli provocations in the Middle East is to be denounced as a terrorism supporter or an apologist for Vladimir Putin. Every sphere of public life is now so controlled by an anti-intellectual clergy of economic and militaristic high priests that informed dissent on fundamental issues is treated as heresy and the “malefactors” in question can expect to be punished. Rational political discourse, the essence of democratic society, has given way to cognitive dissonance. Democratic 1968 Canada mutated into quasi-fascist 2017 Canada.

Lest readers recoil at the last statement, thinking I have overstated my disaffection for the ruling classes, I invite them to consider the record of the previous régime, including Stephen Harper’s unconcealed zeal to destroy Canada as a functioning political state and sell off its assets piece by piece. Because of Harper, Canada now supports torture, military aggression, corporate welfare (more so), active impoverishment of the citizenry and repression of civil liberties. It’s a sure bet that Trudeau will invoke the images and feelings of Canada’s past and gloss over inconvenient details like the Trans Pacific Partnership, selling arms to the butchers of Yemen (Saudi Arabia), participating in U.S./Israeli/NATO anti-Russian provocations, and selling out B.C. for the Kinder Morgan Pipeline. The present doesn’t offer much to celebrate, does it Harper Jr.?

It’s difficult to convey historical attitudes, feelings or national spirit in words, so let’s use an empirical example. The following three graphs will give some indication of how much worse off economically Canadians are today than they were at the dawn of the neo-fascist era.

The graph in the top left shows that Canada’s Gross National Product increased more than six times from 1981 to the first quarter of 2017. Over that same period the core consumer price index (top right) doubled. These are both positive economic indicators, and one might glean from them that Canadians enjoyed increasing prosperity. This would be a mistake and in the lower graph we see why. The corporate tax rate was nearly halved during this time, the implication of which should be obvious. As citizens were forced to pay a greater percentage of the tax burden, their disposable income fell as well as their ability to save. Essentially, people are subsidizing overpaid CEOs and foreign corporations, which now coerce governments into betraying the public good in the name of “free trade.”

Canadians are worse off today than they were 50 years ago. I cannot “celebrate” the 150th birthday of Canada because I cannot pretend that appearance is reality. The legacy of optimism, and gaiety that attended the 1967 centennial celebrations (Expo’67) has been squandered. Canada might still exist on a map, but the idea of Canada is gone and must be rediscovered. We must look backwards, not forwards.

July 1, 2017 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | | Leave a comment

US court dismisses Yemen drone strike wrongful death suit

RT | July 1, 2017

A US appeals court has upheld a decision dismissing a lawsuit brought by a Yemeni man whose family was killed by a US drone strike. The plaintiff alleges that his family members were innocent bystanders when they were struck by the missile.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which consisted of a three-judge panel, came to an agreement with lower courts that stated they, too, did not have the authority to judge government military actions. An August 2012 drone strike in Yemen, which killed, among others, Salem bin Ali Jaber and Waleed bin Ali Jaber, is what this case is based upon.

Faisal bin Ali Jaber is a Yemeni engineer. He and his family sued the US government for the deaths of Salem, his brother-in-law, and Waleed, his nephew. Jaber made the claim that the deadly strike was in violation of the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Alien Tort Statute.

Jaber’s family members were killed by a “signature strike,” which target individuals through information and data obtained from electronic devices such as mobile phones.

In 2015, the families of the two deceased men brought a case against the US government, then-President Barack Obama and other US officials, for “wrongful deaths.”

Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote a rare separate opinion, although she also wrote the decision in the case as the three-judge panel was unanimous.

“Of course this begs the question, if judges will not check this outsized power, then who will?”

The outcome that Jaber and his family wanted for the case was a declaratory judgement, which would make the court admit that the US violated international law governing the use of force when killing his family members with the drone strike.

Court documents from 2015 say the family made the claim that the hellfire missile attack by a US drone, which was deployed in the Yemeni village of Khashamir, which killed their family members, was unlawful.

Judge Brown didn’t hesitate to question some of the US government’s practices in the case.

“Of course this begs the question, if judges will not check this outsized power, then who will?” She continued, “the spread of drones cannot be stopped, but the US can still influence how they are used in the global community – including, someday, seeking recourse should our enemies turn these powerful weapons 180 degrees to target our homeland. The Executive and Congress must establish a clear policy for drone strikes and precise avenues for accountability,” Brown said in her opinion of the case.

Brown also stated that US congressional oversight is a “joke” and that “our democracy is broken.”

The other two judges on the panel did not join in Brown’s separate opinion, Reuters reported.

Read more:

  Families sue US govt, seek official apology over drone killings in Yemen

July 1, 2017 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

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