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Canada doesn’t interfere much in the world, it doesn’t elect crazy nationalists, it doesn’t threaten to deport people. It champions multiculturalism and tolerance. Canada is exceptional. It has its problems like all places, but when the world was on fire in 2016, we were fine. We still have systemic issues and need to deal with it, obviously. Me stating that Canada has many good qualities compared to similar nations =/= there isn’t an issue w/ racism towards aboriginals, etc.
Except when it’s selling weapons to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. Or when it’s overthrowing democracies in countries like Haiti and Honduras for its own benefit. Or when Canadian-owned companies are wreaking havoc in Latin America by trampling over indigenous rights there (because doing that in Canada isn’t enough for them).
Left nationalism was always a mirage. Canada is a settler-colonial state with a subjugated indigenous population. The old nationalist narrative is insufficient to deal with an imperialist country that exploits the Global South and participates in military adventurism abroad under NATO and the United Nations. […]
Toronto-based Barrick Gold is both the world’s largest gold mining company — and its most abusive. In 2011, Human Rights Watch published a report that alleged that Barrick’s security at Papua New Guinea mines committed gang rapes and other violent assaults. In 2015, the company ended up compensating eleven women for the attacks. New rape allegations emerged later that year.
Barrick’s founder and chairman Peter Munk shrugged off his company’s liability, saying, “Gang rape is a cultural habit. Of course, you can’t say that because it’s politically incorrect. It’s outrageous. We have to pretend that everyone’s the same and cultures don’t matter. Unfortunately, it’s not that way.”
Barrick flouts indigenous rights in Latin America, profits from unsafe working conditions from Peru to Russia, and wreaks major environmental damage. Just last month, a Tanzanian inquiry heard that police killed sixty-five people and injured 270 others in the area around Barrick’s North Mara gold mine. Barrick isn’t the only bad apple. Vancouver-based Nevsun Resources was recently sued for allegedly using forced labor in its gold mine in Eritrea. The brutal dictatorship that condoned the practice holds a 40 percent stake in the mine.
Historically, the United States has played a very negative role in supporting coups and military regimes and overthrowing governments across the Americas, and some listeners would be very familiar with that story. What people are less familiar with is with the role that Canada plays.
Whereas in the past I would say that Canada often quietly acquiesced to the interventionist role the U.S. has played in the Americas, with the Honduras coup in 2009, Canada played an explicit, front seat role in both legitimizing the coup and then politically and economically supporting the post coup regimes in power since then. As I said, it is a very repressive regime in power in Honduras, profoundly undemocratic, operating with high levels of repression, corruption and impunity.
“It doesn’t elect crazy nationalists”
Except we already elected Stephen Harper three fucking times.
Can Canadian politics get much more warped than what Harper pulled during the 2015 election? Sucking toes for votes with a crack-smoking mayor while touting family values. Trying to drive a wedge between majority and minority Canadians by exploiting the politics of bigotry over issues like the niqab — despite the court rulings against the Conservative position. Vowing to set up a rat line to expose “barbaric practices”, using the unforgettable sales team of Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander.
Stephen Harper was Donald Trump before Trump was Trump, right down to the bigotry, fear-mongering, divisiveness, scapegoating, and profound anti-democratic impulses that had Canada’s entire parliamentary structure tottering, according to experts like Peter Milliken and Robert Marleau.
Also, remember when Stephen Harper decided to use the term “old stock Canadian” in public in the year 2015?? In spite of the fact that that word has some seriously shitty racial connotations attached to it?? And he used that word to justify why he thinks refugees aren’t entitled to univeral healthcare in Canada???
No, we just arrest refugees then detain them indefinitely, and then treat them so poorly when they’re in detention that many of them wind up dying. We also scam our migrant workers and treat them like garbage and then send them packing when we don’t need them anymore.
Fifteen people have died while in the custody of Canada Border Services Agency since 2000 and in most cases no one knows why. The service needs to be held accountable for the thousands of migrants it detains each year
Migrants are the only population in Canada that can be administratively detained for long periods of time, or indefinitely, without being charged or convicted of any crime. There were 7,300 people detained in 2013, the most recent data made available by the government.
The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act gives the CBSA broad powers to detain migrants if they believe they are a flight risk, a danger to public safety, inadmissible to Canada on security grounds, or inadequately identified. The vast majority, 94.2 per cent, are detained on grounds other than posing a security threat.
Since 2012, the Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act has “protected” the immigration system by imposing mandatory detention for all migrants designated as “irregular arrivals,” including those as young as 16.
[…]
In Canada, migrants may be detained indefinitely – unlike in the United States, for example, which imposes a 90-day limit on immigration detention. Out of 585 people in immigration detention in November 2013, 60 had been held for over a year. Some have been jailed for more than 10 years, trapped in the carceral limbo of undeportability.
“When the world was on fire in 2016, we were fine”
Choosing to remain willfully ignorant wrt Canadian politics and history doesn’t mean we were “fine.” It just means people were purposefully ignorant in favour of promoting a narrative that’s not true.
QueerAnarchism 