Harper – The Environment & War Just a Propaganda Exercise

Jan.2007 by Gary Morton

   Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants us to believe he has gone green in a big way. He has pledged to do more on climate change and has brought in an old Mike Harris Mr. Fix it. The new man, John Baird has gone so far as to admit that he believes climate change is actually occurring.

   In spite of that Harper has announced that the nation will be off Kyoto targets by 50 per cent in 2012 and our greenhouse gas emissions are to rise dramatically over the next five years - much of the gases coming from the Alberta oil sands industry, which Harper is afraid to touch. Unfortunately other nations aren’t afraid to pan the oil sands as California now won’t import its environmentally unfriendly oil.

   Harper and Baird’s problem is that the environment has become the top issue for voters. To grab votes or hold their own against the Greens, the Bloc, the Liberals and the NDP they have to look like a party of the environment. Yet the admission that climate change exists seems to be about as far as the Tories will go. Actually doing something is beyond their scope. All they have is a poor clean air act and a public relations attempt to fool the public.

   As the opposition points out, Harper has even cancelled Liberal programs to reduce emissions, such as the Energuide home retrofit program and funding to shut down Ontario coal plants. If Harper has cancelled weak Liberal programs and offered nothing of his own his pledge isn’t worth the breath he expelled in making it. The Conservatives view the environment as just another PR exercise

Harper’s Bed of Afghan Roses

   Not much news other than combat news comes out of Afghanistan these days. The reports from embedded reporters seem endless. Every second day we get a rewrite of the same report of hundreds of Taliban or fifty Taliban killed in battle. The reports can’t be independently verified, and when verification does come it is often found that civilians or nomads were killed. Our troops and now tanks head off in huge military exercises looking for Taliban and often find none as guerilla fighters work by hit and run. 

   With more than sixty percent of Canadians in opposition to the Afghan war, Harper has been in a bad spot. The Tories, aligned with a faction of the Liberal Party, just don’t get it. Our country shouldn’t be involved in far off occupations of foreign lands and demonstrations of military power that kill and impoverish civilians in large numbers. The public gets it but the government doesn’t. 

   Instead of getting the truth of a withdrawal and a return of Canada as a nation of peace, we get more PR exercise running in tandem with the military ones. Generals and soldiers touring the nation trying to drum up war support from weary Canadians who don’t want blood on their hands. 

   To add to this in January we got a high profile tour from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. Mackay paid a visit to Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the Presidential Palace in Kabul as well as touring the city and military bases. 

   MacKay wanted to prove that we are there for reconstruction and visited a school in Kabul that is operating with the help of Canadian funds. In a conference call MacKay called this minor reconstruction an example of the “untold success” in Afghanistan. He insisted that progress is being made. But of course it isn’t. The Taliban have attacked and destroyed most schools. In Afghanistan public schools are not an answer as they put people at risk. Home schooling is the only option for most of remote Afghanistan. 

   A missile struck the Canadian base while MacKay was visiting and by the time he returned he was spouting the words security, security, security first. As the awful truth is that we really are occupiers there in a foreign land, endlessly fighting native tribes that do not want us or our culture, in order to keep former CIA agent Hamid Karzai, who controls little beyond Kabul, in power. 

   Like the American Iraq debacle, this mission is immoral and it is not winnable, in the sense that occupiers don’t win, they hang in until they are driven out. And how many years will it be? 

   So once again all we get is PR and propaganda and in the end as Canadians we end up a powerless majority, unable to convince our government to get out of Afghanistan. The Harper government remains powerless, too, having willingly locked the nation into a long-term dirty war. We have a dirty-war strategy that is supposed to alleviate poverty in a foreign nation, yet we have no strategy for combating poverty at home. How long will it be before Harper sends out the tanks and troops to enrich the poor here? 

========================