World Politics – Page 15 – Babel-on-the-Bay

The Saudis are not Canada’s friends.

January 9, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If you wanted to find opposites in the world of international relations, you could not find countries as contrary to each other as Canada and Saudi Arabia. When people refer to the Saudis as the Kingdom, it is not a friendly term. It is reality. And a country such as Canada is anathema to everything the Saudi Royal family stand for.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is a country deeply imbued in the extremism of Wahhabism. While Sunni Mohammedan in origin Wahhabism is the Tea Party sector of Islamic fundamentalism. And the Kingdom runs on it. It was Saudi’s who supported Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It is also widely believed that it was funds from the sale of Saudi oil that funded the fledgling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). For where the state teaches extremism, extremists are created.

While Canada’s foreign affairs has to deal with the Saudis, there is no reason to ever consider the Kingdom as friends. For Canada to sell the Saudis the heavy weapons of war is hypocrisy. These armoured vehicles Canada is sending to the Saudis are to suppress the Saudi’s people. They are the product of an American company made in Canada. They are licensed to kill people.

But there is one thing for sure, the Saudis will not let their women drive them. Women are not even allowed to have a driver’s license in that country.

Canada, a pluralistic, democratic and open society, does not have to pander to the Saudis. We do not even need their oil. And do not forget that it was the Saudis who drove down the price of oil to force tar sands synthetic oil producers in Canada and Venezuela out of business. So far they have done a good job of it.

What Canada and the world cannot countenance is the wholesale slaughter of people who dissent in their society. When a society can so casually kill people, what is our moral position in doing business with them? You cannot sell people the bullets one day and then remonstrate them for using the bullets for their purpose.

Canada does not have to like countries with which it maintains relations. It should stand ready at any time to offer the hand of friendship to a country that recognizes the value of human life. Until then, the Kingdom should be quarantined.

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“Justin, Justin, Where have you been?”

November 28, 2015 by Peter Lowry

“I’ve been to London to see the Queen.”

And that was it. Our fealty assured, Prime Minister Trudeau went on to Downing Street to meet the guy who really runs things in England. These meetings were scheduled ahead of the Malta meeting of the heads of the British Commonwealth of Nations. There is little time there for anything more than a pro forma ‘Hello’ in Malta. There are more important fish to fry in that venue.

The objective is to restore Canada as a leader in not only the Commonwealth but in world politics. Hobnobbing with the Queen in that meeting would be a waste of valuable face time with key United Nations contacts who are also members of the Commonwealth. It is also a good bounce pad to arrive fresh and relaxed at the Paris climate change conference.

And Trudeau is no royalist in any event. As a Quebecer, he is ambivalent to the Queen. On meeting her (he was a lot younger last time they met) he was probably thinking “Nice old lady—so this is today’s British Empire!”

Mind you, she complained mildly when answering the toast he was asked to make to her at a Commonwealth dinner that he was making her seem old. The time has long gone when the monarch could say “Off with his head.”

The facts are that there really has not been a British Empire since Prime Minister David Lloyd George left Whitehall after the First World War. What Winston Churchill had left for the Second World War was mainly bluster. It was the Americans, Canadians and allies who supplied and fed the Brits during that war and joined them in sacrificing their young on the battlefields.

What Prime Minister David Cameron knew when he met with Trudeau in London was that the Canadian had no interest in supporting more bombing of Iraq and Syria. He knew better than to ask Trudeau to keep Canadian planes there to support Old Blighty.

And Trudeau had a plan ready to impress the gathering of Commonwealth members by offering more money towards the fight against global warming. He could then go on to the Paris climate conference with a broad array of Commonwealth countries already in his corner. Justin Trudeau has done more for Canada’s foreign relations in the past month than Stephen Harper could do in nine years.

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“Fear us,” said ISIL. But should we?

November 18, 2015 by Peter Lowry

“Fear us,” said bin Laden’s al-Queda. And the Americans feared them. They involved the West in foreign wars that nobody has won.

The people who call themselves an Islamic State say “Fear us.” And they have involved the West in foreign wars that nobody can win.

Did we learn nothing back in the time of Saladin and the Crusaders? Did we not understand the fate of Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi? Did we really believe the silly propaganda about a poor War I soldier they called Lawrence of Arabia?

First the French and then the Americans were defeated by the jungles of South East Asia. The Americans and their allies faired as poorly against the opium poppy growers of Afghanistan as the Russians and the British before them.

And for all the lives lost and damaged in the search for Osama bin Laden, it was technology, the CIA and a small U.S. Navy Seal team that finally spelled his end.

Now the French have every right to feel enraged and vulnerable. After the Paris attacks, they want revenge. It is the World Trade Center redux. And the noose on our freedoms is tightening. All countries of the West share the concern.

But will we let these hoodlums, these brigands, with their false piety, corruption and child-like use of the Internet, call the tune? We have the technology to end the money trails to these false prophets of Allah. And without the money from the Arabian Peninsula and stolen oil, the criminals of the faux Caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant will soon wither and fade in the desert sands.

Why can we not realize that bombs are worthless without boots on the ground? You have to send armies after armies, planes against planes, ships to sink ships, bandits know bandits, spies counter spies, and terrorists terrorize terrorists. The French know the truth of that. We have to stop playing the game and simply win. We have the might and the technology, the intelligence and we have the right to seek justice.

But Canada has no place in making useless war. Despite the agony of our friends in France, we have to remove Canadian planes from the wasted bombing of the desert sands. We have to determine who should be helped in the quest for peace in the Middle East. We have to encourage others to join in supporting peace.

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Leave it in the ground says Obama.

November 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

President Barack Obama has finally let the shoe drop on the Keystone XL pipeline. His rejection of the partially built pipeline was expected. It is now the answer to many other pipeline proposals emanating from the tar sands of Alberta. Keystone XL was just the stalking horse.

What the American President said was that if we are intent on preserving this planet “We are going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” He was saying that the bitumen derived from the tar sands is too polluting to be used to make synthetic oil.

And the people who want to exploit the tar sands for profit should be the losers. They have lied and denied and defied for too long. By no stretch of the imagination can Alberta bitumen be described as “heavy oil.” It is not oil. It is nature’s mistake in the creation of petroleum. It is the same pitch as the Phoenicians used to waterproof their galleys that plied the Mediterranean. It is the mortar that built ancient Babylon. It was only when crude oil is priced over US$60 a barrel that money can be made in tar sands exploitation.

One of the mistakes we make is to treat Venezuelan bitumen the same as Canada’s. The tar sands in Venezuela have a lower viscosity than Canadian bitumen. It actually is a heavy form of oil. This is mainly shipped to the Unites States where there are specialized refineries at the Texas Gulf ports that can work with it.

Diluting and heating bitumen slurry and pumping it under high pressure is the theory behind proposed pipelines such as Enbridge’s Gateway pipeline over the Rockies to Kitimat, the twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline over the Rockies to Burnaby or TransCanada’s Energy East or Enbridge’s converted gas pipeline to Saint John. All of these pipelines are guaranteed time bombs of disastrous spills that are almost impossible to clean up. On land a bitumen spill is a toxic fire hazard that leaches into the water table. On water, the spill gradually sinks to the bottom as the lighter diluting material washes away.

On the west coast the intent is clearly understood to have ocean-going tankers load the bitumen for shipment to countries that do not care about the pollution caused. The eastern destinations have refineries there but the intent is obvious to ship it and do the conversion to synthetic oil elsewhere in the world.

It is this hypocrisy of Canada’s tar sands exploiters that has earned Canada the enmity of people concerned about global warming. U.S. President Barack Obama just did Canada a big favour by stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

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Is it the Trans-Pacific Profit Protection Pact?

October 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is a disquieting trend emerging in all these trading partnerships that are being negotiated around the world. Who do they benefit? The right wing talks about all the potential jobs but what guarantees do we get as to where those jobs might be? That seems to be left out of the plan. Does Canada just get on board because of its resources or does it really gain opportunities?

What people do not seem to be aware of is that the negotiations for these deals might be between trade ministers but the handlers in their corners are the global corporations. These are the real beneficiaries. And the worst trend of all is that these deals seem to exempt multi-national business from more and more controls.

Going back 25 years, we know now that the North American Free Trade Agreement was never favourable to Canadians. We have had to fight for fairness while losing manufacturing capability in almost every sector. We have spent more time in courts fighting for our trade rights for products such as soft wood lumber than in talks to improve the deal for both parties. Even when we included Mexico, the U.S. pitted the smaller countries against each other and continued to rule the roost.

And the Harper government certainly did not help matters vis-à-vis the Mexicans. The Mexicans have been left with sweat shops and drug thugs. The walls against Mexico in the American Southwest are a deep and lasting insult to a neighbouring country. When ignorant American political wannabes propose a similar approach to Canada, the insult should not be ignored.

And why should Canada pay for that new bridge to Detroit? We have put up with the obstructive and miserly attitudes of the old private bridge owners for too long anyway. Instead of helping with the border problems in the region, Washington bureaucrats have been just as obstinate and obstructive. Canada should open the new bridge and then close the road to the old bridge for construction—for the next ten years.

While Prime Minister Stephen Harper thinks he is some kind of white-knight of trade deals, he has also been the guy to screw them up. His arrogance and off-putting ego have left such a bad taste with European leaders that the deal with Europe that he touted so vociferously has been locked in a diplomatic limbo that Harper does not understand.

Trade deals that need to be negotiated in secret are obviously not the kind of deals that will please everybody in the light of day. Of course there has to be give and take. Different countries naturally develop varying regulations and incentives in dealing with businesses that do the trading. There has to be some levelling of the playing field. That is how it works. The rules have to be fair. Mutual trade has to strengthen the participating countries, not beggar them.

In this day of global corporations, these corporations have to accept their role as rowers of the triremes of trade. They are not the warriors who walk the upper decks. They have to be good corporate citizens in all the countries in which they operate. They have to be responsible for moving us forward. They cannot dictate.

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First-Past-the-Post debate ignites Brits.

May 12, 2015 by Peter Lowry

A sudden influx of hundreds of readers can make any blogger’s heart go pit-a-pat. Since last week, Babel-on-the-Bay’s readership has reached new heights. It was not because of our sage advice on Canadian elections but something written eight years ago at the time of the Ontario referendum on voting reform. Our latest surge of new readers is from Great Britain. Now that they have had their hard fought general election, it seems that some Brits want to change the rules on how they vote.

Admittedly, a Canadian’s knowledge of the British parliamentary system is somewhat coloured by the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan and the comedic commentaries of films by the Boulting Brothers. We have never been too sure of how the British parliament managed to survive after the days of David Lloyd George.

Not that we think the Canadian parliament owes anything to the mother of parliaments beyond a nosegay on Mothers’ Day. The parliament in Ottawa has gone its own way now for almost 150 years and many of the worst aspects of the British parliamentary system are only now besetting its poor occupants.

But it is in the choosing of the denizens of the Commons Chamber that is causing the current controversy. Yes, the Brits invented the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system in the days when the villagers met in the town square and shouted out their preferences. The first thing you notice about those demanding change is that they are not proposing any specific system. They are starting by tearing down FPTP.

And, in many ways, they are right. Yes, FPTP is an anachronism. While it is old and creaky, it has served us well. There is not always a relationship between share of votes and share of seats in parliament. Minority governments can happen. A shift of voting patterns by a strategic block of maybe ten per cent of voters can turn parliament on its collective head.

But before counting FPTP out for the count, one really needs to understand what is being posed as a replacement. Does any educated citizen who respects democracy want to vote for a party list? Or would we condone systems of transferable votes or mixed member systems that cannot be understood by all the voters?

Where we are failing in this entire exercise is our miserable performance in developing better voting systems. We are reaching a point today where we can trust the Internet for secure voting and for cost-free instant run-off elections. Why are we not moving in that direction? Why are we not thinking about it?

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ISIL: the cancer on contemporary Islam.

February 24, 2015 by Peter Lowry

They call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. What they are is vultures tearing at the heart of modern Islam. They are brigands and murderers, thieves and cowards, fools and braggarts. They promise a new Caliphate but their membership is drawn from the scum of those who only profess to follow the teachings of the Prophet. And they encourage the West to treat them as the bogeymen of the next Crusade?

Our politicians have sent our planes to bomb anthills. They have been railing against atrocities that we cannot comprehend. We have been told tales of these cretins to frighten, appal, oppress and maybe return the price of crude oil to more than $100 per barrel.

Stop! The Crusades are long over. Westerners bring no new expertise to the sands of the Middle East? The Bedouin have traversed these lands for centuries. This is the home of the Semites. These are where there are the vast reserves of oil to provide a carbon economy for the West and opulence for a very few.

We have made the Saudi, the Emirate and the Kuwaiti leaders rich and their people oppressed. We have kept religious fanatics supplied with funds. We buy the opium of Afghanistan and the cotton goods of the sweat shops of Pakistan. And the monies we pay out come back at us in the pockets of fanatics.

In exchange for our condemnation these same fanatics continue to threaten us and since 9/11 we have believed them. Oil money buys destruction. Are we not satisfied with the slow death of the melting icecaps?

And why are we letting politicians use these tensions to subjugate us? Why let them pass unnecessary laws to ward off the supposed jihadists within? Are we fools to believe the propaganda of our own technology? Is the pervasiveness of the Internet that persuasive?

Why is the West spending money on solving the problems that the Prophet addressed more than a 1000 years ago. Islam is a way of life and it is the leadership of Islamic countries who have to realize that Islam either has to accommodate change or to seek isolation. Yet there is no hope for isolation in a global economy.

It is an increasingly smaller world and accommodation is the challenge to all.

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Netanyahu buys into Harper election tactics.

February 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

If it was good enough for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to bring his election campaign to Jerusalem, why should Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not try it? The difference is that Jerusalem to the Jewish leader is Washington. With an Israeli election in three weeks, Netanyahu has pulled out all stops.

But even if he wins re-election, he has a pissed off President Obama. Lame duck or not, it really does not pay for a Jewish leader to annoy a sitting American president. Netanyahu accepted Republican House Leader John Boehner’s crassly political invitation to address Congress without doing the proper diplomatic discussion with the U.S. State Department and the President. That is very bad manners.

Not that good manners are a regular part of the right wing code of conduct. In aid of re-election, Stephen Harper brought a load of Canadian Jews to Israel in a re-enactment of the wedding reception scene from the 1969 movie version of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. The Israelis politely looked away and dutifully applauded whatever it was that Harper said in addressing the Knesset.

Even as late as a couple weeks ago, when then Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was in the Levant stirring the pot of hatreds. He seemed to enjoy the shoes and other objects being thrown at him by protesting Arabs. It is really too bad the Arabs do not often play baseball. It would have been nice to see a few sliders hit the mark.

Mind you, Stephen Harper does not have to go far to stir the pot of hatreds, suspicions, distrust and retribution. His current dialogue in the House of Commons is built on the few disturbed people who have reacted to the potential notoriety offered by jihad. His alarms and efforts at revenge are creating more.

And for this, he insults Canadians, ignores rights, ridicules the need for oversight and accuses his naysayers of failing Canadians in a time of fear.

But those who are really failing Canadians are the New Democrat’s Thomas Mulcair and the Liberal’s Justin Trudeau. They are letting the right wing trample rights for cheap political points. It is a time for leaders to lead or to fall by the wayside. As a famous American President once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

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Scots, Wha Hae.

August 9, 2014 by Peter Lowry

Even if your ancestors left Scotland more than 200 years ago, you can still rise to the skirl of the pipes, honour a haggis with other fans of Robbie Burns, sing along with old Harry Lauder recordings and dance the Gay Gordons at a ceilidh. What you cannot do is read the mix of emotions in Scotland on the upcoming referendum. On September 18 this year, Scotland will be voting on whether or not to become a nation that stands alone.

While Scots nationalists have been vocal and demanding for many years, the Scottish National Party might be misreading its own people. In the same way Britain’s bookies current 5–1 betting odds in favour of separation have to be viewed in emotional terms and are not realistic. If you know one thing about the Scots is that they are a very practical people.

What there is not in the Scottish situation is any comparison to the referendums held in Quebec. In a recent article by the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert, she points out that Quebec voters would never agree to risking an after the fact negotiation with the rest of Canada as is part of the agreed vote in Scotland. She sees the conditions of the Scottish vote as anathema to the selling of separation in Quebec.

One of the factors making it hard for anyone to read the tea leaves in Scotland is the fact that the vote has been extended to people from age 16 up. The youth vote was pushed by the nationalists in hopes that this younger vote will take the emotional aspects of the vote to the polls.

But what we know from past experience is that there seems to be a balance in that age group from 16 to 19 that matches the overall result of their parents. Lowering the age to vote is not the answer and just getting them to the polls is enough of a problem.

There is no question but the romanticism of university-level Scots nationalists will be voting for separation but they are not the ones needing a job the next day. These nationalists will also be joined by the disenchanted, the losers and the bitter. That adds up to a solid vote for separation.

But it is probably not enough. The realist is going to wonder why they should want to swim in a smaller economic pool. All they are guaranteed by separation is the probability of higher taxes and lowered economic opportunity.

But the realist is pitted against such words of Robbie Burns as: “The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there ‘til the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest.”

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Is Canada supporting racism in India?

May 22, 2014 by Peter Lowry

It can happen. In our eagerness to support democracy, we sometimes get put in a position where we appear to be supporting causes that we would never support back in Canada. This is obvious in the enthusiasm and support Barrie’s Conservative Member of Parliament Patrick Brown has displayed for India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr. Modi has been strongly criticized for his support for Hindu extremism.

Possibly it is a nuance of Mr. Modi’s character that Mr. Brown would not recognize. He would certainly be aware of Mr. Modi’s strong support for business interests and smaller government. Those are political positions close to Mr. Brown’s heart. He might not be as well aware of Mr. Modi’s less than stellar record in human rights and his possible ignorance of the unimproved living conditions of most of the 60 million people in the State of Gujarat where he was chief minister for the past 13 years.

But these are not things Canadians can debate without first-hand knowledge. We have to restrict ourselves to the areas we do understand and in which we have direct information. It has always served this writer well to remember a friend who was an industrialist from Bombay. He was always a very friendly and easy-going chap except when the then Prime Minister of India Indira Ghandi was mentioned. His visceral hatred for his country’s leader always muted further discussion of the subject. It only made it a bit easier to understand when the lady was so brutally assassinated in 1984.

Talking to friends in Canada from India, we get mixed messages about Mr. Modi. With some expatriates it is only the perceived need for the country to move on from an old and entrenched Congress Party. There are also those of mixed marriages (widely frowned upon back in India) who came to Canada for the opportunities offered for them and their children and to live in peace.

What we do not need from Mr. Brown is his obvious pandering to the wider Hindi community that has immigrated to Canada and now call it home. You expect that first generation immigrants will always pay close attention to happenings in the old country but we also expect them to learn about their new country. It is by his obviously biased view of the conditions in India that Mr. Brown does them a disservice.

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