As our city finally agrees on the stadium location and now they have a couple of months to solidify the funding needed to purchase the land from CP and build the stadium there, we can move on to bigger things, like national politics...
Unless you've been under a rock over the last 48 hours, you know that the UN for the first time ever has denied Canada a seat at the Security Council table when it was on the ballot. Every time our country has appeared on the ballot, our country has been elected until now. So how serious is this? Very.
What was even more puzzling was watching Harper having to beg and plead for a place at the security council. I don't recall there ever being a time when a PM has ever done so. To stand there and remind the UN of Canada's contributions, none of which his government has provided, was disingenuous and rightfully rebuked.
And I for one don't really like the idea of the Conservatives spreading their pogrom on the world, as they have done in Canada. This is not the same Canada that stood under the watch of all our great prime ministers since William Lyon Mackenzie King. This is a more hated country and with plenty good reason. The people in charge have alienated us from the world and our reputation continues to slide every single day this government sits. The Conservatives only want impose their ideology on the world, with a simplistic view that makes us less worldly than we once were.
There was a time when being a Canadian meant being a citizen of the world, but Conservative government with its continuous stoking of nationalism and endless echoing of jingoist views have made us a little more alien to the world. It's as if they don't recognize us anymore. We are now perceived to be a different country altogether because of actions taken by the Conservative government.
There's something about changing a country that once fought to keep the peace and acted as an honest broker internationally, to a militarist country led by a confirmed chickenhawk with delusional visions of an old Christian-dominated, Islamophobic world order. Getting in late in the game, cutting aid to African countries, criticizing the UN as a corrupt organization and taking more of an isolationist approach for the country doesn't help sell yourself either. This debacle is owned by Harper's Conservatives, who epically failed to pin their loss on oppostion leader Michael Ignatieff, who rightfully observed that we really didn't deserve the non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council.
And perhaps all this was a set-up for something else. After all, they need to score some cheap points as another apparent reason to deny Mr. Ignatieff a mandate to govern. But let's just ignore Mr. Harper's own tinkering with a sitting government when he expressed his disappointment that Canada rightfully refused to participate in Bush's Iraq war to remove a Republican operative and bring chaos to the Middle East for years to come. He expressed his disappointment in the Wall Street Journal. So as the pot calls the kettle black, we are caught in the crossfire as usual, wondering whether or not we will return to the UN Security Council.
Of course we will be back at the table, but not with our current government holding the reins. The time for reckoning is coming. Let's hope it will be sooner rather than later.
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