Canadians can't quite believe it: suddenly, we're interesting. After months of making the news only with our various communicable diseases -- SARS and West Nile -- we are now getting world famous for our cutting-edge laws on gay marriage and decriminalized drugs.
US President George W. Bush's conservatives are repulsed by our depravity. My friends in New York and San Francisco have been quietly inquiring about applying for citizenship.
And Canadians have been eating it up, filling the newspapers with giddy articles about our independence. "You're not the boss of us, George," Jim Coyle wrote in the Toronto Star.
"So much for nice; we're getting interesting," wrote the conservative columnist William Thorsell in the Globe and Mail.
Four events have contributed to Canada's newfound status as Hippie Nation:
? The Liberal party government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien did not support the invasion of Iraq ("opposed" would be too strong a word, since we maintained troops in the region).
? On May 27 the government introduced legislation to decriminalize the possession of marijuana. People caught with up to 15g will get the equivalent of a parking ticket. US drug czar John Walters has promised to "respond to the threat."
? On June 17 the government announced it would introduce legislation to legalize gay marriage. This will bring the entire country into compliance with a court ruling that has already made it legal in Ontario. US gays and lesbians have been flooding into Toronto to get hitched.
? On June 24 the government announced the opening of the first "safe injection site" in North America in Vancouver, which averages 147 overdose deaths a year. The publicly funded facility will provide needle exchanges and health assistance to heroin addicts. Walters calls this one "state-sponsored personal suicide."
So, does all this peace, love and drugs really mean that the US and its closest neighbor and ally are parting ways? Much as I would love to report that I really do live in "Soviet Canuckistan" (as Pat Buchanan has taken to calling us), it is mostly hype.
When he was elected in 1993, Chretien pledged to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and negotiate a better deal for Canada. He immediately broke the promise. Now, months away from the end of his decade in office, Canadians are keenly aware of how much independence we have lost under the agreement. Our economic dependence on the US is staggering -- almost 40 percent of Canada's GDP comes from exports to the US. More troubling, we have traded away our right to put Canadian energy needs before those of the US. A little-known clause in NAFTA states that even in the event of a severe energy shortage, Canada cannot cut off its oil and gas exports to the US -- we can only reduce the flow south by the same rate as we reduce consumption.
This ceding of power to the US is Chretien's true legacy, which is why, in his final months in office, he is racing to be remembered as a principled man. But Chretien's last-ditch attempts to declare Canada's independence -- significant as they are -- can't mask the fact that on trade and security, the Liberals are following Washington more obediently than ever.
We are pushing, with the Bush administration, for NAFTA to be expanded into all of Latin America. Our government has made only tepid efforts to save Canadian citizens born in countries identified by the US government as "sponsors of terror" from being photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the US. Immigrants and refugees inside Canada suspected of terrorist ties are being detained for long periods without charge, then tried in secret.
There is another reason Chretien's nose-thumbing at Washington should be regarded with skepticism. When Chretien steps down, he is likely to be succeeded by his arch-rival, Paul Martin. By passing a bunch of laws that piss off Bush and then retiring, Chretien wins on two fronts: he is remembered as the man who rescued Canada's sovereignty, while Martin gets stuck dealing with the fallout. Watch for Martin, who represents the right of the Liberal party, to do whatever it takes to get back into Bush's good books, even if it means overturning Chretien's last-minute laws.
The wild card is how the Canadian people will respond. Will we embrace obedience once again, or will we demand more independence? Well, so far there are no signs of retreat. For a country that has been boring as long as we have, there may be something more addictive than sex and drugs -- being interesting.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers