Just a few days ago, I was driving along Lochside into Sidney, BC and stopped at a shoreline watching area to enjoy the large fluffy white clouds and the strange shapes they were creating 0ver the San Juan Islands, and the mainland – Washington State USA at that point.  The sun was shining on them and their whiteness was exaggerated by that.   As the sun slowly sank over the western horizon these clouds lost their glint and started turning grey and dark.   Time to move.

 On my way home I was thinking about what I had just seen and I realized it was a sort of metaphor for Canada since the 1930s.

 In 1974 our world was rosy. We had a small national debt we owed to ourselves, we had been through 40 years of growth and prosperity (even after the end of WW2 which we paid for our share ourselves) with very little inflation and the world was looking good.  The sun was shining on Canada as in our white clouds over the San Juans and their magnificent shapes.

 However greedy and powerful men both here at home and internationally saw the potential of Canada and wanted a piece of the pie so to speak.  At the behest of the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements was created to protect the interests and profits of the various privately owned central banks of countries around the world, and a series of agreements was created for this protection.  Basel 1, 11 and 111 are not international agreements between countries as most people thought or still think but are private banking agreements to which Gerald Bouey, then Governor of the Bank of Canada 1974,  signed our publicly owned bank into the first of those agreements.  He had no mandate to do so from either the government of Canada or the Canadian people, but I can only assume he was rewarded in the usual manner.   From that point on our national debt has spiraled out of control, no longer owed to ourselves but owned by international banks and investors.  

 In my metaphor the white clouds over the San Juans are losing their glow now

 Over the last 40+ years successive governments, most particularly of some form of conservatives, have signed Canada into multiple deals they call Free Trade deals, starting with the Canada/USA FTA and currently being crowned with the CETA with Europe.   This CETA is the first one that has been openly called an economic agreement, that’s what the “E” stands for, but it is the culmination of years of false Free Trade deals all of which have been designed to allow investors from overseas to claim damages from our Federal government through a corporate tribunal if ANYTHING we do stops them from making a perceived profit from dealings in Canada.  This anything includes laws, or regulations to protect either our environment or our workers and their jobs.  Not only that but Canadian corporations have discovered that if they incorporate in Delaware USA (cheapest place in North America) it allows them to take advantage of NAFTA.   $130 million donated to Abitibi Bowater by Stephen Harper in a perfectly defendable claim against Newfoundland & Labrador that he chose to ignore, and $250 currently being claimed by Lone Pine Power of Calgary.

 By now the white clouds of the metaphor have turned very grey and I leave and head home. 

 Canada meanwhile has been put into a box where our sovereignty is given to international corporations which now control our very country, not only through our monetary debt to them but through our so called “FREE TRADE DEALS” 

 Free?  I think not!

 The current version of a Liberal government is in fact a complete duplicate of the Stephen Harper regime intent on signing away more of our rights and indeed even wanting to take privatization further than even Libertarians could have dreamed about.  Our publicly owned Bank of Canada is to be replaced by a privately sponsored Infrastructure Bank of Canada which will have to give away control of anything in which it invests so we Canadians will have to pay user fees in order to satisfy the need for profit to those banks and investors as well as the compounding interest of our ever-increasing national debt.   Now our prime minister is looking to sell of our airports and sea ports to private operators so the cost of using them both will increase exponentially, and will of course be covered by more user fees.

 By now I am home and it is getting much darker with no sunset to light up the horizon and I am left wondering how “sunny days and sunny ways” had disappeared so soon and left us with a dictator who could exchange masks with Stephen Harper (as shown in that cartoon a few months ago), and no-one would notice the difference.

 It really is time for a peaceful revolt not only for Canada but also in BC where we are desperately in need of a legislature not controlled by the mining, development, housing and oil and gas interests.

 Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep very well that night, thinking of my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Jeremy