Columns – LInda McQuaig – author, journalist, activist

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system offers nothing but the illusion of safety

It’s certainly worrisome, as we’re discovering, that U.S. President Donald Trump has so much sway over our economy.

What’s even more worrisome, but rarely mentioned, is that this volatile, vengeful, vindictive, reckless and deeply unpredictable man also has control over the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal.

Of course, Canadians don’t get to determine who sits in the Oval Office. But we do have some options how to respond.

And while the debate rages on in Canada about how best to resist Trump’s grip on our economy, we’ve quietly signed on to fully co-operate with his ultimately more threatening military agenda.

Our elbows aren’t just not up, they’re in lockstep with his.

At the urging of Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney has agreed to radically raise our military spending over the next decade, jacking it all the way up from 1.4 per cent to five per cent of our GDP.

Furthermore, Carney has also signalled Canada’s intention to join Trump’s “Golden Dome” — thereby discarding decades of sensible Canadian refusal to become part of the long-smouldering Republican “Star Wars” fantasy of world nuclear domination.

This move is a striking departure for Canada, and it has received far too little attention.

For decades, Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative (under Brian Mulroney), wisely declined to participate in earlier versions of the Golden Dome under former U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Canada’s refusal was largely on the grounds that these so-called “missile defence” systems are not just defensive. In fact, they undermine arms treaties and encourage arms races.

Indeed, Canada’s apparent willingness to embrace the Golden Dome would amount to a repudiation of our long tradition of supporting arms control and specifically our role in trying to prevent the use of weapons in space.

This danger was underlined last week by Douglas Roche, a former Canadian ambassador for disarmament, when he lamented in a speech in Ottawa that the Carney government “has joined the Western pretence that a Golden Dome missile defence system will save us.”

Roche, a retired Canadian senator, considers it “deeply disturbing” that the Carney government seems willing to embrace the Golden Dome, which threatens to “provoke the development of a new offensive nuclear arms system.”

Roche calls nuclear weapons “instruments of pure evil.”

In an earlier column, I argued that Carney’s decision to appease Trump by dramatically raising our military spending means there will be little revenue left for other priorities.

Even worse, Carney’s willingness to join Trump’s Golden Dome misadventure will leave us less safe, by adding fuel to the already-overheated arms race.

The Golden Dome — a trillion-dollar project likely to enrich Peter Thiel and other U.S. tech billionaires — is central to the revival of the nuclear arms race, reversing the significant disarmament progress made in earlier decades.

The Golden Dome is based on the far-fetched idea that a land mass the size of North America can be shielded from incoming missiles through a technology often likened to a speeding bullet hitting another speeding bullet from thousands of miles away. It can work in a test but is regarded as less reliable in warfare.

However, by providing the illusion of protection, the Golden Dome could encourage political leaders to consider using nuclear weapons, not just defensively, but in “first strike” situations, to pre-emptively knock out opponents. In other words, it risks encouraging nuclear aggression.

In an article last month in Scientific American, astrophysicist Ramin Skibba suggested that the Golden Dome would lead to a “more overt weaponization of space” and concluded that its main feature may be “the perilous acceleration of arms races and the enrichment of profit-seeking defence and space-tech contractors for what is, at best, only the illusion of safety.”

Hardly sounds like something Canada should be part of, particularly when the lethal nuclear arsenal connected to it will be under the control of someone we know, from firsthand experience, to be volatile, vengeful, vindictive, reckless and deeply unpredictable.

Carney’s military spending binge will leave Canadians worse off and divided

At last! Finally, we’re seeing some real nation-building by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

I’m referring, of course, to his decision to extend the national school lunch program.

This is an excellent way to ensure Canadian schoolchildren — who represent the future of our country — aren’t drifting off to sleep in class because they’re hungry. (An astounding 2.5 million Canadian children live in food-insecure households.)

Sadly, however, beyond this wise move, the Carney government seems poised to deliver a brutal budget next month that will take us in exactly the wrong direction, undermining any hope of “nation-building.”

Carney announced plans last June that will seriously limit the options for Canada’s future, by hugely increasing the country’s military spending over the next decade, raising it from 1.4 per cent of GDP to a staggering five per cent of GDP. That amounts to an annual military expenditure of $150 billion, compared to the $41 billion we spent last year.

Such extreme peacetime military spending was never contemplated, even by the most hawkish Canadian defence analysts, until U.S. President Donald Trump started throwing around the five per cent figure. Yet even the excessively-armed United States only spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on defence.

The very idea of linking military spending to GDP is nonsensical, according to Paul Robinson, a military historian at the University of Ottawa. That’s because GDP measures the country’s total output, from its auto manufacturing to its hamburger production.

“There is no reason why you should spend more on defence just because you are eating more hamburgers,” argues Robinson. “To make sense, defence spending has to be linked to needs, not GDP.”

The Carney government clearly did not do a careful assessment of Canada’s defence needs before embracing Trump’s five per cent figure. Rather, it was a sudden move, apparently designed to please Trump -— even though there’s no reason to believe it will make the slightest difference in Trump’s highly capricious decisions about tariffs or anything else.

Carney may have also deluded himself into thinking Trump will be less inclined to push us around if we have more military might.

More likely, a military version of “Elbows Up” will provoke the mercurial president to demonstrate American dominance by designating Canada, along with Chicago, as a place to send U.S. troops for military exercises.

Indeed, the impossibility of Canada defending itself from its rogue neighbour — the only country that could realistically invade us — is underlined by our 2023 deal (still in place) to purchase 88 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets.

As Canadian political scientist Michael Byers notes, Washington controls the F-35’s complex software, which it could deny to Canada, along with spare parts for the aircraft. “Canada’s F-35s would, one by one, become unflyable,” observes Byers.

Retired Canadian senator Douglas Roche notes that, while Canada already spends 20 times more on the military than on diplomacy, our focus should be on diplomacy. “In this new surge of militarism, diplomacy has been pushed aside, at our collective peril.”

This military spending binge will definitely leave the cupboard bare. As the military eats up endless billions of taxpayer dollars over the next decade, every single aspect of government spending — including the school lunch! — will end up under the knife, sooner or later. Any promises to the contrary will simply vanish over time, as the military budget balloons ever larger.

Former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower famously warned: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

We urgently need to bring the country together, making it work for all Canadians, strengthening feelings of unity and national purpose, as we collectively gear up to resist the Trump menace. Diverting hundreds of billions of dollars away from ordinary Canadians, in order to needlessly swell our military, is hardly the way to do this.

Postal banking once made Canada Post profitable — and could again

Mark Carney clearly loves a nation-building project — as long as it’s wildly expensive and is pleasing to corporate interests.

That seems to be the takeaway from the prime minister’s decision last week to largely abandon Canada Post, an institution with a vast network of 5,900 outlets across the country that’s been tying Canada together since Confederation.

In recent years, Canada Post has lost large amounts of money and is currently in the midst of a strike by postal workers. Carney’s response is to effectively gut it, ending door-to-door mail delivery (where it still exists) and resuming the closure of post offices across the country.

This plan for disembowelling Canada Post was first advanced in 2013 by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which was always keen to cut public services and hand them over to the private sector.

Now Carney is picking up this destructive scheme rather than opting for ways to use the already-established national infrastructure of the post office to actually strengthen Canada.

By gutting Canada Post, Carney is throwing Canada’s mostly-unionized 62,000 postal workers to the wolves, forcing them to compete in an industry increasingly shaped by anti-union, low-paying private delivery companies like U.S.-based Amazon.

Amazon and other non-union companies have become major players in the lucrative delivery business in urban and suburban Canada, and they’re able to leave the less profitable rural and remote regions to be serviced by Canada Post.

One solution to Canada Post’s financial difficulties would be for it to maintain a properly-paid unionized workforce, and to make up any shortfall by offering new services — particularly banking — through its network of postal outlets.

Actually, banking wouldn’t be a new service. Canada Post offered “postal banking” for more than a century.

And it was a big money-maker, even though Canada Post typically offered its banking customers higher interest rates on their savings accounts than the private banks did. The private banks never liked the competition, and continually pressed Ottawa to end postal banking, which it did in 1969.

Postal banks continue to operate successfully in about 100 countries, with particularly profitable postal banks in France and Japan.

Interestingly, in the Harper years, senior executives at Canada Post were supportive of the idea of resuming postal banking as a way to compensate for revenue shortfalls, according to government documents obtained under an Access to Information request by Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter.

The documents showed that, after studying the experience of other countries, Canada Post executives concluded that postal banking could be a “win-win” way to subsidize home delivery and serve rural communities.

But Harper wasn’t interested in a win-win solution that would bolster the public sector, while annoying the major banks and private delivery companies. And neither, apparently, is Carney.

However, the case for resuming postal banking — and possibly using the post office’s national network to provide other services, such as high-speed internet — remains strong.

There are some 1,200 rural communities across Canada that have no bank branch or credit union, but they do have a post office. First Nations communities are also poorly served by banks, notes John Anderson, author of “Why Canada Needs Postal Banking.”

Even in urban areas, low-income Canadians could benefit from postal banking. With the private banks increasingly focused on providing “wealth management” for the well-to-do, hundreds of thousands of low-income Canadians are obliged to turn to payday loan businesses that charge exorbitant interest rates — as much as 365 per cent a year.

Canada Post could charge far less, thereby providing significant savings for low-income people while earning profits to subsidize mail delivery.

Reviving postal banking may not be the big, flashy sort of project that seems to excite Carney. But shouldn’t protecting Canadian workers from the ravages of the gig economy, and using a national network to provide vital banking services to rural and low-income Canadians, also qualify as a form of nation-building?

The marketplace will not solve climate change

Climate change is a “wicked” problem, but the free market has no interest in solving it, in fact, they do much to exacerbate the problem.

The utter failure of humans to rein in climate change has led some observers to call it a “wicked” problem.

It’s a catchy term — actually used in academic discourse — that’s meant to capture the sheer difficulty of solving the climate crisis, given the centrality of fossil fuels in our lives and the world economy.

The idea is to distinguish between “tame” or solvable problems, and “wicked” or unsolvable ones.

But catchy or not, the term “wicked” is dead wrong when applied to climate change. As problems go, it’s the opposite of “wicked.”

By that I mean there absolutely is a solution to climate change: renewable energy, which is safe, free and abundant — appealing features which, oddly enough, we always seem to overlook when planning our energy systems.

Furthermore, people around the globe — horrified by raging wildfires and tempestuous floods threatening their lives — are showing a willingness, even an eagerness, to transition from fossil fuels. More than 13,700 cities worldwide have pledged to cut carbon emissions as part of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, including 25 Canadian municipalities.

For most of us, switching to clean energy would require some adjusting, but wouldn’t have to impact our lives all that negatively. It’s not like we’d return to pre-industrial lifestyles, getting around in horse-drawn carriages and playing charades every evening. We’d still drive fast cars and spend our lives glued to a screen.

So climate change is a solvable problem — but it can’t be left to the marketplace to solve. That’s because the dominant players in the marketplace have no interest in solving it. Indeed, their immense profits depend on blocking us transitioning from fossil fuels, and profits are what they care about.

This is where government comes in, or should come in. The best hope we have of tackling the climate crisis is for government, acting in the public interest, to create publicly-owned enterprises focused on developing clean energy alternatives.

This is happening in Europe, where governments, notably the Nordic countries as well as Spain, Portugal and Austria, have established companies that advance renewable energy.

Denmark has established state-owned Orsted, now the world’s largest offshore wind-power developer, having transitioned from fossil fuels completely.

Norway is a particularly interesting case because, like Canada, it has extensive oil reserves. But it hasn’t let private oil interests control it politically, the way they control Canada. Indeed, in addition to creating a publicly-owned oil company, Equinor, Norway has established publicly-owned Statkraft, now Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy.

There’s no reason we couldn’t be as smart and innovative as the Europeans.

Indeed, Canada had a strong tradition of publicly-owned enterprises, before we embarked on a privatization binge in recent decades.

Ontario Hydro, for instance, was established by the Ontario government in the early 1900s in response to popular demands that the hydropower of Niagara Falls be owned by the people, not by the private “water barons” who were exploiting consumers south of the border. (Hydro became the world’s largest publicly-owned power authority; it was mostly privatized in 2015.)

So far, Prime Minister Mark Carney, while professing concern about climate change, seems content to rely on the market to solve the problem — a hopeless strategy.

Indeed, his obsession with market solutions, which could perhaps be dubbed Market Derangement Syndrome, will leave us condemned to an ever-hotter world.

Carney is planning to divert billions of our tax dollars to subsidize the oil industry’s notoriously ineffective “carbon capture and storage,” and billions more to beef up our military — rather than directing major public funds to the urgent cause of doing everything possible to save the planet for our future use.

Big Oil, with Alberta’s full support and Ottawa’s acquiescence, is hell-bent on ensuring we dig up and sell all the remaining oil under our ground — despite how dirty, destructive and lethal that would be.

Maybe, on second thought, the term “wicked” isn’t so far off.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Mark Carney should pursue renewable energy as a national project

If nuclear war were to break out, I’m confident (or at least pretty sure) that the mainstream media would cover it.

The climate crisis is another matter.

Although it also poses an existential threat to humankind, its more gradual timeline means it can be more easily ignored by the media, which clearly prefers to focus on the Epstein files, the Charlie Kirk murder, etc.

As a result, many Canadians are probably unaware of a couple of momentous developments on the climate front.

One is that the world’s climate appears to be warming faster than scientists thought. We’ve already burned enough fossil fuels to push us past the must-hold threshold of 1.5 degrees of warming and appear heading toward three to four degrees — rendering significant parts of the world effectively uninhabitable — before the end of this century.

But back to Charlie Kirk.

The other big climate development is good news: due to technological breakthroughs, solar energy has dropped dramatically in price and is now much cheaper than fossil fuels. Long considered a luxury for chardonnay-sipping environmentalists, solar energy now has the potential to become the energy choice of beer-drinking workers concerned about the cost of living.

“The suddenness of this moment is startling,” notes Bill McKibben in “Here Comes the Sun.” “The solar cell was invented in 1954, and it took from then until 2022 to install the first terawatt (one trillion watts) worth of solar power on this planet. It took two years to get the second; the third will be quicker still.”

Obviously, this is fantastic news.

Ahh, but there’s a catch. The very thing that’s exciting about solar energy — its abundance and low cost — also makes it of little interest to investors. Sun (and wind) are so freely available all around us that it’s hard to hoard them and make big profits from them.

And in our business-dominated culture, that’s a deal-breaker.

This presumably explains why, last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney, in revealing his five priority projects to be fast-tracked in the interest of nation-building, failed to choose a project aimed at harnessing the transformational energy potential of sun or wind.

Although Carney sold himself to Canadians last spring as a climate leader, his focus since becoming prime minister has been on pleasing business and investors.

This was reflected in his decision to select, as one of his fast-tracking priority projects, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s misguided plan to invest in new reactors for the Darlington nuclear power plant.

While nuclear power isn’t climate-destroying like fossil fuels, it’s got other really serious drawbacks: it’s wildly expensive, potentially dangerous and comes with the unsolved problem of how to safely bury nuclear waste, which (let’s not forget) remains radioactive for thousands of years.

Furthermore, the new reactors for Darlington will require enriched uranium from the U.S. — uranium that could be withheld by a capricious U.S. president wanting to weaken Canada.

With sun and wind so affordable and safe, why would Carney or Ford opt for expensive nuclear power that leaves us vulnerable to presidential whims — other than because investors are keen to make profits from it.

All this raises the question: why should profits for investors be given priority over affordable, clean energy for all?

If the Carney government wants to fast-track projects in the national interest, how about this: a youth climate corps.

Seth Klein, leader of the Climate Emergency Unit, urges Ottawa to set up a nationwide program offering every Canadian under 35 a job for two years implementing clean energy solutions, cutting carbon emissions and handling extreme weather across the country.

Now there’s a transformational, nation-building idea. It would tackle youth unemployment and alienation and give us all a greater chance to live in a world not dominated by wildfires, floods and droughts.

That might not excite investors, but it would likely leave young Canadians feeling we’re doing something to ensure they have a future.

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star.

Canada fails to add its voice to worldwide plea for humanity in Gaza

In this dire crisis in the Middle East, there is a desperate need for Canada to speak up as a middle power of some standing in the world.

In this dire crisis in the Middle East, there is a desperate need for Canada to speak up as a middle power of some standing in the world.

Twenty years ago, in one of Canada’s greatest moments on the world stage, Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced that Canada would not join the US invasion of Iraq.

Chretien’s decision to keep Canada out of that foolhardy bloodbath showed a compassion and independence that was particularly impressive given the enormous pressure coming from Washington at the time in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Now is a similarly fraught moment, in the wake of the horrific October 7 terrorist attack in which Hamas brutally killed 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages.

An enraged Israel has responded to the Hamas attack by relentlessly bombing Gaza for more than three weeks — with the full support of the United States.

This has created a humanitarian crisis of extraordinary proportions. More than two million Palestinian civilians — about half of them children — are trapped in Gaza. They had nothing to do with the Hamas attack. Yet, with nowhere to go to escape constant bombardment, more than 7,000 of them have been killed and there are severe shortages of food, water, medicine and the fuel needed to run hospital generators and incubators.

This humanitarian catastrophe, broadcast on live television, cries out for nations of conscience to demand a ceasefire so bombs stop raining down on children — some 3,000 of whom have already been killed in Gaza in the past few weeks.

In this dire crisis, there is a desperate need for Canada to speak up as a middle power of some standing in the world, for our prime minister to summon the same courage Chrétien showed in declining to join the Iraq invasion.

Canada used to be known for peacekeeping and for “punching above its weight” in world affairs. Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. And last Friday, Canada refused to join a majority of the world’s nations in passing a UN emergency resolution calling for “a sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.”

The resolution, sponsored by Jordan, condemned all violence against civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian. In an effort to win broad support, the Jordanian resolution avoided making political points and focused instead on the need for “immediate, full, sustained, safe and unhindered humanitarian access.”

Yet this call for a humanitarian truce was rejected by the US and Israel — along with 12 mostly small nations.

Canada could have shown some real independence from the US — and compassion — by supporting the Jordanian resolution.

Instead, Bob Rae, Canada’s UN ambassador, proposed an amendment that heavily denounced the Hamas attack while avoiding criticism of Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

This prompted Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram to rebuke Rae, saying “my friend from Canada insists on naming the organization Hamas [but] does not feel the need for the equity and balance and fairness for which Canada is so well known, he does not feel the need to name Israel for killing 7,000 Palestinians.”

The Pakistan ambassador’s remarks were greeted with loud applause and Rae’s amendment was defeated. The UN assembly went on to pass Jordan’s resolution with an overwhelming majority of 120 nations, including France, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.

Notably, Canada abstained. We failed to add our voice to a worldwide plea on behalf of humanity.

Rae is a skilled diplomat and he demonstrated real compassion in 2018 as Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar with his persistent efforts to stop ethnic violence against Myanmar’s minority Rohingya. The Trudeau government backed Rae by providing $300 million for the Rohingya.

An emotional Rae appeared before the Canadian Senate in 2018, breaking down as he described his visits to Rohingya refugee camps: “The camps are full of young people, and the thing that I felt as a father and a grandfather is: these are just kids.”

If only Rae — and Trudeau — could muster equal compassion for the bleeding and traumatized children of Gaza.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Canada must use its clout to demand Israel stop collective punishment

As Israel politics have turned to the right, its top figures have discard all context for understanding what drives the violence directed toward them.

As Israel politics have turned to the right, its top figures have discarded all context for understanding what drives the violence directed toward them.

“Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

These words were delivered in 1956 by Israel’s then-top military commander, Moshe Dayan, during an emotional eulogy he gave for a young Israeli soldier killed near the Gaza border.

The legendary Dayan, who wore a patch to cover an eye lost in battle, played a key role in military victories leading to Israel’s creation in 1948 and went on to lead the nation to surprising military triumphs in its early years.

But for all his fierce, unflagging dedication to Israel, Dayan was capable of this fundamental insight into the nature of the forces arrayed against Israel and the source of their rage:

They hate us, he understood, because we took their land.

This essential insight enabled him to understand his Palestinian enemies in a way that seems lacking among Israeli leaders today.

In the 67 years since Dayan described the origins of Palestinian wrath, that wrath has only grown, leading to the horrifying assault this month by Hamas on Israeli civilians, including the murder of blameless youth attending a music festival, helpless children and babies and the seizure of dozens of civilian hostages.

There is never any excuse for such barbaric attacks on innocent civilians.

But, as Israel politics have hardened and turned to the right in recent decades, its top figures have tossed aside Dayan’s fundamental insight, discarding all context for understanding what drives the violence directed toward them.

This was evident last week when Naftali Bennett, who served as Israeli prime minister in 2021-22, became furious when a Sky TV interviewer asked him about Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

“Are you seriously — keep asking me about Palestinian civilians? What is wrong with you? Have you not seen what’s happened? We’re fighting Nazis,” shouted Bennett, who remains a member of the Knesset.

But Israel is not fighting Nazis. Naziism was a far graver threat to Jews. And it was based on pure racism, not on a battle over land — which, unlike racism, is possibly negotiable.

Bennett and others might prefer to characterize Israel as fighting Nazis because that makes it easier to justify relentlessly bombing and cutting off water and electricity to Palestinian civilians, effectively treating them as Nazis to be obliterated.

This amounts to collective punishment, a war crime under international law. It is also deeply unfair to the 2.3 million Gazans — half of them children — who clearly had no role in the highly secretive Hamas attack.

Israel appears to be acting under the delusion that by levelling Gaza, it can kill every last Hamas terrorist, bringing Israel permanent security. This is an impossible task, as Thomas Friedman noted in his New York Times column.

It’s impossible because, according to Friedman, there will always be more — indeed, an endless supply — of humiliated, unemployed young Palestinian men who can be mobilized to commit mayhem.

As Moshe Dayan might have added, these young men are also angry, having known nothing in their lives but the prisonlike world of Gaza, where virtually everyone is descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 war establishing Israel.

As a devastating humanitarian crisis unfolds in Gaza, there’s an urgent need for countries like Canada to use their clout to demand that Israel, in exercising its legitimate right to self-defence, show restraint — abandoning collective punishment and limiting itself to surgical strikes against Hamas.

If there’s any chance of preventing the situation from spiralling more massively out of control, middle-power countries like Canada will also have to finally start pressuring Israel into giving Palestinians some hope.

If that sounds fanciful, the alternative is worse: allowing this raging, blood-drenched savagery to just continue.

Originally published in the Toronto Star October 19, 2023.

Inquiry should expose foreign oil’s meddling in our elections

The election interference inquiry should look into foreign-owned oil companies seeking to influence elections, despite laws banning such action.

The election interference inquiry should look into foreign-owned oil companies seeking to influence elections, despite laws banning such action.

As Chinese officials went about trying to influence the Canadian federal election in 2019, they could have learned from another set of foreigners who know a thing or two about influencing our elections — the foreign interests that own most of our big oil companies.

Both sets of foreigners — the Chinese and the oil interests (American and others) — are very keen to shape our politics and both took specific actions to influence the 2019 Canadian election.

But the actions taken by China — which we know about from Canadian intelligence sources — led to weeks of political fury and outrage in our Parliament and prompted the establishment of a public inquiry, headed by Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue.

Meanwhile, the actions taken by foreign oil interests — which are arguably as far-reaching in terms of determining the shape of important Canadian policies — aroused no outrage or even attention in Parliament.

Yet, surely, if we care about Canadian elections being decided by Canadians, then the clear attempt by foreign oil interests to determine the election outcome should figure prominently in this inquiry — something far from certain at this point.

Of course, the U.S. oil interests are harder to spot, partly because they carefully disguise themselves as Canadian. One might easily assume, for instance, that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) is, well, Canadian.

It’s true that CAPP represents the major oil producers in Canada and many of the managers in these companies are Canadian. But, as political economist Gordon Laxer documents in a recent issue of the Canadian journal Policy Options, all the big oil producers on the CAPP board are either majority or entirely owned by foreigners. Indeed, of all the oil produced by companies on the CAPP board, only 2.8 per cent is by Canadian-owned companies.

The fact that its board is heavily dominated by foreign-owned companies didn’t stop CAPP from making a concerted effort to determine the outcome of the 2019 Canadian election — and in some devious ways. Its goal was clear: replacing the Trudeau government with the more oil-friendly Conservatives.

This was explicit at a closed-door retreat CAPP held at the luxurious Azuridge Estate Hotel in the foothills of the Rockies in April 2019. Topics on the retreat’s confidential agenda — which was leaked to the press — included using front groups to make the pro-oil case, silencing environmental groups by suing them and getting more government support for pipelines (that is, more than the billions Ottawa was already spending on the Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion).

The retreat brought together business leaders, Conservative politicians and operatives. One session on using litigation to silence environmental critics featured Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official who was recently indicted in Georgia for conspiring to overturn the 2020 U.S. election.

Interestingly, such a brazen attempt by foreigners to meddle in a Canadian election was theoretically banned when Canada passed the Elections Modernization Act in 2018.

The act bans foreign interference by governments and third-parties — including foreign-owned corporations. But Laxer maintains there’s a loophole: foreign-owned corporations are exempt from the ban if they list their headquarters in Canada.

Laxer notes that almost all CAPP members, no matter how heavily foreign-owned, list a Canadian headquarters.

We really need a public inquiry to investigate this massive effort to shape such a vital area of our politics during election campaigns — and all other times.

At least, the current public inquiry into election interference should look into foreign-owned oil companies seeking to influence our elections, despite Canadian election laws specifically banning such action. At the very least, Justice Hogue should recommend closing the loophole that allows them to do so.

Originally published in the Toronto Star October 5, 2023.

Poilievre wants to help workers, just not on the picket line

Past union victories dramatically improved the ability of workers to afford a good life — but you won’t catch Poilievre talking about that.

Past union victories dramatically improved the ability of workers to afford a good life — but you won’t catch Poilievre talking about that.

Pierre Poilievre seems to pop up with his populist message everywhere these days. But even though he’s out to woo working class voters, one place you definitely won’t find him is on a picket line.

The Conservative leader fumes relentlessly about today’s “affordability” crisis, and he correctly points out that workers are struggling to pay for groceries, rent, mortgages, etc.

Yet he seems confused about what actions workers should take to ease their affordability problems — other than voting for him.

In fact, the proven most effective way for workers to increase their pay and improve their working conditions hasn’t been to vote Conservative but rather to join a union and, when necessary, go on strike.

Still, despite the success of unions in increasing their workers’ pay — unionized workers in Canada have received on average about $5 more per hour than non-unionized workers over the past decade — Poilievre has never seen much merit in unions. Indeed, he’s sided with corporate interests that have persistently acted to suppress unions.

In 2012, when Poilievre was a young parliamentary secretary, he pushed hard for Canada to adopt notorious “right-to-work” laws, which are favoured by corporations because they undermine unions. Barack Obama famously described them as being about “the right to work for less.”

Back then, the bespectacled Poilievre was a far-right political gadfly. His support for “right-to-work” laws — which originated in the U.S. South to weaken unions and their efforts to promote a cross-racial brotherhood of workers — was regarded as too extreme by even the staunchly anti-labour Harper government.

Today, the smoothed-down, done-over Poilievre is less overtly waging class war on behalf of the corporate elite. Instead of focusing on crushing unions, he now presents himself as battling the more neutral-sounding “affordability crisis.”

In fact, today’s “affordability crisis” — caused by recent inflation and high interest rates — is just the latest affordability setback for Canadian workers who have struggled for the last few decades as almost all the economic gains have gone to those at the top, leaving the bottom 90 per cent straining to afford groceries, rent, mortgages, etc.

Today, on both sides of the border, labour senses this may be the moment to begin turning things around — just as a pivotal strike by U.S. autoworkers did in an earlier era of extreme inequality in the 1930s.

Dubbed “the strike heard around the world,” the bitter 1937 strike by autoworkers against General Motors in Detroit was the first major victory for unionization in U.S. history, and it led to 300 per cent wage hikes.

The success of that strike triggered a wave of union activism that ultimately helped create a substantial American middle class — with tens of millions of workers enjoying good wages, job security and pensions that allowed them, really for the first time, to live comfortable lives.

The same dramatic turnaround happened in Canada, again with autoworkers playing a pivotal role.

In 1945, more than 10,000 autoworkers at Ford’s Windsor complex — the largest workplace in the country — waged a gruelling 99-day strike which resulted in workers winning recognition for their union and compulsory dues check-off, which became known as the Rand formula.

That victory inspired other Canadian union actions and helped push Canada in the same direction as the early postwar U.S. towards greater equality and an enlarged and empowered middle class.

But you won’t catch Poilievre — or any of today’s other pseudo-populists — talking about how those union victories dramatically improved the ability of workers to afford a good life.

Indeed, today’s populists seem to know next to nothing about the financial struggles of working people, as Poilievre recently demonstrated.

Speaking at a rally in Sault Ste. Marie in July, the Conservative leader suggested that a local waitress would make $60,000 a year. In fact, the average waitress in Canada earns about $29,000 a year, making him off by about $30,000.

Maybe he doesn’t know that most waitresses aren’t unionized.

Originally published in the Toronto Star September 21, 2023.

Canada needs a public digital system not controlled by Big Tech

Canadians really need: more control over the digital universe that increasingly dominates our lives.What we need is a public digital infrastructure that is not beholden to private interests.

Canadians really need: more control over the digital universe that increasingly dominates our lives.What we need is a public digital infrastructure that is not beholden to private interests.

Like the Railroad Barons of the late 19th century, today’s Big Tech giants strut around, acting like they own the world (which they mostly do). Among their many imperious actions, they’ve taken to blocking Canadians’ access to our own news.

This is their high-handed response to Ottawa’s attempt to force them to pay Canadian publishers for news content, which Big Tech giants Google and Meta link to on their social media platforms.

Without some crackdown by Ottawa, Canadian publishers will have trouble staying in business, as Google and Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are managing to scoop up billions of advertising dollars that used to support the Canadian media.

So, it’s easy to side with the Canadian media business — even though it’s largely dominated by corporate chains. (Torstar, which owns the Toronto Star, also owns a half-dozen smaller Ontario newspapers. The largest Canadian newspaper chain by far — owning about half of Canada’s newspapers — is Postmedia, which has a strong right-wing bias and is owned by a U.S. hedge fund.)

But Ottawa’s intervention on behalf of Canadian media — important as it is — doesn’t even attempt to achieve what Canadians really need: more control over the digital universe that increasingly dominates our lives.

The core problem is that the technology that largely determines our access to the news — and just about everything else we do online — is controlled by a few Big Tech giants that are highly sophisticated in extracting money from us, governing how we search for information and, in the process, shaping public discourse and much else about the way we live.

What we need is a public digital infrastructure that is not beholden to private interests.

As James Muldoon, a political scientist at the University of Exeter, puts it: “I don’t think access to humanity’s collective knowledge should be controlled by a for-profit company.”

An open-source digital system — which would be publicly funded — could enable democratic governance, allowing independent media to flourish. And a public search engine — a publicly financed version of Google — could ensure us all access to the vast trove of human knowledge and information, without being routed in ways that limit our control and benefit private interests.

This may sound too wildly ambitious, but it’s really just an updated version of the wildly ambitious public takeover of the key, emerging market in the early 1900s — for electricity.

That public takeover happened after a popular movement — led by ordinary citizens and small business owners — championed the cause of “public power.”

They wanted to create a new public infrastructure for hydro power, wresting control from the mighty private interests — dubbed “Water Barons” — who had taken over the transformative new power source.

This pitted them against the likes of powerful Toronto business mogul Henry Pellatt, who headed a syndicate pushing for rights to develop Niagara Falls power. (Pellatt is best known for the massive mansion he built for himself, which he called “Casa Loma.”)

Shortly after his 1905 election, Conservative Premier James P. Whitney created Ontario Hydro, turning electricity into a public utility and declaring that water power “should not in the future be made the sport and prey of capitalists.”

This public takeover of electricity, ratified overwhelmingly by municipal voters, proved crucial to the province’s development. By ensuring low electricity rates, it enabled Ontario industry to compete with larger U.S. businesses.

Creating a public infrastructure for the digital world today could be just as transformative. But it would require the Trudeau government to be truly bold and innovative and actually challenge Big Tech’s power and control over our lives.

Sadly, as noted by Dru Oja Jay, publisher of the online media outlet The Breach, which champions a public digital infrastructure: “Decades of neo-liberalism have melted our collective imagination.”

Imagine if we had a political leader today willing to fight to keep the digital universe from being merely “the sport and prey of capitalists.”

Originally published in the Toronto Star September 7, 2023.