Elections for the 343 members of the federal parliament of Canada were held last night. I am a Canadian and I don't give a damn who won and who lost. Here is why.
Canada poses as a democracy, but an event in its previous parliament, which occurred on 22 September 2022, irreparably exposed this imposture. On the day in question, the President of Ukraine visited Canada and addressed its parliament. In a pathetic attempt to enrich this historic occasion, the Speaker of the House of Commons introduced to the assembly an elderly former soldier of Ukrainian descent who was seated in the gallery. The man in question was one Jaroslav Hunka, formerly a member of the 14th Waffen SS Galician Division which was formed by the Nazis in 1943, comprised almost entirely of Ukrainians, and notorious for its slaughter of Poles and Jews. Hunka was presented to the assembly as a veteran of the Second World War "who fought against the Russians." To Canada's ineffable disgrace, every member of its parliament stood up and applauded a man whom they had just been told had fought against our ally and on the side of our formerly loathed enemy in the most damaging military conflict in history.
In the darkness exuding from this event, it would be hard for even the most ideologically adroit of Canadians to squirm out of the following binary: every member of that particular parliament is either so ignorant of Canadian history so as not to deserve election to the local town council or else so hypocritical as to be better suited to assignment in a federal prison than to the occupation of a seat in the federal parliament. And although Canadian media awkwardly minimized domestic attention to this scandal, people outside of the country know and recall.
Canada's descent into international ignominy began in 2004 when it hosted the conspiracy to destroy democracy in Haiti. The co-conspirators were France and the US, the two slave states who never recovered from the insult to white supremacy delivered by the impish black slaves of Haiti when they overthrew the French imperialists in the late 1790s and left the US scrambling to ensure that such an indignity would never befall any other slave-holding state in the Americas. By 2004, however, Haitians had managed to elect a liberation theology priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide who enjoyed wide popularity. Though the US had managed to severely constrict Aristide's powers as a condition for reversing an earlier coup, Aristide was still able to determine minimum wages in his country. In February of 2003, he was able to double this wage from 35 gourd to 70 gourds (($1.75US) per day. For Canadian textile companies feasting on the immiseration of Haiti's working class, this effrontery by a nation of ex-slaves was insupportable. They successfully urged the Canadian government to join the French and US in driving Aristide permanently out of power. When the mission was accomplished on 29 February of 2004, Canada's Prime Minister Martin boasted that the helicopters that guaranteed the expeditious extraction of Aristide from Haiti to the Central African Republic were Canadian.
Later in the year 2004, the vote count in the Presidential elections in Ukraine indicated that the victor was a candidate named Victor Yanukovych, considered by Western nations to be insufficiently Russophobic. Having so egregiously exhibited its commitment to democracy in the restoration of elite dictatorship in Haiti, Canada was entrusted by other anti-democratic Western democracies with the lead role in what was termed the 'restoration of democracy' in Ukraine. The Canadian Embassy was the central organizer of exit polls which became the basis for the invalidation of the initial vote; Canadian election observers far outnumbered monitors from other countries in the re-run that succeeded and resulted in the election of the pro-Western candidate. These observers were so ostentatiously partisan as to move Matthew Fisher to observe in the National Post “The journalists felt these people were so over-the-top in celebrating Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution and so loud in condemning the voting process, they were an embarrassment to Canada.”
Canada's reputation as a two-faced wannabe champion of democracy was, however, still at an inchoate stage at this point. It would come to fruition in 2014, again in Ukraine. The Ukraine presidential candidate who had initially 'won' the 2004 election and then been sidelined by the intervention of Canada and other nations, Victor Yanukovych, sought election again in 2010. This election was subject to careful international monitoring monitored and this tie Yanukovich's victory was not disputed. He remained in power until 2014 when he was ousted through a violent coup dubbed by Western sentimentalists the "Revolution of Dignity." The major events of the coup, including the mass shootings by neo-Nazi opponents which were blamed on the government, occurred on Maidan Square in Kiev. On one notorious occasion a particularly obnoxious neo-Nazi group calling itself C14 stormed city hall and were then chased away by police. Desperate for refuge, they sought the Canadian Embassy, located near Maidan. A single passport flashed at the Embassy was enough to secure access to the facility for the entire group, followed by several days of shelter and affirmation. When the disgrace crept into public awareness, officials were reduced to the lame assurance that the terrorists had not damaged the premises. One Canadian, though, dared to face reality: Bob Fowler, former diplomat and policy advisor to three Canadian PMs, pronounced the new normal: "We're not the considered, intelligent players that we used to be,. We have been all mouth and no brain."
It was not always so. Canada used to employ both mouth and brain in dealing with issues of international political importance — sometimes simultaneous. A telling indicator of that status Canada once enjoyed was its election to membership on the United Nations Security Council in every one of the first six decades of the existence of the organization. To the puzzlement of those who are not aware of the events I have just related, Canada was snubbed in 2010 when, following the six decades rotation, it would have been Canada's turn to again serve. The same indignity befell us in 2020, when it was again Canada's turn. To those who see Canada as a stalwart defender of the interests of impoverished peoples such as the Haitians and to those who think that Canada's support of democracy in Ukraine prevails over its alignment with Ukrainian Nazis, this comedown is incomprehensible. In fact, it merely shows that you reap what you sow.
Most Canadians on this day after the federal election are tremendously excited about the fact the the Liberal Party won substantially more seats than the Conservative Party and that the New Democratic Party won hardly any at all. But it was an adolescent campaign in which there was more talk about Donald Trump than about any policy initiatives stuttered out by Canada's political misleaders. Given Canada's role in undermining and even destroying democracy in other countries, what could be less surprising?