Trade deal launches new era in US / Canadian relations

So if I've got this right, we challenge the Americans for 4 years over softwood lumber trade and win repeatedly before NAFTA and international trade panels - NAFTA panels on which 3 of 5 of the panelists are Americans - we pay $5 billion in tariffs that were deemed to have been illegally collected, and we lose hundreds of jobs in the interim. Now in only 80 short days Stephen Harper and his team reaches a settlement. Poof!! We get fixed quotas, we agree to tax our own producers, we get only 80% of the illegal tariffs back, we pay the US lumber companies and their lobbists' legal fees, we agree to open ourselves to another challenge in 7 years, and if prices in the US go down we agree to keep our's high. No wonder Stephen is beaming with pride. We just didn't understand how Brian Mulroney meant free trade to work.

School's out and so is parliament . . . so what are the leaders doing for the summer?

I decided to check out the web and see what our legislative leaders are up to . . .


Jack and Olivia are busy marketing Jack's new line of muscle shirts for skinny, white guys . . .


Stephen's busy in Ontario preaching the Conservative message to anyone who will listen . . .


and promoting his vision of two - tier health care . . . "everything feels fine to me" . . .


BQ leader Gilles Duceppe is taking the summer to tour English Canada and promote his separatist agenda there . . .


while in Muskoka, Paul is just hanging out with the beautiful people confident of four more years in power . . .

But what of the electorate! What do they think of what's ahead . . .

Former Prime Minister, Jean Chretien's recent testimony at the Gomery Inquiry had an all too familiar ring . . .

I welcome this kind of examination because people have go to know whether or not their prime minister is a crook. Well I'm not a crook.

"We don't get it!" 

they sure don't

"We don't get it!"

No truer words have been spoken by an American politician than this comment by US ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci in response to Paul Martin's announcement that we wouldn't be a part of their missile defence system. That Canada and Canadians aren't buying into the program shouldn't come as a surprise. There's an agenda at play here that's more than defending North America against "rogue nations".

With the United State's economic dominance declining and emerging nations like China and India set to become new major world players, it's more likely that the real objective is American military dominance of space and the ability to have a Big Brother view of the whole globe.

You don't get it? Well with unilateral invasion of sovereign countries, state supported torture, imprisonment without trial, a drift towards fundamentalism, and failure to support international criminal justice, women's health and global warming initiatives by the international community, there's alot that you don't get.

Paul's been away on holidays directing Canada's disaster response from Morocco. "Do you think I should have come home earlier?", he ponders. 

Rapid response . . . Canadian style

hello world . . . well all is abuzz with tsunami news and the response both public and private . . . here in Canada, we have a "rapid response" unit ready to help out in situations just like this. . .DART . . . the Disaster Assistance Relief Team . . . engineers, field hospital and water purification equipment capable of producing tens of thousands of litres of clean water daily . . . except . . . in Canada it takes a 2 week political discussion to decide whether to send it . . . then when the decision is finally made we've got to find some way to get it there . . . in Canada you see we have no transport planes . . . when we do finally get the planes, it takes another week to transport it and sent up . . . then we're ready . . . in my opinion, our government's response in deploying the DART has been a national embarrassment . . . millions of Canadians were able to look at photos and video on the net and see the need . . . within the first few days, the UN identifed the need for clean water as the number one disaster response priority . . . but the Canadian government wasn't convinced . . . they needed to send their own observers to determine for themselves whether there was a need . . . there was . . .

. . . while the government had hundreds of millions of dollars to squander on Adscam and currently sits on a multi billion dollar budget surplus they quibbled over who would pay to send the team . . . if this is the best we can do then maybe we should scrap DART and give our disaster relief dollars to others who have the physical resources to move in a more timely manner . . . of course that's just one person's opinion . . .