The positives and negatives of US annexation

Or, how Canada's elites sold out Canada's sovereignty over four decades of neoliberal economic policies.

As the United States playfully throws around annexation (which many Canadians receive as a full-blown statement of war), many people are realizing that the people in power — our bosses, our leaders, CEOs, decisionmakers, politicians, whatever — don’t actually give a fuck about Canada’s sovereignty.

Canadians got a glimpse of this this past weekend when the country’s only national radio call-in show, Cross Country Checkup, was lambasted online for co-producing a thought experiment with NPR: what would being the 51st state mean to you? It’s a silly question if you have the mental capacity of a critical adult, but it’s a compelling question if you don’t. Or, if you exist in the service of maintaining a Canada that the elites want maintained.

That’s where Ian Hanomansing found himself on Sunday, asking Goldilocks questions about whether or not Trump’s porridge might be too hot and too cold, or is Trudeau’s just right (but not perfect!) The highlight of the two hours of absolute shit radio (and I mean *total garbage* — everything you learn about gathering good sound in first year radio class has seemingly been thrown out the window), was Hanomansing interviewing Kevin O’Leary and having to eat three plates of shit in the process. The interview was so humiliating and degrading for Hanomansing, you’d think that management had it in for him, that is, if you didn’t hear how much he seemingly enjoyed everything else. Maybe he was just excited to finally be piped into the bedrooms of Maine and Colorado and if that comes along with eating some shit, so be it.

The episode exposed that what is a mere thought experiment for the CBC is a matter of life and death for tens of thousands of Canadians. In the minds of the CBC critics, it makes no more sense for us to imagine ourselves as part of the US as it does to set the entire country on fire, and fair enough.

But CBC didn’t do this by accident. CBC’s Editor Brodie Fenlon wrote a post-mortem that showed that even after the hellstorm they received from listeners, he still does not get it. Because he is paid to not get it. CBC is parroting the thinking, the logic, the rationale of Canada’s elites; a confrontation between average people who believe that Canada is a country that is real and sovereign, and the elites who know that Canada is a country that is fake and dependent. People really haven’t realized that their country was sold out from under them decades ago.

(For more on that, you can read my latest book, The Social Safety Net, and even more, Corporate Control which is out in May)

There is a chasm between how the vast majority of Canadians view Canada’s sovereignty and how the 1% and their mouthpieces view Canadian sovereignty. It’s in this chasm that many Canadians are surprised to find themselves, discovering that maybe, their elites are not as committed to Canada being an independent nation as they are.

I could get cynical about it and ask: how did you miss this? How did you miss this when they were selling our manufacturing out for free trade, or defunding our healthcare and creatively selling off parts to hedge funds? When they destroyed our media and sold it off for parts or when they refused to fund research and development so that Canada sits at the bottom of the OECD — how did you miss it? When they defund culture and sport, when they refuse to expand public access to the Internet. When they commodified our housing and allowed people to gamble off of it, did you think — oh yes, these are all the hallmarks of a sovereign nation doing sovereign things for its sovereign people?

I don’t mean you. You who are reading this surely knew about all of this and thought … this is very bad. But the masses. The you that are the faces in the crowd that together form Canada. You must have missed that we haven’t been sovereign for decades. That our sovereignty has always been fragile but oh god has it never been as damaged as it is right now. But it was easy to miss. We’ve been fed a deep and long set of lies for decades, and have been told to trust our leadership’s savvy economic and political decisions.

The elites though, they know that Canadian sovereignty is an illusion. They’re the multiple passport holders. The Panama Papers. The Costa Rica homeowners. The MPs and CEOs and executive boards who do their jobs from a zip code. They know it and they love it.

It’s easy to make fun of Kevin O’Leary (and we should make fun of Kevin O’Leary) but when he told Cross Country Checkup (one of three Canadian guests, all who owe their notoriety in Canada to the CBC), that it’s time for a common continental currency, to eliminate even more trade barriers between our economies, you know, shit like taxes, you have to accept that he is being consistent with the logic of our status quo. Because his idiocy is absolutely consistent with the direction of our current economic order. Horrified to hear it? The elites have been there for years. Whether they support closer integration or they support things the way they are now, they do not give a fuck about Canadians or Canada and we can see that in their deeds.

Capitalism and nationalism have been bedfellows for a century but they are not natural bedfellows. As global alliances unravel and the global economy starts bending in response to trade restrictions, Canada is in for a rocky ride. That’s what happens when your country has been tied to a global superpower. Things are going to get weird as that superpower collapses but try not to act surprised when you discover that Canada has already been sold off for parts, and act accordingly.