The Wet'suwet'en Raids and Canada's Garbage Culture

Right off the top of my head I believe that some elected members of the Wet'suwet'en people ("Indian Act chiefs") gave their approval for the bitumen pipeline to go through their lands but that other members of that community do not recognize their authority and do not agree to having the pipeline.

It takes a particular amount of shamelessness for any Canadian politician to send the RCMP in to enforce a court order (of dubious legality) against First Nations protesters. This is the same RCMP who only recently were discovered to have utilized the presence of lethal snipers AT THE START of a movement against a previous, peaceful road blockade. [This is the same RCMP that is rife with sexual harassment and institutional injustice against women employees btw.]

This is the police force of a legal system that disproportionately arrests and incarcerates First Nations people. This is a police force that has sexually abused First Nations women. This is a society that reneges on its Treaty commitments. This is a society that ignores a First Nations suicide epidemic. This is a society that cheats First Nations peoples for decades and then ignores court orders to pay what it owes for all those decades of cheating.

Sending in armed goons against the Wet'suwet'en People again, and imposing a media blackout on this action, does a lot of damage to the Trudeau government's mewling about "reconciliation." Regardless about what anyone can say about the supposed internal conflict between the Wet'suwet'en themselves, this police action simply looks bad.

But to abuse these First Nations peoples for the sake of a bitumen pipeline in the age of global warming? Even worse! Why disgrace yourself simply to convey dirty tar to the Pacific Coast? Even disregarding the (likely and horrendous) chance of an accident that will devastate the local eco-system, the burning of this tar will continue to add to the planetary climate catastrophe that is already upon us.

What sort of shit-head culture engages in such loathsome, stupid behaviour?

Well, Canada's, obviously. Because as a people we've decided that top two political choices of around half of us are the shit-head Liberals or the even more rancid, stinking shit-head Conservatives. Coming in Third Place is the shit-head NDP that (as an institution) attempts to pander to the supporters of the other two parties by replicating as much of their stupid policies as its own membership can stomach. Then we have the Greens and the BQ who (for this blog post) I'll relegate to merely affecting which of the two major parties can govern.

It is a garbage culture. And from where I'm sitting it's inexcusable. I simply cannot fathom the depths of human failure that are needed to vote "conservative." And I mention this because the material fact of having such a large proportion of the electorate that votes for a "conservative" party answers the question about how we're capable of doing something so simultaneously scuzzy and stupid as to abuse the Wet'suwet'en in order to put a pipeline through their lands.

We have a country where the federal Liberals voice some mild concerns about Saudi Arabia's barbaric misogyny and when this brings down a diplomatic shit-storm on us we meekly acquiesce. One of the reasons we do so is so that we can continue to sell weapons to this regime, even though it is implementing a genocide of World War II proportions in the country of Yemen. And while the federal Liberals are doing that, our scum-bag Conservative Party of Canada is condemning them for having upset the murderous, fanatical, corrupt, disgusting House of Saud in the first place.

All of us, across the political spectrum, across social-economic classes, ethnic and gender identities, ... this collective of "Canadians" living in "Canada" ... are molded such that we can, from time-to-time, vote for absolute intellectual, moral, and public policy garbage as Jason Kenney, Doug Ford, or stephen harper.

While even I'm surprised at the astonishingly insane antics of Jason Kenney in Alberta, I was expecting a lurch towards austerity for the public and slavish service to the oil sector and "business" in general. Who would have thought otherwise? The Alberta right-wing were exposed as pathetic failures in 2015. Right-wing policies have failed the people of Alberta. Yet they voted for this corrupt, deluded closet-case and his gang of idiots again. Garbage culture.

Ontario's last election resulted in a majority government for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives under the obnoxious buffoon Doug Ford. Ford campaigned on a platform of thin air with a smattering of obvious lies. And enough voters were absolute idiots and/or ignoramuses that they voted for him to govern the province. And now, ... well it's a total shit-show. All sadly predictable. Garbage culture.

We are, all of us, complicit in the perpetuation of this vile nonsense.