Canada: Thanks Stephen Harper - We Are Now Known as a "Thuggish Petro-State"

Anyone who doesn't believe that Stephen Harper is single-handedly flushing Canada's reputation down the toilet...

...need look no further than Monday's Guardian, a major national / international U.K. newspaper and online news publisher.

Those with their heads in the (tar) sand can say what they will.

This is what is being said about our beloved Canada. It is being said all over the world. It is being said in the city and in the country. It is being said at war and at peace. We are numbly, willingly, greedily, aiding and abetting this lunatic Stephen Harper in destroying the viability and the essence of what has been Canada for the past 100 years.


When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

Can we please stop this insanity?