The unrecoverable dispersal of natural resources wealth into the pockets of a few super rich economic war lords, Dick Cheney, Warren Buffet, The owners of Esso etc., is no longer tolerable. We as a country have been bought and sold by international oil interests. This Federal Budget is a virtual confession of this situation.
Manufacturing is part of a National Culture. Social services are part of a nation building culture, a quality of life in a particular place. A national broadcaster is a national cultural institution. Environmental regulation is part of a national concern about quality of life in a particular area of the Earth. Canada is seen and written into a narrative of our territory adjacent to the US as a resource base, a rich hinterland of resources, principally oil and gas, and nothing else here matters. Why should oil interests care about our quality of life?
“Things” can be made in China and the US and elsewhere. Why bother with them here? Why bother with a middle class here? Why should Oil fund health insurance? Why do they need to fund pensions? The Oil interests want wage slaves to get the resource out of the ground and sent on its way in pipelines. Wage slaves should work hard for a short time and then die and be replaced by other wage slaves. And the least supportable of all groups claiming rights are aboriginals who failed to all die and disappear under the original colonial plan.
Learn this story. Tell it at every opportunity. This counter narrative is our only real defence. Get this story out there. Forward this to every person, party, union, interest group, workplace, family, email list that you can imagine or find.
I ask for not a penny. In fact I resent their disappearance as being a gesture of arrogance about how pennies don’t matter any more. Wrong.
The only opposition is a different story that makes sense and gives force to our actual experience.
