You could call Mel Hurtig, grey eminence behind The Canadian Encyclopedia, a longstanding Canadian institution. That might make him sound like a heritage building with a structural upgrade, but the respected 79-year-old author and former publisher is still going strong. Last Saturday, he gave an animated speech at an event organized by local group Occupy Ideas.
After a few anecdotes about bear encounters on Banff golf courses, the former Alberta resident launched into a tirade against the tar sands (Thanks to industry propaganda its now called the oil sands). He followed with troubling factoids about the Enbridge Northern Gateway project: supertankers longer than the Empire State building carrying five to six times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, the proposed doubling of Kinder Morgans pipeline volume into Vancouver, etc.
I suggest what you should do is go occupy Christy Clarks office and tell her unless she comes out strongly against oil tankers coming down the west coast of British Columbia youre going to continue to occupy no matter how many people are arrested The same thing with Mr. Dix, he has been very equivocal, has not been clear about where the NDP stands on this issue.
You cant accuse the man of being a shrinking violet, but you could certainly call him a Canadian nationalist. Since Brian Mulroney abolished the investment review agency, how many Canadian companies have been taken over by foreigners? he asked his audience. How many have been blocked? A few loud voices supplied the correct answers: 14,000 and two, respectively.
How can we take back Canada when every single day we continue to sell off the ownership and control of our country? Its a good question. Now that Harpers agenda is no longer hidden, but in the wide open, the author says hes never been more pessimistic about the future of our country. The only hope he sees is for Canadians to become politically active in a big way, and soon.
We are bloody lucky to live in this country, with our abundance of fresh water, incredible scenery, incredible amount of natural resources and people from many parts of the world, Hurtig insists. Yet we surrender this natural capital to others, by electing a series of sock puppets for transnational interests.
The former publisher is incensed by the recent acquisition of McClelland and Stewart by the U.S.-German giant, Bertelsmann AG. He says he phoned the literary editor at the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Sun, who told him she had never heard of the biggest publishing company in Canada, even though M&S had launched the careers of Leonard Cohen, Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Michael Ondaatje, and had published Hurtigs last two books.
The author has been hammering on the issue of national sovereignty for years, starting with his 1991 book The Betrayal of Canada, and his last from 2008, The Truth about Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing, and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country. The latter book drew on Statistics Canada figures to highlight Canadas slide into Third World level indices for health care, education, research and development, and other areas of social spending.
When I interviewed Hurtig in a downtown Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»coffee shop back in 2008, he told me he was astounded that Canadian editorialists and business writers constantly parrot information from industry sources and right-wing think tanks that contradict Stats Cans own figuresnumbers that seem as alien to our pundits as String Theory.
He told me about documents that were leaked to him concerning a secret meeting of high-powered Canadians and U.S. officials in Banff on September 2006. He faxed every major newspaper about the particulars of this gathering, involving the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership, yet did not receive a single response.
In those meetings were people like former American secretaries of state, people like Peter Lougheed, the former premier of Alberta, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz, former U.S. secretary of defense [James] Schlesinger, etc. etc. and big business from Canada and the United States. And the media treated this as a nonexistent story. And that is bizarre. Its unconscionable that the media wouldnt report this information when it was handed to them.
That mysterious meeting was six years ago. Were a long way down the undemocratic road our leaders have paved for us.
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