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It's a weird feeling watching a movie you'd swear was made for you.

As I was watching Toronto-based documentarian Albert Nerenberg's latest offering Escape to Canada, the one theme that kept hitting me over the head was that one country in North America is a place where freedom is rising and another is a place where it is being frittered away.

Guess which country is which?

Nerenberg, who previously gave the human race its first comprehensive look at human stupidity with the documentary of the same name (Stupidity, get it?), portrays a Canada that a progressive American would love ­ pot, same-sex marriage, peace, sex and good beer. (Okay, I added the beer part).

This Canada is most assuredly not, as hinted in the first few minutes of the film, boring, even though in the film, Stephen Harper gets tagged with the sobriquet "The Baron of Boring."

Yes, it does seem the country American liberals (the real small-l ones) dream of.

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[ 04 March 2006: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

1. Tommy Chong is from British Columbia Canada. I believe he's part-Indian, and I know that he's part-Chinese because that was the part that explained the "Chong" part. He met "Cheech" Marin when Marin moved to B.C. to flee the draft for the Vietnam War.

2. I remember a newspaper story where I guy from Southern Alberta recalled the differences between the restaurants in a fast-food chain on both sides of the border. On the Canadian side, it was just another restaurant in the chain, but in the US, these northern Wyoming (?), Montana(?) outlets were decorated with all sorts of "wilderness" and "outdoor" paraphenalia, because they were up in the remote north, close to the frontier.

3. The tragedy is that the USA used to be the freer country and it's been lost. Canadian politics had been marred by a stuffy British conservatism, and in Quebec, this authoritarian, hierarchical political culture had the even more authoritarian, hierarchical influence of the Catholic Church stamped upon it. Most of our "anti-Americanism" in this earlier period was wailing about US materialism (this was sheer hypocrisy), "mobocracy" (elite condemnation of US democracy), and immorality (Hollywood and popular fiction as opposed to stuffy and boring British snobbery).

4. I really think that it is the intrusion into our essentially liberal CAPITALIST political culture of the issues of Quebec Nationalism, and the "semi-mutally-reinforcing" power of trade-union and NDP social democracy, that has saved Canada from the utter debasement of politics into the "tax cuts, 'free markets,' massive inequality, and knuckle-dragging 'populism' for the dispossessed" that is the result of the complete and total domination of capitalism on US democracy.

Still, we can lose things very quickly here. Both Preston Manning and Stephen Harper have been recorded telling their backers that they have long-term plans for Canada, and that they'll start off small and move us gradually.

I just saw former Haitian Lavalas politician, Patrick Elie last night. He said that he'd been in Canada in the 1960s, and off and on until 1980. He said back then we had a climate of social justice. Today, he says politics and political-culture seem to be obsessesed with the almighty dollar.

When politics is dominated by the rich (inevitable under capitalims) politics will be about wringing the population for its cash, crony-capitalism and naked corruption, and ratcheting up the superstitions, racism, and intolerance towards the marginalized so that the victims of your con-game turn their anger against targets other than the causes of their suffering.

[ 04 March 2006: Message edited by: thwap ]

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Of course it's not all bliss in the land of the Maple Leaf.

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Yet within our communities we find a majority of citizens that want certain socialistic and liberalistic ideals and freedoms promoted as well. The problem is they really have no relevant voice in the decision making process of what our governments invest in or promote.

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I remember a newspaper story where I guy from Southern Alberta recalled the differences between the restaurants in a fast-food chain on both sides of the border. On the Canadian side, it was just another restaurant in the chain, but in the US, these northern Wyoming (?), Montana(?) outlets were decorated with all sorts of "wilderness" and "outdoor" paraphenalia, because they were up in the remote north, close to the frontier.

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