Mark Steyn at The Corner;
As one of NR’s house Canadians, can I comment on this North American Union the maple hegemon is about to impose on the continent?Chances of an EU-style sovereignty pooling arrangement in North America? Zero per cent – whatever Tom Tancredo and the CFR say. In Europe, the EU controls trade policy, sales tax rates, immigration and a ton of other stuff including the approved curvature of bananas. In North America, the Province of Quebec sets its own tax rates, controls its own immigration policy and regulates a ton of other stuff including the color of margarine (it is illegal to sell butter-toned butter substitutes in Quebec – hence, no I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. It would have to be a wan off-white color and you’d very easily believe it’s not butter). Seven million Quebecers are not going to submerge themselves within 300 million anglophones – and, as Quebec determines Canada’s disposition in almost everything, an EU-style North America is not going to happen.
So relax, and enjoy Thanksgiving – unless you’re Canadian, in which case you enjoyed it back on Columbus Day. Which is one more reason there won’t be a North American Union. At any rate not until the Hispanic States of North Mexico and the Islamic Dominion of Canada decide to merge circa 2037.
I'd take this seriously. Just because we aren't being informed by our politicians and by the MSM doesn't mean that there's necessarily not some kind of top-level movement or even unannounced agreement afoot to move towards some kind of NA "union" of some sort, like the EU.
If the MSM isn't saying anything about this, then it would mean they're in on it. And I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
Why wouldn't the MSM tell us if there is a plan to join Canada, the US and Mexico in a sort of union? Because the MSM knows that if controversy were to be created by simply saying, "There's this movement afoot to joing these nations like the EU...", then there would be a massive grassroots movement against this international joining plan, if it's indeed real. And I wouldn't discount it, as, just think about the whole situation of the illegal Mexican aliens in the US which the White House refuses to do anything about... could this be part of the plan? I mean, to allow illegals to become Americans by the millions... is just insane and amounts to opening the floodgates to something of an even greater magnitude, something which the people might loathe to even countenance...
Indeed, the unthinkable does become reality, as we well know.
9/11 was unthinkable, but happened.
SSM was unthinkable, but happened just like that.
All kinds of unthinkable things do indeed happen.
Of course Mr. Steyn says it's unthinkable that North America would become some kind of union like the EU.
But, as we've seen, the EU became a reality, though once unthinkable! Imagine Germany joining Britain, France, etc. in a union such as there is today in the EU!
Why doesn't the MSM start asking the question of the national leaders of the NA continent? Indeed, why not?
If it's a rumor and nothing more, then let the national leaders swear that it's never going to happen, that there's no such concept being contemplated whatsoever.
Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne are drawing breaths from a brown paper bag as we speak.
Um, not to monopolize or anything, but y'all know, just a day ago the unthinkable happened again: the Conservative Prime Minister, out of Alberta, actually called Quebec a "nation". Imagine how many Canadians were going, "WTF?!" when they heard about it... though the PM did do the right thing and effectively removed it from the burner rather than let it simmer and splatter.
Now we're talking about the concept of a NA union... is it really all that unthinkable? Not that I'd favor such a thing; nope.
And why, pray tell, would anything patterned on the EU model of union be either desired or covetted?
sentinel - you forget, Harper was born & raised in Ontario.
You also forget - that the USA is not going to give up its sovereignty to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, (as is the EU).
And Mexico is not going to give up its huge black market economy and its 'illegals in the USA sending money back home' economy. After all, that externalization of the Mexican economy means that Mexico doesn't have to provide housing, schooling, a city infrastructure for all those millions living illegally in the USA, not paying taxes, but sending lots of money back home to Mexico.
And, as Steyn points out, Quebec in a North American Union would get 'the finger'. It wouldn't be catered to, grovelled to, and have its welfare state lifestyle supported. Not a whit.
So- it won't happen.
What will happen, is more decentralization. The old era of 'Two Canada's' made up of Ontario and Quebec is finished. That ended in the 1950s - when the populations of both were equal, about 4 million each, and the West was negligible.
Then, things began to change. Quebec moved into an identity crisis, and chose The Past (je me souviens) rather than The Future. Trudeau's Constitution and Charter set Quebec up as the lynchpin, but, quite disastrously so, since its refusal to modernize and move out of unionization, out of a top-down governance and out of centralist Make-Work industries has morphed into an enormous provincial debt. That has meant that Quebec's economy has plummeted and it is entirely dependent on the federal gov't.
And the West has transformed; it's now the hub of the Canadian economy and demographic growth. It's no longer 'Two Canada's of Ontario and Quebec'. It's going to move into a decentralized federation, with more power, and responsibility going to each region. Can Quebec survive or will it always be on life-support? If it refuses to modernize and move out of being a Kept Province (sorry, a Kept Nation) - it's in trouble.
And I don't think Harper's move yesterday was unthinkable. We ourselves set it up - by our Constitution and our Charter, which privileges Quebec in the House, in our gov't (bilingualism) and gives it is own federal party (the Bloc). It isn't unthinkable; it was inevitable - all set up in those three systems.
Yes, Bear, and Harper has Maritime roots as well. But now he's an Alberta boy, clearly, if you know much about him.
Myself, I don't care for the concept of a NA "union". Why on earth would we want to have to consult with others of such different interests on so many matters to reach a consensus when we can decide for ourselves on things as we're our own sovereign nation? I see no net benefit from such a union. We already have this confederation... and it's unwieldy enough without having to complicate it any bloody further!
Excellent points, ET. I hope you're right that it (NA union) won't happen.
Tom Tancredo is todays Ross Perot.
The Clintons could not get into the White House in '92 without Perot and they very likely will not win the WH back in 08 without a Tancredo/Buchanan type who can split the vote on the right.
So here we go folks. The MSM will trumpet him high and low. And that double agent Pat Buchanan will also probably stab his fellow conservatives in the back again if they do not wake up to this tactic and flank it. The Tancredo/Buchanan types are protectionist against Canada too.
In reality a NA Union is not constitutionally in the cards so Steyn is exactly right. This issue is like global warming. Largely based on lots of lefties using scare tactics that cherry pick the issues.
"And why, pray tell, would anything patterned on the EU model of union be either desired or covetted?"
It paves the way for Londonistan, Ontario and the Islamic Dominion Caliphate. All we need is the Olympic Games and we're all set.
I read your book.
Steyn is right, I think, about the impossibility of Canada (as it is)joining the US.
He may, however, not be so 100% sure about a part of a fractured Canada joining the US...
More and more and more Bush-derangement syndrome at work. It gets wilder all the time. For the U.S. to admit Canada would probably require a constitutional amendment. Unlike our little gewgaw of a constitution, the US one is really really hard to amend.
Of course what the 31+50 states of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos and the Islamic Republic of Kanukistan might wish to do in 2027 is a question which is almost beyond speculation.
From where I sit as a Canadian living in the UK, I have a front-row seat on the EU follies.
I think Canada, the US and Mexico have been a whole lot smarter than the Europeans on this one; we built ourselves a viable free trade association that is going along gang-busters.
Meanwhile, our three countries are free to carry on with their own particular national eccentricities and dotty idiosyncracies.
But no - not the Eurocrats!
A free trade union would have been a fine idea. But it would never be enough for the Eurostatist mindset. Nope, they've got to impose a cumbersome Euromeddling political agenda on the EU as well.
It'll all end in tears.
Persons advocating a "North American Union" should be shot outright, allowing the rest of us to get on to the enjoyable business of tariff-free capitalism from Whitehorse to Cozumel.
I think ET has it right, mostly, but Mad Mike's post is very curious.
Canada's been a poorly led nation state for some time with Trudeau and his group setting in motion a kind of rot the EU has come to rue.
Free Trade and NAFTA restructured the Canadian economy permanently and cleaved the countries in day to practical ways that politicians seem not to understand. That goes for Congressman more than MPs as the latter are much more powerful than the nobodies in downtown Ottawa.
Why wouldn't a province like Alberta want to join the US? A "US Senator for Alberta would have more political power than a Premier could ever dream.
The NA customs union will occur in the not to distant future and a majority [CPC] federal government would have no problem ratifying.
I've allways wondered where the seed wording for the EU charter came from. It's convoluted, backbighting, infinetly overregulating and serves only for the continuation of a bureacratic ruling class. Wait!! They must of got copies of the Alaska/(insert your Canadaian area of preference) etc. fishing and hunting regulations
"You also forget - that the USA is not going to give up its sovereignty to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, (as is the EU)."
Exactly. Canada will give up its sovereignty. The US will maintain its sovereignty.
I think that under the US constitution it is Canada that would have to petition to join the USA. I believe Texas was the only state that was a actually a country first. And IIRC it was Texas that had to vote to join in. Puerto Rico recently voted to stay out. Many PRs pay less tax as a territory now then they would if they became a state. Statehood is very much about representative taxation (and lots of it /s) and naturally it is Alberta that likes the idea much better than Quebec (or Ottawa) does. Which IMHO is why Quebec and the ROC may one day regret okaying any provincial opt out voting. It might be Alberta that could win a sucession vote some day. The civil war in the USA pretty much settled that issue for most (not all) Americans. Most Americans now accept that there is no quitting the USA once a state has opted in.
Mordecai Richler on Canada:
“Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and the bush on the other.”
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/sept01/mordecai.htm
More Mark Steyn on Mordecai Richler from the same New Criterion article:
The irony in all this is that, in the end, Mordecai was one of the few writers in the world who can claim to have saved his country. In the Nineties, irritated by Quebec separatism, he started writing about its oppressive triviality: arriving outside a pub in Montreal one day, he found an agent of the Office de la Langue Française photographing the menu blackboard and measuring the inscription “Today’s Special: Ploughman’s Lunch.” Under Quebec law, signs can only use English words if they’re half the size or less of the accompanying French words. An essay for The New Yorker, later expanded into a book Oh, Canada! Oh, Quebec!, caused particular distress to the Parti Québecois, who never forgave Richler for, as they saw it, making them a laughingstock in the outside world.
In fact, the outside world never gave Quebec a thought. No doubt in Manhattan there were those who marveled, “Can you believe it? There’s a long piece in The New Yorker this week that’s actually readable!” Then they promptly forgot about Quebec. Back home, though, where Anglophones had reacted to separatists either by enduring their humiliations (the so-called “lamb lobby”) or by fleeing to Toronto, Richler’s essay legitimized scorn, while the PQ’s outraged reaction to the puncturing of their prestige only emphasized the stunted and pitiful state of the nationalist movement. In the 1995 referendum on secession, the final result was separatists 49.5 percent, federalists 50.5 percent. It’s not too fanciful to assert Richler made just enough difference to save the day. I happen to disagree with him on separatism, since on balance I find smug English Canada the more insufferable, but even so Quebec boasts the world’s dumbest secessionist movement, forever trying to explain to its citizens why we need to set up our own country exactly the same as the one we’ll be leaving. But there’s no doubt Richler the “controversialist,” the “misanthrope,” the “curmudgeon” did more for Canada than all the sunny maple-draped multiculti CanLit boosters put together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joKgNBRXdP4&mode=related&search=
Canadian Senate session caught on You Tube