Canada, home of rational people, a salad bowl of cultures, national healthcare, and state paid education is slipping to the right on a film of oil

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the right-wing  leader from Alberta and an American style evangelical Christian, is using Canada’s new found oil wealth to rejigger America’s gentle neighbor.  with a power base in Alberta, ground zero of Canada’s oil boom.  Emulating Margaret Thatcher’s use of  largess from the North Sea oil, Harper  has increased defense spending by nearly $1 billion/year and committed $2 billion to prison expansion with a “tough on crime” policy to deal with Canada’s already  crime rate. Of course, after surviving the debacle of 108 on the basis of its traditional fiscally conservative policies , Canada has now amassed an American style supersized  federal debt of $600 billion .  Given the relative populations of the two countries, this makes Canada’s debt per citizen now close to that facing Americans!

Canada’s famous devotion to the environment is being dismantled by Mr. Harper.  Canada now gets 1/4 of its export revenue from the coal sands of his native province., Alberta.  In pursuit of this slippery stuff, Harper has eviscerated conservationists, run rough shod over the rights of indigenous people, killed federal funding for environmental science,and treated any one daring to oppose oil wealth as unpatriotic radicals. In short, the Prime minister form Alberta is thumping his bible to promote a new national wealth based on untapped riches from Canada’s wilds.

Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s.  How America’s friendly northern neighbor became a rogue, reckless petrostate.

Mr. Harper leads his country men (and women) to believe that their children will live off of this wealth even after the slippery gunk is sold and burned elsewhere … nearly three-quarters of Canadians support oil sands development in a recent poll. Of course, the largesse, like that of Mrs. Thatchers gifts from the North Sea, will run out .. leaving his country a much poorer place … not only having run out of the greasy income but with monstrous environmental debts to pay.   Harpers’ promise of  a divine gift seems very American. If both were not fundamentalist Christians, it would nto be hard to see Mr. Harper as a transsexual version fo Sarah Palin

Based on: Oh, Canada