New Judas Rising North of America

It hurts when those one expects to behave badly do so, but it really, really hurts when those who have always been friends turn to become bad actors.

According to Monbiot, this is exactly what the government of Canada has done to the people of Canada and to the world:

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

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In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks.

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It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

(Monbiot, see also Guardian UK). The people around the world who have considered Canada to be one of the beacons, one of the sources of environmental sanity, one of the places to always be a solid hope for the future of humanity, now fear that Canada has fallen into the abyss of human error.