Much-obliged for the full post, friend! :-)
Posted on 02/14/2005 9:12:14 AM PST by quidnunc
I always love the bit on the big international news story where they try to find the Canadian angle. A couple of months back, every time I switched on The National, there seemed to be no news at all and Peter Mansbridge was in the middle of some 133-part series of reports on “Canadians making a difference in the world,” which at least three nights a week seemed to be an “encore presentation” of the same worthy soft-focus featurette about some guy helping with an irrigation project in Sudan.
Once upon a time, it didn’t seem such an effort to find “Canadians making a difference in the world” — D-Day, say, or even the early years of Pearsonian peacekeeping. But it’s a stretch nowadays. In the maple-free zone of the Afghan campaign in fall 2001, several desperate media outlets were driven to rhapsodizing over my old chum from Fleet Street days, Alex Renton, spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam — or to give him his full honorific, as the Sun chain’s Greg Weston liked to put it, “the Toronto-born spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam.” The Toronto-born Alex spent his formative years at Eton — not Eton, Ontario, the agreeable municipality a scenic one-day drive from Sault Ste. Marie, but Eton College, the swanky boys’ school for Brit toffs. His father is Lord Renton, a cabinet minister under Mrs. Thatcher. I’m all for celebrating the rich diversity of the Canadian mosaic, but we haven’t had a Canuck like this since Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, checked out of Rideau Hall. Still, any oasis in a desert. …
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at westernstandard.ca ...
Mark Steyn is the best.
Only you would unnecessarily excerpt from a subscription site.
The Power behind the thrones
Monday, 14 February 2005
Mark Steyn
I always love the bit on the big international news story where they try to find the Canadian angle. A couple of months back, every time I switched on The National, there seemed to be no news at all and Peter Mansbridge was in the middle of some 133-part series of reports on “Canadians making a difference in the world,” which at least three nights a week seemed to be an “encore presentation” of the same worthy soft-focus featurette about some guy helping with an irrigation project in Sudan.
Once upon a time, it didn’t seem such an effort to find “Canadians making a difference in the world”--D-Day, say, or even the early years of Pearsonian peacekeeping. But it’s a stretch nowadays. In the maple-free zone of the Afghan campaign in fall 2001, several desperate media outlets were driven to rhapsodizing over my old chum from Fleet Street days, Alex Renton, spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam--or to give him his full honorific, as the Sun chain’s Greg Weston liked to put it, “the Toronto-born spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam.” The Toronto-born Alex spent his formative years at Eton--not Eton, Ontario, the agreeable municipality a scenic one-day drive from Sault Ste. Marie, but Eton College, the swanky boys’ school for Brit toffs. His father is Lord Renton, a cabinet minister under Mrs. Thatcher. I’m all for celebrating the rich diversity of the Canadian mosaic, but we haven’t had a Canuck like this since Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, checked out of Rideau Hall. Still, any oasis in a desert. When I made a couple of cracks about Alex being the designated Billy Bishop of the new world war, I got a huffy e-mail from the Hindu Kush protesting that it wasn’t his fault the likes of Greg Weston had decided to anoint him as the Great White Hope of Canadian Global Relevance.
And yet, throughout this period, there has indeed been a Canadian making a difference in the world-and if The National wanted to do a 133-part special report on him, for once they’d have enough material. Most of us know Paul Desmarais as the . . . well, let’s hold it there: most Canadians don’t know Paul Desmarais at all. You could stop the first thousand people walking down Yonge Street and I’ll bet no one would know who he is. But the few who do know him know him as the kingmaker behind Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin. Jean Chrétien’s daughter is married to Paul Desmarais’s son. Paul Martin was an employee of M. Desmarais’s Power Corp., and his Canada Steamship Lines was originally a subsidiary of Power Corp. that M. Desmarais put Mr. Martin in charge of. In other words, Paul Martin’s public identity--successful self-made businessman, not just a career pol, knows how to meet payroll, etc.--is entirely derived from the patronage of M. Desmarais.
That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Imagine if Jenna Bush married the chairman of Halliburton’s son, and then George W. Bush was succeeded by a president who’d been an employee of Halliburton: Michael Moore’s next documentary would be buried under wall-to-wall Oscars and Palmes d’Or. But M. Desmarais has managed to turn Ottawa into a company town without anyone being aware of the company. We’re a G8 economy; it would be reasonable to expect a prominent British or American businessman to number prominent political figures among his friends, but to have brought so many of them into his company and even family would surely excite some comment. Power Corp.’s other alumni range from Quebec premiers to Canada’s most prominent international diplomat, Maurice Strong. In fairness, you don’t have to work for M. Desmarais to reach the top of the greasy pole-Kim Campbell managed it, for about a week and a half.
But this is just the hicksville stuff. What’s really impressive is that, when one considers the epic events of the last three years, the truly Canadian content is not Toronto-born aid spokespersons, but the ubiquitous presence of M. Desmarais.
During the Iraq war, for example, I mentioned en passant that Power Corp. is the biggest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, the western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein (it has since changed its name to the Total Group). Total had secured development rights to 25 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves, a transformative deal that would catapult the company from a second-rank player into the big leagues with Exxon and British Petroleum. For a year, the antiwar crowd had told us it was “all about oil”--that the only reason Iraq was being “liberated” was so Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the rest of the gang could annex in perpetuity the second biggest oil reserves in the world. But, if it was all about oil, then the fact--fact--is that the only Western leader with a direct stake in the issue was not the Texas oilpatch stooge in Washington, but Jean Chrétien: his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren stood to be massively enriched by the Total-Saddam agreement. It depended on two factors: Saddam remaining in power, and the feeble UN sanctions being either weakened into meaninglessness or quietly dropped. M. Chrétien may have refused to join the Iraq war on “principle,” but fortunately his principles happened to coincide with the business interests of both TotalFinaElf and the Baath party.
As I said, I mentioned this curious footnote at the time. Stockwell Day picked up on it. The CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and all the rest steered clear. A bland perfunctory 200-word CP story reporting M. Desmarais’s denial--“Power Financial Head Refutes Saddam Link”--was carried by far more media outlets than had bothered going anywhere near Day’s original remarks.
Well, okay. Let’s take M. Desmarais’s word for it. But, getting on for two years later, we’re in the middle of the UN Oil-for-Fraud investigation, the all-time biggest scam, bigger than Enron and Worldcom and all the rest added together. And whaddaya know? The bank that handled all the money from the program turns out to be BNP Paribas, which tends to get designated by Associated Press and co. as a “French bank” but is, as it happens, controlled by one of M. Desmarais’s holding companies. That alone should cause even the droopiest bloodhound to pick up a scent: the UN’s banker for its Iraqi “humanitarian” program turns out to be (to all intents) Saddam’s favourite oilman.
I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, and, if I were, I’d look for a sinister global organization with a less obvious name. If “Power Corp.” was the moniker given to the sinister front operation for the latest Bond villain, critics would bemoan how crass the 007 franchise had become. And a “Power Corp.” that controlled the “Total Group” would have them hooting with derision. But it’s nevertheless the case that M. Desmarais’s bank functioned as the cashier for Saddam’s gaming of the global-compassion crowd: if a company agreed to sell Iraq some children’s medicine for $100 million, Iraq would invoice BNP Paribas for $110 million, pay the supplier and divert the skim-off into other areas. Everyone knew this was happening. It seems impossible, even with the minimal auditing, that BNP Paribas did not.
So here is a Canadian “making a difference in the world.” Suppose Conrad Black controlled a bank that had enriched a brutal dictator with a fortune intended to go to starving children, and that he also had an oil company that had cooked up an arrangement to make billions from the same dictator’s oil resources. Think Maude Barlow and the CBC might show an interest? But Paul Desmarais’s no-publicity clause is apparently enshrined in the Charter of Rights. So on it goes. Only the other week, M. Desmarais was hosting at his home in Quebec Nicholas Sarkozy, very likely the next president of France. Even after they’d become heads of government, neither Bush nor Blair could be bothered swinging by Ottawa to look in on Chrétien; not for years. But an invitation from M. Desmarais, and France’s coming man can’t wait to hop on the plane.
M. Desmarais’s spectacular rise from an obscure Quebec bus company operator to an obscure global colossus is an amazing story. Instead of struggling to find a local angle on the international scene, why doesn’t the CBC just start from the basic premise that whatever the subject--Iraq, oil-for-food, the European Union--somewhere at the heart of it will be the world’s least famous Canadian.
Instead, not a whisper. The good news is it’s not because Robert Rabinovitch, president of the CBC, is another discreet Power Corp. alumnus. He’s not. Rabinovitch’s close buddy, John Rae, who ran Chrétien’s campaigns, is. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old colleague Joel Bell, who was Trudeau’s chief economic adviser. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old boss, Senator Michael Pitfield. And so’s . . .
P.S. If, by the time of publication, Power Corp. has bought the Western Standard, please disregard all of the above.
bump for later read...
Thanx! Sanity reigns again :)
Well shut my Canuck mouth, Chretien's "heralded" stance, by others pas moi, against supporting the war in Iraq is as genuine as the French and Russian position, who also had Saddam oil agreements they stood to lose
well shut my mouth
and you can rest assured no one in the Canadian MSM picked up on this in the first place nor will they now Steyn has pointed it out
hmmm, maybe an email to Stephen Harper is apropos?
WooHoo! Steyn is back online. His web site is back up.
Another good one from Mark Steyn. Altho' the Canadian angle of this article has me a little lost.
Good one. And O.F.F.
Great article. Might have weaved into it that right after Chretien stepped down he was hired by PetroKazakhstan.
That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Imagine if Jenna Bush married the chairman of Halliburton’s son, and then George W. Bush was succeeded by a president who’d been an employee of Halliburton: Michael Moore’s next documentary would be buried under wall-to-wall Oscars and Palmes
Can you imagine this happening in the U.S.?
Canada, politically, is a third world country, being run by power hungry despots.
Thank you Mark Styne....... and watch your back, because Power Corp. knows who you are
It's best to appear to be a moderate here in Canada . Safety first.
Ultimately, I think that the values I believe in ARE moderate.
Logical and compassionate, at least.
My country should NOT be run as though it is a banana republic!
/rant off
good stuff!
Basically, Canada's opposition to the Iraq war arose from the potential loss of business by an oil company owned partly by the Canadian Prime Minister's family. The propaganda was that the war was morally objectionable. That's what the government owned media reported and that's what most Canadians believe.
LOL. Great home page!
On first thought, yes. But then if the CPC communications department isn't all over this already, we're doomed in any event. :-(
Good explanation.
Our conservative brothers and sisters in the U.S. need to learn more about our fight against socialism and corruption in Canada. :-)
Fanfan.
:-)
Hopefully, the appearance of Fox News on the scene will help turn things around. Either that or the Liberals will feel Fox's sting and get it yanked off the air. Unfortunately, with the Parlementary system in Canada, the Liberals will hold an indefinite monopoly on power. If they lose an election, they have plenty of patronage beaurocrats willing to sabotage anything the Conservatives try.
bttt
You've got a point there. When the conservatives form the gov't. here, there will be a hydro failure from all the shredders running at the same time. LOL
What worries me is that they seem to already operate beyond the critical mass needed. So many people are on the payroll, that we will be stymied at every turn.
I got in through bugmenot.com.
Thanks!
Thanks for the link. Strong's role in both those areas certainly merits further investigation, IMO.
You think this is why the Canadian MSM was so upset that Canadians can now pick up Fox News?
This is my first time posting on FR. I am appealing to our friends and neighgours to the south to do whatever you can to circulate and air this article by Mark Steyn in the US media.Maybe if it grows legs in the US media the Canadian msm will have no other choice but to cover it.
The Canadian government is corrupt and our media is corrupt. We need help.
Nothing like a little sunshine to kill some germs.
amen to that.
I'd imagine they're very blue in Canada tonight, with hockey season officially cancelled. (That did go thru, right?)
Unfortunately no one will toych this one politically because the media is deeply involved in the coverup of Desmarais-Powercor's doings. If Harper opened his mouth he's be cricified in Desmarais controlled media.
But I'm sure once this becomes common political chatter on all the US networks, the politicians couldn't ignore it in Kanukistan any more....this scandal is so big it will have to be broken from the US..then the crack in the Kanuk media dyke will let the truth truth spill out to the largely clued out Canadian public.
It wuld be great if Fox or Rush just pounded this unholey alliance and corruption at the top of the Canadian socialist echelons ...particularly with the present PM a Desmarais employee with a long history of conflict of interest dogging him...in a weak minority government....one more major scandal like this could topple the socialist dynasty....maybe our American friends can help us in getting thei article to as many US conservative media outlets as possible?
bump
I guess. I`m sort of a non typical canadian there too( not really a hockey fan since teen years)
Worth a read.
It's nice to know Canada still does play in the big league.
Please note Shermy's comment #12.
I still think Harper should open his mouth. If he showed he had courage of his convictions, the way Ronald Reagan did in our country, it would be a true breath of fresh air. He doesn't, from what I can tell, have any skeletons lurking in his closet. He should fight the good fight on this.
I bet he'd win the argument, handily, at the polls (if the Lieberals dared to go there).
I'm a Mario Lemieux fan in Pittsburgh PA.
a long time steyninian here. Just found this site. too bad, i wish i knew about it these long months without Mark's website. Just a head's up on this story: It was actually Diane Francis editor of the Financial Post who first broke this story -- albiet just in passing. when MS mentioned it -- also in passing -- a year or so ago, he ackwoleded it came from Diane. Looks like Mark has taken it a step further, however. This is amazing stuff..
I wonder if Michale Moore is going to rev up his cameras for this. CBC is pathetic -- This is the Canadian eqivelant of Rather and Jordan of CNN: See or here no eveil when it's one of your own about to get burned
That would be 'hear' no evil. All this socialism up here makes me a bit dyslexic
This is my first time posting on FR. I am appealing to our friends and neighgours to the south to do whatever you can to circulate and air this article by Mark Steyn in the US media.Maybe if it grows legs in the US media the Canadian msm will have no other choice but to cover it.
^^^^^^
No news yet south of the border! The whole Oil for Fraud at the UN scandal has been virtually invisible, nevermind the Canadian aspect to it.
It would have only gotten coverage if Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld could have been accused of involvement.
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