CanadiancomplicityinBMD.pptVIP

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” Mark Twain Here, to my embarrassment as a long-time NDPer, is their immediate response on the very day of the Big “No.” They did not wait to see if the governments no would be followed up with any action, or be linked to a single, practical effort to slow down, let alone stop, any of the existing examples of Canadian complicity in missile defense. If they had waited for a real step forward, they would still be waiting. The NDP has not altered its position on this and is still trying to make hay from their supposed victory in this “long battle.” They should have decried the supposed “no” as a rigged sleight-of-hand trick designed to distract us while the government picked our pockets with the largest increase in military spending that Canada had seen in decades. Instead, the NDP accepted the “no” at face value and actually propped up the Liberal’s massive war-budget increases. It was a dark day indeed... 50 A sure sign that we are being hoodwinked is government duplicity: a two-faced, contradictory doubleness of thought, speech or action. Just two days before the big NO, our ambassador to the U.S. – former member of the Carlyle Group and one-time golf partner to Bush Sr. -- set off a media frenzy. McKenna said Canada was already involved through NORAD and we’d already given the US what it wanted. What more can we do, he asked? Heralded as a great exposé, this was actually a cover up, or what intelligence buffs call a “limited hangout.” Sure, he mentioned NORAD, but that was no secret anyway. It’s what he didn’t say: Nothing about all the Canadian companies working on BMD. Nothing about government handouts to those companies. Nothing about the complicity of government-paid scientists. Nothing about the integration of our armed forces into US and NATO plans for BMD. Never-the-less, his statement did pull the rug out from under the debate about whether we should join. Damage control was needed and w