Excretion (L.), Siegfried und Roy (R.)
France II
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 16, 2003
VOTERS IN QUEBEC REJECTED SECESSION from Canada this week by handing a big loss to the once-mighty pro-secessionist party. News stories reaching America made this sound like a huge defeat for millions of French-speaking, French-thinking activists in La Belle Province, geographically larger than the France from which their ancestors came to settle Nouvelle France, New France, centuries ago.
Americans need to look north and pay attention. What has happened recently in Canada could have a huge impact on us.
England bested France in wars of the early 1700s, and Canada became an English nation with one predominately French province. But as a gesture of tolerance and good will, its English governors declared Canada a bilingual nation and culture.
This Balkanization policy in our time has evolved to require all government documents to be in both French and English, even thousands of miles west in Vancouver and Edmonton where nobody speaks French. Signs in English, meanwhile, are torn down by Franco-Canadians in Montreal. We grew up hearing its cri de coeur in that song about "two rivers in the land" by Canadian folksingers Ian & Sylvia – before they got divorced.
Americans should pay urgent attention. We need to understand that this week’s vote in Quebec was not a defeat for the Franco-nationalists. It was their way of saying that secession no longer needs to be contemplated – and henceforth will never be permitted.
The Franco-Canadians, three centuries after their defeat, have at last won. They have conquered their conquerors. Canada’s Leftist Prime Minister Jean Chretien shares the culture, tongue, and anti-American political views of French President Jacques Chirac – both of whom, with typically French modesty, think it no accident that their initials J.C. are also those of Jesus Christ.
The nation north of the United States is no longer Canada. It has become France II, Nouvelle France, a cultural and political clone of the nation that behaved as America’s enemy in trying to undermine our efforts to de-fang an Iraqi regime busy acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The secessionists emerging in France II are no longer Quebeckers. They are the English-speaking Canadian cowboys, oilers, farmers, fisherfolk, and loggers of the far western provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Yukon whose resources and high taxes are being siphoned eastward to subsidize Quebec even more than Ottawa.
Now that France II has replaced Canada, Quebec no longer has any reason to secede from Canada. Quebec and its values now rule all of Canada.
It is no coincidence that France II has been rushing to disarm the citizens of its western colonies and the Maritimes with draconian national gun control. Those cowboy colonies, from Saskatchewan westward, in particular, are the source of France II’s wealth and power.
The English-speaking peasants of Canada’s west, whose language and values have much more in common with George Bush and the United States than with Jean Chretien and France II, will not be permitted to secede.
These westerners soon might not even be permitted to put on their license plates the slogan that during the secession movement there replaced La Belle Province on the cars of Quebec – Je me souviens, "I remember."
The United States and Canada long celebrated sharing "the longest unguarded border" between any two nations on Earth, so friendly were our relations. In the wake of September 11, 2001, however, Americans have seen terrorists cross that border – and to discover that people flying into Canada without passports from the Middle East (and elsewhere) have simply been allowed to stay and run free.
Most Americans have been astonished that Canadian Prime Minister Chretien refused to join Great Britain and ourselves in coalition against Saddam Hussein. We have been shocked by Mr. Chretien’s opposition to regime change in Iraq. We have been horrified by his direct order to Canada’s navy not to seize or detain members of Saddam’s regime trying to flee the Middle East – or, we presume, trying to enter Canada – and not to turn them over to Coalition forces. This last action, said U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci, was "incomprehensible."
Americans were pained to discover that the President of our historic ally France, Jacques Chirac, had taken campaign money from and sold weapons illegally to Saddam Hussein. We were appalled that Chirac sided with Saddam and against us merely because France stood to lose billions of dollars in business with the Iraq dictator. But at least his treachery against the United States and Iraqi people had a reason and purpose, however ignoble.
But what possible reason, ask most Americans, could cause our next door neighbor and closest trading partner Canada to stab us in the back? To side with France and Saddam Hussein against us? To cozy up to Fidel Castro (even though Chretien’s and Castro’s socialist politics are not all that different)? To boo and curse America’s national anthem at Canadian sporting events? To have members of Canada’s cabinet say vile things about the United States and its President – and then go unfired and unpunished by its Prime Minister?
A few of us, however, know that Jean Chretien is a grandfather. Canadian oil tycoon and mega-billionaire Paul Desmarais, coincidentally, is also grandfather to the same grandchildren – his son Andre being married to Chretien’s daughter, whose very name is France.
One of the French oil companies that had been closest to Saddam Hussein is Paris-based TotalFinaElf. Its biggest shareholder is the same Paul Desmarais, and his son Paul Jr., brother of Chretien’s son-in-law Andre, sits on Total’s Board of Directors.
TotalFinaElf, incidently, recently and quietly moved to buy up a large share of a major oilsands project in the Canadian province of Alberta, which evidence suggests may be home to one of the world’s two biggest relatively-untapped oil reserves. This gives both Montreal and France a Saddam-like interest in making sure Alberta can never secede to become either part of a new independent nation or a new state of the United States.
"It’s all about oil," the anti-war protestors told us. Apparently they were right, writes Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, at least where Canada is concerned.
Jean Chretien has followed an anti-American, pro-Saddam Hussein policy that may be bad for Canada, but his family stood to make many, many, many millions of dollars if Hussein could by hook or crook be kept in power. To paraphrase its beautiful national anthem, Oh Canada, Jean prefers greed to thee.
If Chretien seems greasy, it apparently is because his family fortune rises or falls by floating on the oil of Saddam’s Iraq and other undemocratic Middle Eastern nations.
The Desmarais family has other links worth noting. Andre has held a proud place on the board of multinational communications behemoth Vivendi. And he runs Power Corporation, whose annual revenues typically top $18 billion (Canadian dollars). For a disturbing, if Leftist, depiction of how the Desmarais family manipulates the national media as well as all major political parties in Canada, check out University of Windsor Professor James Winter’s provocative book Democracy’s Oxygen: How the Corporations Control the News.
Andre also sits on the board of the Peoples’ Republic of China’s China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC), reportedly described by some as "the investment arm of the Chinese military." Canada’s version of the CIA, the CSIS, reportedly through its "Project Sidewinder" tried to investigate how this and Chretien’s frequent trade missions to China might reflect undue Chinese communist influence on Canadian politicians.
In the dawning light of the 9-11 world, we see change. Old enemies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have become friends and allies. Old friends such as France at this moment look more and more like enemies, bent on undercutting "the American hegemon" to make themselves feel and appear taller. Canada has become closer to France and China, and moved farther from its traditional friendship with the United States.
Is it any wonder that President Bush postponed a scheduled May 5 visit to Canada, or that Canada fears it has quietly been cut out of postwar contracts in Iraq?
Canada, our longtime friend and neighbor, has either been taken over by a body-snatcher or demon-possessed by an anti-American spirit that prefers to speak and think like Jacques Chirac. Time may exorcise this demon through regime change. If not, we should be willing to liberate the pro-Western westerners of Canada by offering statehood and friendship to the peoples of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the diamond-rich, oil-rich lands of the old Yukon Territory.
If our northern border is to front no longer on Canada but instead on France II, at that border we will indeed need to stand on guard. It would help to make that border much, much shorter.