This week, I offer you a little return on the political week.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
This week, we heard Dominique Anglade declare: “Under an Anglade government, we would not have found ourselves in a situation where we have strong restrictive measures, a high vaccination rate, but at the same time such catastrophic results…” She may be right, because there is no model to check this statement with an “if”. That said, I find this assertion enormous. We understand the liberal leader wanting to take advantage of the tribulations of Legault who is struggling during this Omicron wave, but it is very risky to go that way.
Mario Dumont used the metaphor of the farmer pulling out the big sledgehammer, aiming for the stake and hitting the fence. I rather believe that this way of doing politics is even more risky. In the case of M.me Anglade, the metaphor would rather be the farmer who pulls out a mace, aims for the stake and hits her hand.
Perhaps Dominique Anglade would have been more effective, but has the Liberal Party that she leads already demonstrated what she is saying in the recent past? I’m not sure. Let us remember how catastrophic the management of a simple snowstorm on Highway 13 by the Couillard government was. If this argument seems insufficient to you, think of the organizational chaos of the Charest government in the face of the red squares that Jean wanted to send to the north as the ultimate solution. I doubt that such a government was any better than the one currently managing this great planetary turbulence, repetitive and unpredictable.
When a nation is going through such a difficult time, nuance, compassion, benevolence and solidarity are other very effective ways of convincing.
This week, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, flew to Ukraine in order to support the authorities of this country as well as its population in the face of the threat of the Russian army camped en masse on its borders. We therefore learn from the mouth of Mr.me Joly that Canada no longer closes the door to Ukrainian demand for the supply of military equipment and weapons. That too is a huge statement. I also wonder how the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reacted to the presence of Mélanie Joly in Ukraine. How did he report the terrifying news to the cold-blooded predator who rules the Russian Federation? If we could have hidden microphones in the president’s office, in the Kremlin, here is what we could have heard about it:
— Mr Poutine, the potatoes are cooked!
‘You seem on edge, Sergei. Here, take a “shooter” of brown sauce to cheer you up.
— Thank you, Mr President. (Slurps!)
– Good. What’s so serious, Sergei?
— (Slurp!) Well… I’m afraid Canada is supplying arms to the Ukraine!
– Ha! Ha! Ha!
— But, Mr Putin, why are you laughing?
“Come on, Sergei! Not so long ago, Canada got some used Australian fighter planes delivered that even the scrapyards didn’t want.
– Yes I remember. It wasn’t flying high…
“And before that, in 1998, Britain sold Canada four used submarines for $750 million. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a country that equips its armed forces on Marketplace?
— You’re quite right, Mr. Poutine: we don’t have much to fear with Mélanie Joly.
– Well, there it is ! As they say among the Putins, don’t make a big deal out of it, everything is oily, Sergei!
Let’s stay delirious. This week, in addition to Mélanie Joly, American diplomacy showed its solidarity with the Ukrainian people. We heard Joe Biden, as energetic as a turtle coming out of the Quebec Cannabis Society, get carried away on the subject before recovering and threatening Russia with an economic disaster in the event of these troops entering Ukraine. The head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, also recalled Thursday, in Berlin, that an aggression by Russia would lead to a “rapid and severe” reaction from the United States.
What should we understand in this statement? Will America go to war against Russia to defend Ukraine? In truth, we are mainly talking about big economic sanctions against the Kremlin. You know, the same threats that we unsheathed against Russia annexing Crimea, against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian excesses against China in the Hong Kong case, against the military junta which confiscated power and massacred the young people in Burma, facing the Iranian regime, facing Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus… With what result?
Since the debacle in Afghanistan, America and its allies have looked more and more like a toothless old lion with only its roar to gain respect.
Of course, everyone sees Russia in this story as the big bad natural enemy of America and the Western world well entrenched in the imaginations of the cinema. But like the Hong Kong case, the Taiwan case is coming, and you have to dig into history to get a more nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This is what Jocelyn Coulon, researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal, has done in these pages. I recommend that you read these two texts for a better understanding of the history being played out on Ukraine’s borders.