How Do We Know Governments are Lying? By Keith Porteous (Op-Ed)
While you may have heard about Prime Minister Carney’s deal to essentially pre-approve and fast track another pipeline to the B.C coast, you may have missed Premier David Eby’s announcement of the Phase 2 doubling of capacity of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline at the Kitimat terminal that was rammed through Wet’suwet’en unceded territories, where the hereditary indigenous land defenders were criminalized for defending their right to free, prior, and informed consent to resource development on their lands. Even the moderate human rights organization Amnesty International declared this as a brutal and repressive violation, while the B.C. Supreme Court ruled against the violence and racism of RCMP premeditated actions against the Wet’suwet’en people, who they have been covertly surveilling for many years.
A year after the election of PM Mark Carney, you may be confused, asking the question: what the hell is going on? The elected representatives of the Crown pay lip service to the climate and environmental and First Nations’ issues, while doubling down on the massive expansion of resource extraction projects. Their playbook involves paying off economically challenged elected First Nation bands and calling it reconciliation and consent. This is all done in the name of independence from the United States, while the benefits of massive fossil fuel exploitation go to American owned energy extraction corporations in Canada where the greatest subsidy to these companies, besides tax breaks and other incentives from the public purse, is the environmental degradation to the air, land, and water that Canadians are left to deal with.
Meanwhile, PM Carney committed Canada to increased military spending from $40 billion a year to $150 billion a year, purchasing 75% of its arms from the U.S., in support of wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. No increases to services for Canadian people, but unlimited borrowing of billions of dollars to fund increased militarism, the single biggest Co2 emitters on the planet. Canadians voted for a Carney government that would push back against American threats and economic dominance, and instead got the governing policies of reactionary Conservative Pierre Poilievre. More corporate subsidy of American owned industries in Canada, more money for NATO warmongering, more climate and environmental degradation, and more running roughshod over First Nations objections using RCMP repression.
There is a food and housing crisis for millions of people in this country, and these economic and military alliances are only making things worse for everyone except the wealthy. These are the real threats to us all, and not the manufactured fears about the rise of economic rivals in Russia and China. The billionaire “Epstein Class” owns the dominant political and economic institutions and corporate media of Western democracies, and their dystopian techno-feudal vision for our human community is what is driving the decline in the health and well being and prosperity of it, not Chinese or Russian bogeymen. Our government is promoting Ai data centres that gobble the electrical power and water of entire cities, while serving to eliminate human productivity and creativity.
And who benefits? Most people, especially younger people, are highly sceptical of the false promises of an Ai “Industrial Revolution” because they intuitively understand that the only people who will benefit are the tech-bros. the global venture capitalists, and the repressive governing and surveillance systems everywhere. Manufacturing fear through corporate media propaganda is used to coerce our consent for all of this, in an opportunistic strategy of mass deception. There is a simple answer to the question: how do we know governments are lying? Their lips are moving.
