On the face of it, Canada might seem an unlikely candidate to be the first of the Nations of Virtue to send a senior delegation into the chaos of post-Yanukovich Ukraine.
While Ukraine is doing their best to put a moderate face on the new regime with the announcement that vaguely centrist Arseniy Yatsenyuk is to be interim leader until May elections, there can be no question that it was the extremist right that did the heavy lifting in the triumph over the democratically elected government of Yanukovich.
That is a cohort that features at least two prominent characteristics that are anethema to the purported values of the Canadians.
One is their rampant anti-semitism.
The other is their rampant homophobia. Don't expect gay marriages to become officially sanctioned in Ukraine anytime soon.
So the spectacle of a Canadian delegation led by openly gay Foreign Minister John Baird handing out bon-bons in Independence Square is fraught with multiple layers of irony.
This is the same crew that has embarrassed itself professing absolute loyalty to the Likudniks in Israel.
Perhaps the Canadian mission is tasked with moderating the extremist views of their Ukrainian hosts?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps it's about nothing more than brazen political opportunism. As everybody knows, there is a federal election on the horizon in Canada, and Prime Minister Harper's Conservatives are in for a tight race.
The fundamentalist religious inclinations of certain of their party notwithstanding, the Harper gang sucks up to Israel mainly to impress the Jewish vote in Canada.
They're now sucking up to Ukraine to woo the Ukrainian vote in Canada, which happens to be roughly twice the size of the Jewish vote.
That's a lot of sucking up.
No comments:
Post a Comment