Canada as "sh!thole country"

In the week before our PM Fluffy took his feminist foreign policy to the G7 gabfest in Cornwall, two Canadian stories made headlines around the world. One came from Kamloops BC, the other from London, Ontario.

Both stories reveal a Canada starkly at odds with the carefully crafted image spun by our professional turd-polishing class. You know the one; Canada as the benevolent middle power built on social justice and diversity at home, while standing up for women, children, the environment, and marginalized communities the world over.

The reality is quite something else. Our concern for human rights is focused overwhelmingly on those countries officially on Washington's enemies list. 

Therefore Venezuela is of overweening concern to us, while our "allies" in the quasi-fascist states of the Lima Group get a pass.  

We wring our hands over the state of human rights in the authoritarian anti-gay theocracy of Iran while happily selling weapons to the authoritarian anti-gay theocracy of Saudi Arabia.

We connive in the silencing of Julian Assange while demanding freedom for US flunkies Alexey Navalny and Roman Protasevich.

We hurl accusations of genocide at China even as Senator Murray Sinclair predicts many thousands of anonymous Indigenous children's graves remain to be discovered around our many former residential school sites. 

We simultaneously trumpet our "feminist foreign policy" while hoarding vaccines.

Our commitment to global climate remediation, it is claimed, is dependant on increasing pipeline capacity to bring more of the world's dirtiest fossil fuels to market.

We have a prime minister who is always ready with a weepy apology, but simple things like providing potable water to Indigenous communities is prohibitively expensive, even while we commit billions upon billions to the procurement of war machinery so we can "stand with our allies" against Russia and China.

Is Canada a shithole country?

Depends who you ask.