Jew World Order

Press TV has conducted an interview with Edward Corrigan, journalist and political commentator to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers opinions of two additional guests: Michel Chossudovsky, director of Center for Research on Globalization and also political analyst, Inayatullah Andrabi.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Students protest over raising tuition fee hikes; now they have turned into a political problem as we saw there in that report, with demands ranging from economic issues to environmental issues, humanitarian issues even and of course we are witnessing the harsh police crackdown.

Why did the seemingly simple question snowball into this nationwide political problem?

Corrigan: Well, Quebec is sort of a unique territory in Canada. It has a large francophone population; it’s also much more politically engaged because of the separatism issue but also other issues and they have exposure to the international media, francophone media in particular. So the population, I think, is much more sensitive to political issues.

But the [Jean] Charest government was very heavy handed in their response, in terms of shutting down the schools, basically banning the right of a protest and that in turn generated a lot of support from the francophone population and the labor unions who also saw this as an attack on their rights to protest and the lawyers are correct, in my opinion, that under the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, you cannot prevent a public protest because its the freedom of expression is guaranteed under the Canadian constitution.

And the government which is quite unpopular is under attack because it has priorities that do not reflect the needs of the students or the general population.

They have like millions or even billions of dollars for corporations, bank bailouts, such as that but they do not have money for student loans, for tuition and for funding schools and research and other issues.

So it has sort of snowballed into a much larger issue in terms of basically the priorities of the government.

Press TV: Mr. Corrigan, how serious is the desire for an independent Quebec and how is the current crisis affecting it?

Some were saying that this student protest is reviving that debate and that the protest, as well as the introduction of bill 78, is creating the winning conditions, in their words, for an independent Quebec.

Corrigan: Well, I believe that it is the direction of the federal government under the conservative leader Stephen Harper that is really to a concern to the Quebec population.

In the last federal election, the Bloc Québécois actually suffered a very serious defeat in Quebec and they were advocating for Quebec’s independence at the federal level, but the new Democratic Party, which is a social democratic party, swept the province.

So that put it into sort of a leftist, center-left, perspective which is diametrically opposed to the hard-line right-wing perspective of the Harper government.

But there is this undercurrent where pro-separatism has diminished as a separate issue. There is like the quality of life issue, the different approach towards society and Quebec is much more of egalitarian society that wishes to…; they want to help each other but the governments are becoming more and more right-wing; catering only to the corporate interest which is opposed by the vast majority of Quebec population.

Now in western Canada, we tend to have a more right-wing political view. So Quebec’s anxiety over the direction of Harper’s government, I think, is reigniting these issues of Quebec’s separatism.

And as an issue itself, the Quebec parties and the separatist parties are downplaying that; they do have a whole broad range of other issues which will strike a chord with the Quebec population that puts them at odds with both the former; Jean Charest was the former leader of the Canadian Conservative party and then he switched and became a provincial liberal and premier of the province.

So he is seen as a conservative as well and the Quebec population clearly is; the vast majority of them are at odds with the conservative orientation of the government.

But the problem in Canada is that we have four parties that split the center-left vote and the conservatives won a majority government with 39 percent of the votes.

So 61 percent of Canadians voted against them but they are governing with vengeance and using their majority to impose all sorts of laws that are not supported by the vast majority of Canadians but they do have majority, they are governing as if they have, you know, it is almost like a dictatorship, a democratic dictatorship, if you will have it.

But Quebec is certainly at odds with the federal government on most issues.

Press TV: Mr. Corrigan, would you say that, again in response to that question, some serious issues raised there by our guest in London, would you say that the 99 percent, so to speak, in Canada is as real as the 99 percent in the United Sates or in the global Occupy movement as a whole?

Corrigan:.Well, actually, I agree with both of the other commentators. There clearly is a clash of priorities but it also goes to the nature of the political system.

Political system is funded by money which largely comes from the corporation and their vested interests, the larger population, for example, a vast majority of Canadians were opposed to war in Afghanistan, yet the government still proceeded with participating in that because they wanted to ingratiate themselves with the United States.

There is a certain industrial military complex that is very adapted at funding politicians that support their interests and therefore manipulating the system to support them when the general population, even though, they are opposed to it.

In fact, the most Americans are opposed to wars in the Middle East as well, but that democratic majority is not reflected in the decision making process, and that is because the nature of the system is really geared towards the people who fund the process. OK?

If you will argue that both in Canada and the United States it is not really a democracy, it is a plutocracy where vested interests and powerful money interest control the system and the students, they have numbers, OK?

So they are organizing in the streets; they are responding in a way much like the Arab Spring and using social media and social communication and with numbers.

But it is still that the politicians are looking at who pays for their election campaigns; who is really controlling the system and the people that are so well-established.

MY/MSK/JR