Exit 0 — welcome to Canada, USA!

The secret military pact between Uncle Steve and Uncle Sam

Dean Jensen, Volunteer Staff

I was listening to Steve Earle and the Dukes’ Exit 0, scanning the Internet for something topical to write about while casually enjoying a Lucky. For all the uninitiated Earle fans out there, the album is a great one — a fully digital ’80s Nashville production; the album is about roaming the American Interstate looking for an exit and always coming up unsatisfied. Side 1 was just finishing, and “San Antonio Girl” was blasting away when I happened across a random Facebook.com group a “friend” had just joined called “NO US TROOPS IN CANADA.” I checked it out, assuming it to be of little value, but was surprised to discover otherwise.

It seems that the Harper government has (again) pulled another one of their quick George-Bush-jerk-off-manoeuvres on us. The media these days has been jumping like frantic inbred dogs around the threat of an election involving (this time around) bullshit budgets and Afghanistan. What will prove to be yet another failed attempt at ousting the schoolyard bully from his reign over the swings, the pack of limp-wrist, back-stabbing Liberal twits known collectively as the Opposition have taken command of the headlines, but for the wrong reason.

It took me a week and a half to stumble across the news of Canada and the United States signing “an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other’s borders during an emergency.” This move, by the way, was never announced by the Harper government or the Canadian forces; so it comes as no surprise that almost nobody reported on the story.

The U.S. Northern Command, it turned out, had announced the move on its website and issued a statement from Fort Sam Houston (just up the road from San Antone), Texas on Feb. 14. The statement read: “This document is a unique, bilateral military plan to align our respective national military plans to respond quickly to the other nation’s requests for military support of civil authorities.” U.S. air force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, also said, “The signing of this plan is an important symbol of the already strong working relationship between Canada Command and U.S. Northern Command.”

As of press time, the Ottawa Citizen is the only Canadian publication available as a primary source on this issue, and the National Post republished the story on Feb. 22. The Ottawa Citizen quotes Stuart Trew of the Council of Canadians as saying, “there is potential for the agreement to militarize civilian responses to emergency incidents” and that “work is also underway for the two nations to put in place a joint plan to protect common infrastructure such as roadways and oil pipelines.”

Roadways and oil pipelines, eh? Without fanfare or even a drab monotonous announcement, Uncle Steve has signed away our ability as a sovereign nation to prevent American troops in light of some “emergency” from stampeding up over the border and into Alberta, guns a-blazing as is their penchant, to stop anyone from even thinking of disrupting the oil flowing south.

American troops (not necessarily the best example of a friendly occupying force), with a mandate to keep the taps running in Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Yukon, Alaska, hell, even Saskatchewan, are now (thanks to Steve) well on their way to raping at gun-point the living shit out of Canada. All that is needed is for one of the wealthy nations currently sucking the last drops of once rich blood from the U.S. economy to cut the cord once the final death-spasms finally begin wracking ol’ Dow Jones.

Commander David Scanlon, the Canada Command spokesman, U.S. Northern Command bedfellow in this pact, calls the agreement “benign.” “There’s no agreement to allow troops to come in,” Scanlon claimed, suggesting, “The ‘allow’ piece is entirely up to the two governments.” Still, the idea of armed, oil-crazed Americans with heavily vested interests in the “resources park” which is Canada (as I once heard Ward Churchill describe us), streaming north to protect said interests fills me with nothing if not unease.

I have signed off of the Internet, now, and am listening to the last refrain’s of Exit 0’s closing song, “It’s All Up To You,” and I can feel the cold rain on the drifter’s wet shoulder as though it were my own. My beer is empty, and I can see Uncle Steve, sitting in 24 Sussex Drive, gloating in his bedroom with the knowledge that tomorrow, when the House fails to reject his budget or his plans for Afghanistan, nothing will change that won’t benefit him and his oil-industry cronies. He has never cared about this country, and he certainly does not care much about me, or you. Not tonight.

Dean Jensen has moved on through Copperhead Road to Shut Up & Die Like An Aviator.