Canadians, know thyselves. Our record abroad is dirty. By Michael Nenonen

We go to great lengths to obscure self-knowledge of what we're really like in the capitalist world at large

Canada's exploitation of the developing world reminds me of sex in Victorian England. The rigid class structure of Victorian England was maintained, in part, by excesses of sexual exploitation, violence, and perversion, but at the same time, sexual repression was so intense that in well-to-do homes even table legs had to be concealed. It was this division between obscene truth and comforting appearance that Robert Louis Stevenson captured so perfectly in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In I Don't Believe In Atheists (2008), Chris Hedges addresses the cruelty that marks the human condition: "This cruelty arrives however, in different forms. Stable, industrialized societies, awash in cash and privileges, can better construct systems that mask this cruelty, although it is nakedly displayed in their imperial outposts." Nowhere is this principle better displayed than in Canada. The cruelty sustaining our way of life has become obscene in the way that sexuality was obscene in Victorian England. The more we exclude it from our public consciousness, the more deranged and pervasive it becomes.

The contrast between our national self-image and our country's foreign policy is as stark as the contrast between Victorian prudery and Victorian porn. In The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (2009), Yves Engler writes that "Numerous studies have found that Canadians' self-appraisal of their country's foreign policy is more positive than any other country. A March 2007 poll found that 84 percent of Canadians believed that Canada played a positive role on the world stage while 10 percent felt it was negative. According to a survey released in June 2005 . . . 94 percent of Canadians believed their country was well-liked around the world, the highest percentage of 16 nations surveyed." Few Canadians want to know that in many parts of the world our country is reviled for the violence inflicted by our corporations with the full support of successive Canadian governments.

Engler documents the way that Canada's foreign policy has consistently helped Canadian corporations, our "imperial outposts," to savagely exploit the resources and peoples of developing countries. While Engler's book looks at Canada's role in nearly every region of the globe, in this article I'm going to focus solely on the information he provides about Canada's influence in Latin America and, in particular, Colombia.

In 2007, Canadian corporations invested $117.2 billion in Latin America and owned more than 1,300 mineral properties in the region. These corporations have worked closely with the Canadian government to support draconian regimes and steal Latin American resources. Colombia provides a useful case study of Canada's contempt for human rights and the environment in the developing world. Currently, Colombia has Latin America's worst human rights record. Engler writes that between 2002 and 2007, Colombia's civil war claimed the lives of 13,634 people. Most of the human rights abuses were committed by the government, either directly or through its support for paramilitary forces. Regardless of this record, in November 2008 the Harper government signed a free trade deal with Colombia, a step that even the United States has thus far refused to take. Most of Colombia's organized peasantry and labour movements opposed the agreement, which they correctly see as part of an ongoing effort to liberalize their country's economy.

For example, in August 2001 Colombia's Department of Mines and Energy accepted a proposal from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and a University of Calgary think-tank called the Canadian Energy Resource Institute (CERI) that radically revised Colombia's mining code. The new code contains environmentally and socially ruinous provisions. Previously, corporations paid a 10 percent royalty rate on mineral exports above 3 million tonnes per year and a 5 percent rate for exports below 3 million tonnes. Now, they only pay 0.4 percent. Mining concessions have been lengthened from 25 to 30 years, with possible extensions for up to 90 years. Furthermore, mining companies that cut down timber can now sell that timber for 30 years without paying any taxes on it. These companies care little for the local population: the Canadian resource company Conquistador Mines has been credibly accused of encouraging the murder of local community leaders and widespread displacement of peasant miners and their families.

Mining isn't the only Canadian industry that's fouled its hands with Colombian blood. In 1995, CIDA provided a $4 million dollar grant to liberalize Colombia's telecommunications industry. The Canadian corporation Nortel Networks, supported by a $300 million dollar line of credit from Export Development Canada (EDC), played a crucial role in this liberalization, which cost 10,000 unionized telecommunications workers their jobs. Protests were brutally suppressed: over 70 trade unionists were murdered by paramilitaries for demonstrating against the privatization of Colombia's biggest telecommunications company, TELECOM. This alliance between Canadian corporations and the paramilitaries wasn't an isolated occurrence. With the help of $18.2 million from the EDC, The Canadian corporations BFC Construction and Agra-Moneco built the Urra dam, submerging 7,400 hectares and the homes of 411 indigenous families. 2,800 people were forcibly resettled, and up to 70,000 people were impacted by the development. When the community tried to stop the project, paramilitary and guerilla forces killed six people and disappeared ten others.

The same collusion with the Colombian military was displayed by the Calgary-based Enbridge and the Toronto-based TransCanada Pipelines, which operated the OCENSA pipeline in Colombia in the late 1990s. Until 1997, the OCENSA consortium worked with the British security firm Defense Systems Colombia (DSC). This firm used paid informants to gather information about the local populations affected by the pipeline, and then forwarded this information to the Colombian military. The firm was well aware that the military, alongside its paramilitary allies, regularly committed extra-judicial executions and disappearances. OCENSA and DSC also purchased military equipment for the Colombian army, an act of generosity emulated by the Canadian government, which has supplied Huey helicopters and intelligence gathering equipment to Colombia.

This same basic pattern occurs in every region penetrated by Canadian corporate interests. Of course, Canada isn't unique: every developed country plays the same sadistic game. We live in the "free world" in the same way that whites in the Confederacy lived in a "free world": our freedom is defined in contrast to the people we enslave. This is the obscene truth of global capitalism, a truth so devastating to our collective self-image that we go to absurd lengths to repress it. As in Victorian England, repression exacts a high cost. The more we repress the awareness of our "obscenity," the less prepared we are to take responsibility for it. By denying their desires, Victorians fed their depravity.