9/11 plus 6: Canada's lucky near-miss

Today marks the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This page will dispense with any snapshots of where I was or what I was doing at the time when a sizable portion of Manhattan real estate was reduced to ashes, not I will entertain any conspiracy theories, which if you're scoring at home, ring closer to the truth for this page than the official story. Instead, today I reflect on the path this country could have taken if we had accepted the emotionally overheated advice of the conservative punditry at that time.

The op-ed pages and talk shows during that September of 2001 were a hyperventilating attempt at vindication for Canada's right wing. The trauma radiating from the attacks like so much toxic dust from the World Trade Center suppressed the voices opposed to corporate globalization which had started making serious noise at the WTO meetings in Seattle two years earlier. There was no alternative to Pax Americana, Canada 'had' to sign on to the U.S. missile defence plan, Canada 'had' to establish a common security perimeter, Canada 'had' to adopt the American dollar.

Imagine if Jean Chretien and his government of the day had accepted the bucolic mantra that "There is no Alternative". The men and women of our armed forces would have been cut down on the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic security of our social programs would have been surrendered to meet the persistent, conflicting, and nonsensical demands of the Police State. The Canadian economy would have been shattered as the Bush Administration's abject crashed the U.S. Dollar against the Euro, a trade deficit with China, and America's own cannibalistic credit industry.

It has been said that tragedy plus time equals comedy. I don't think that can ever be said about 9/11, but Canadians should consider themselves fortunate that in the aftermath of that tragedy, we were spared a comedy of errors even greater than the one we live through today.