More crocodile tears for Haiti

Looks like aging snowflake Hugh Segal has had another thought. According to his opinion piece in the Globe and Mail this morning, “We should welcome Haitians facing US deportation.“

I have no objections to this in principle. If we are determined to welcome 350,000 new arrivals next year, 60,000 of them may as well be Haitians “stranded” in the US. What disturbs me is the tone of smug condescension that permeates the article.

Haiti was the first colony in the Western Hemisphere to break away from it’s colonial masters in a slave rebellion over two hundred years ago. It’s been the non-stop target of foreign interference ever since. That interference came first from its colonial masters in France and then from the Americans as well. For the past quarter-century Canada has been an obliging junior partner in the struggle to keep Haiti a subservient failed state.

That’s why I literally gagged when I read this whopper;

Canada has a long history of trying to help Haiti. Canadian forces were part of stabilization efforts when the politics turned violent and military dictatorship was in place. Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide lived safely in exile in Canada under prime minister Brian Mulroney before democracy returned. 

Segal is referring to the 1991 US-backed military coup that unseated the democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The literature on the subject overwhelmingly shows that our so-called “stabilization efforts” were primarily concerned with rooting out Aristide’s popular political movement, Fanmi Lavalas. The fact that Aristide spent a few weeks in Montreal after he was deposed was hardly a humanitarian gesture on our part.

Nor was that the end of Aristide. In 2000 he again won the presidency, only to be hooked off the stage yet again by the usual suspects four years later. Canada’s enthusiastic connivance in the 2004 coup is well documented.

Here we are almost fifteen years later. We don’t have to acknowledge our role in the continued immiseration of Haiti. Instead, we have one of our leading public intellectuals prattling on about how Haitians at risk of deportation from the US “would make superb additions to the Canadian family.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.