Chris Hedges calls Harper a puppet
Hedges has a Canadian connection: his wife is Canadian, and his daughter is a university student in Vancouver, currently studying abroad. He said Canadian governments have a "strange" tendency to make the same errors their American neighbours made 10 years earlier.
"I wouldn't call it Republican. I'd call it corporate... that's how we've seen the kind of devolution of Canadian politics, rolling backwards, which Harper has exemplified. But I don't play the game of focusing on personalities, because if you focus on personalities, you ignore the structures of power and how they work."
As for examples of the "devolution", Hedges cited Canada's backing out of the Kyoto protocol, the increasing surveillance state and the militarization of police forces.
"This is a pattern we're familiar with in the U.S. It (the de-funding of health care) isn't as has advanced as the States but your healthcare system is woefully underfunded, and we're watching one of the great university systems in the industrialized world get destroyed by corporate money, making a college education harder and harder for people with little means. The destruction of your manufacturing base. There's all kind of activities (in Canada) that replicate what has happened in the United States."