Alphabet Soup.....

RRRRRRight....Now...Ha, Ha, Ha

IsSomethingRotten
InOttaWashVille?

Is this the MPLA?
or is this the UDA?
or is this the IRA?
I thought it was the UK
or just another country
another council tenancy?

The lyric above is one of the lesser known verses from the infamous Sex Pistols song 'Anarchy in the UK', which was released with Britain on the verge of its viscious and vengeful lurch to the far right under Dame Thatcher.

It was also a time of alphabetical abbreviations gone wild.

So now that we Canuckistanis are apparently on the verge of a lurch to the far right of our own it's hard not to notice the sudden outbreak of letter-based acronyms like the CPC, the SOW, and the dreaded SLA.

Which, of course, stands for the Softwood Lumber Agreement, not the Symbionese Liberation Army.

And the thing that bugs me most about the SLA is not just that it is a bad deal that was originally 'struck' when the Minister responsible, David Emerson, chopped his negotiators' legs out from under them just as the final ruling from the American Court of International Trade was about to come down in our favour.

Or that the Canadian lumber industry was bullied by the same Minister into accepting it.

Or even that this recently reported $450 million dollar Bush Administration slush fund was set up with Canadian money.

No.

What really gets me is that a deal like this, and I'm pretty sure others to follow (think oil pipelines out of Alberta, water pipelines out of the Manitoba, and massive, HMO-assisted P3 health care delivery cash-cows everywhere), appears to be signalling Messr's Harper and Bush's true intention.

Which, of course, is to turn Canada into just 'another council tenancy' of Fortress North America.

But will we go for it?

I, for one, sure hope not.

Then again perhaps I shouldn't set my hopes too high.

After all, returning once more to the words of Mr. Rotten et al., it looks, at least for the moment, like for our......

Future dream is a shopping scheme.

OK?

_____
And that OttaWash thing is no joke. The two cities were was recently inserted, together, at the top of a Globe and Mail piece on the, you guessed it, SLA.

.