Winnipeg, Oct. 3, 2019 – Arnold August, speaking at the University of Manitoba about US and Canadian foreign policy regarding Cuba and Venezuela. Photo: Paul S. Graham
There is no doubt that Canadian foreign policy has taken a hard turn to the right, especially with regard to Latin America. Arnold August provides the context and details the US led attacks on Cuba and Venezuela that Canada has been supporting so vigorously.
August is a Montreal-based Canadian journalist and lecturer, the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion and Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond.
He was a member of the Canadian Delegation invited to the Sao Paulo Forum in Caracas last July. His articles are published regularly on many web sites in Latin America, Cuba, Europe, North America and the Middle East. He collaborates with television and radio broadcasts based in Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Canada and U.S. He is a member of the Québec Chapter of the Network of Intellectuals, Artists and Social Movements in Defence of Humanity.
He gives conferences in Cuba, Canada, the UK and until recently the U.S., from which he was barred on March 16, 2019 for his political views and specifically his support for the Bolivarian Revolution.
Arnold August’s visit to Winnipeg was hosted by the Winnipeg Venezuela Peace Committee.
Paul S. Graham 
Good to hear. Perhaps August can also add Haiti to the list of countries we treat like dirt. There were recent protests in Montreal in the Haitian community there about our propping up of the current dictator, dismissed as unimportant by JT of course (I mean is he ever wrong?) but then he appeals court rulings in favour of First Nations here.
However, we can likely assign Freeland the honour of being our star warrior for the US War Party, the Democrats, who have always rather enjoyed running State and CIA and recently inserting war hawks into Trump’s orbit. Wilson started the Jim Crow segregation at home and was quite jealous of the Brits running their Empire – the Dems never looked back in their quest to tell the Latin Americans how to run their affairs after Ted Roosevelt destroyed the Phillipines as a nominal Republican, while contemporaneously being a conservationist and jolly good fellow at home. So from Latin American domination to the world, the US took over on more than the British ever had, using the basis of money and corrupt manipulation thereof. And of course, pressure from Canadian mining companies who’ve managed to be our worst export in old school colonialism helped the wind fill Freeland’s sails with constant lying about Venezuela. If they weren’t braying so loudly behind the scenes while organizing intellectual Munk debates publicly, perhaps Canada wouldn’t be so gung-ho corporatist in its approach to Latin America.
Quite why we should believe that letting right wing dictators rule over people to protect “our” interests while denying sovereigntists the right to run their own countries is a conundrum that the Canadian elite should ponder, but never has because it dosen’t want to. Remember Brascan? We believe our own BS about being wonderful caring people, while happily acting the exact opposite and extracting wealth from others without a qualm. Even our “professional” foreign affairs public servants seem to think we should act like arseholes, so hope for change is generally lost, I’d say.