Month: January 2005

A scathing column on Paul Martin’s Liberals was published today in the National Post. The heart of the diatribe:

“To those countries and their citizens who are so much the subject of our prayers and our concern, we say simply that in Canada, you have the most caring of friends and strongest of allies.” — Paul Martin

Are we more caring than the Swedes or Italians or Australians or the dozens of other peoples who have dug deep as we have and have actually managed to show up? Are we stronger allies than the Americans, who have 12,500 military personnel in the region, an aircraft carrier, field hospitals and helicopters?

It turns out helicopters — helicopters that can actually fly — are useful things in a disaster. Even Bangladesh has sent helicopters and, of all things, two C-130 transports. Military aircraft are a shameful extravagance for such a poor country. But for a country like Canada that aspires to be a player in the world, the soft power of good intentions and eloquent resolutions is not enough. The hard power of helicopters is what people really need.

I am very proud that my country is donating a significant amount of money to provide aid for those that desperately need it, but Paul Martin might be better off writing an $80 million cheque to the Red Cross who is better equipped to handle such a crisis, in coordination with other countries that possess the proper tools and vehicles.

Please consider the following quotations:

“[Canadians have] a clear choice between aircraft carriers or health care” — Paul Martin during the 2004 federal election campaign on the difference between the Liberals and the Conservative Party of Canada

“Over the past six fiscal years, Canada has spent approximately $107 million on strategic airlift, an average of $18 million per year. This is but a mere fraction of the annual interest on the cost of our own strategic airlift – let alone the capital cost. And no one has yet been able to give me a single instance where the absence of this capability stopped us or significantly delayed us in moving people or equipment from point A to point B.” — Minister of Defense, Hon. John McCallum in a speech in October 2003.

The DART team was delayed by many days and will finally ship out this Thursday by two Russian-built Antonov heavy-lift aircraft. Moving the team will take a total of four flights (in sequence, not in parallel).

The drastic cuts to the Canadian military to a near point of non-existence has severely crippled Canada’s ability to live up to its international obligations. We might have intended to send DART to the areas affected by the tsunamis, however, we did not have the airlift capacity to do so. Other countries have their own strategic airlift capacity while others charter other aircraft (such as the Russian Antonov planes). Australia, for example, uses its own national commercial domestic cargo carrier Adagold. Canada has outsourced its airlift capacity and has delayed the deployment of DART as a result.

The Conservative Party of Canada and Stephen Harper, promised to increase military spending during the last election. The Liberals effectively scared Canadians by making them believe that military spending has some sort “war-mongering hidden agenda”. By gutting our military and by slashing our strategic airlift capacity, the Liberals have tied the helping hands of our military and Canada’s capacity as an international contributor to peace and humanitarian aid continues to pale.

As Canadians, we can still help provide tsunami relief. Click here for a list of charities providing tsunami relief

Here’s an interesting editorial speculating on the impact of extending the mandate of CSIS to include “foreign intelligence”. Yes, we have a spy agency yet it only spies within our own borders (think RCMP). In fact, the best method of being recruited by the agency is by excelling in Her Majesty’s Canadian mounted regiment. Canada remains the only G8 country which does not conduct foreign intelligence abroad and the Times Colonist columnist erroneously speculates, to the degree of misguided buffoonery, that if we got into the foreign spy business, our agents would be off to “Washington to rifle through the filing cabinets of unfriendly senators”.

Hardly.

Allow me to speculate. An extended CSIS mandate would create a foreign division which would focus primarily upon coordinating with the agency’s existent domestic wing to identify and prevent likely terrorists from entering the country. At first, Canadian agents would coordinate with DFAIT’s foreign service to establish a working network and to train agents in the field. The most difficult transition would be to facilitate the operation of our agents on foreign soil without a base of operations just around the block, or within the foreign state.

I always had somewhat of a childhood fantasy where Canada was indeed a global force in international espionage and the very fact that “nobody suspects the Canadians!” was our primary strength. I guess this was never true:

“When our secret service sent one of its ‘human sources’ off to spy on drug lords in a Far Eastern country in the 1980s, he ended up in jail because CSIS had reserved his hotel room under a ‘government of Canada’ account.”

Sigh…