Ho hum, another day, another example of mismanagement of the Canadian defence portfolio.A shortage of money and sailors is forcing Canada's navy to mothball half of its fleet of coastal patrol vessels.Canada's 12 Kingston-class ships, based in Halifax and Esquimalt, B.C., are operated by the navy reserve. The 55-metre vessels are used to patrol the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific ocean coasts.In a statement to CBC News, the navy says it made the tough choice to leave several ships at dock and strip them of their crews because it doesn't have the resources to operate all 12.Stand up for... ah, …
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Turns out our military isn't being 100% straight about what's happening in Afghanistan.Which is worse: a policy that allows the military to obscure from the people it serves what is actually going on, or a media group that willingly joins in with the scheme?Openness. Accountability. Bullshit. …
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The Montreal Gazette has a piece today about the spending plans for the Department of Defence. The NDP defence critic, Jack Harris, was able to get this information in the past, but now?In 2007, NDP researchers asked for and received the year-by-year spending estimates stretching out to 2050 that the military has for all of its new weapons programs, infrastructure and equipment. But Defence Department censors blacked out the annual spending estimates when the NDP asked for an updated version.And David Akin has a good idea of what's going on here: Since taking office in 2006, the Conservatives …
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The question of whether DART was deployed quickly enough in 2004 was brought up here, as CC notes here. As it happens, in 2007 I interviewed an officer who served on that DART team, and talked at length with him about the mission.Of course, it's all in the book, but I thought it might be germane to provide the relevant portion of the interview transcript here.We landed there on New Year’s Day, and the tsunami happened Boxing Day. So we were in theatre in less than a week. Obviously we were in the capital city. One of the problems with the DART, and I don’t want to get into the political …
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What communist Islam-loving leftopian anarchists are not supporting the troops today?That would be... the troops.Aftersnark: Let's be clear -- I'm not trying to use a dead soldier's (reported) words to bolster the case against Afghanistan; the issue will not be decided based on celebrity gotcha quotes and individual opinions.But for years I've been told that if I didn't support the mission in Afghanistan -- if I even questioned that mission -- I didn't support the troops. I think we can finally shitcan that line of reasoning now, can't we?CC here, with a postscript for readers popping over …
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Maxime Bernier, last summer:These briefing notes were not sensitive enough to be bar-coded, which explains why their disappearance did not set off any alarms in my department. For my part, I did not notice they were missing, I do not recall misplacing them.Reality, today:[Le Devoir] received heavily redacted copies of the material through the Access to Information Act. Still, in the parts that weren't blacked out, the newspaper says the documents contain information about — among other things — missile-defence systems, NATO's expansion to the Balkans, Afghan prisoners, arms control in the …
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Nationol Post writor Matt Gurnoy thinks that "war resistor" Kim Rivera should leave her children behind and sit in jail for a year or two to live "within the dictates of her conscience". This says plenty about Gurney's understanding and empathy concerning the war resisters issue, and the CPC talking points assigned to it.We already knew the writers at the Post were buffoons; now the headlines are showing that even the copyeditors are useless there. Why does anyone read that paper at all?Oh, right. They don't. …
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