Quotulatiousness

July 18, 2019

Canada’s disputed claims to the Arctic

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Post Millennial, Jason Unrau writes about the Canadian government’s largely unsupported claims to the Northwest Passage as Canadian territorial waters:

If Canada is serious about defending sovereignty over its Arctic archipelago, Ottawa needs to develop better infrastructure there and start with a permanent military base, says the only MP who attended the International Arctic Forum held in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“The conversation was that it’s international waters. From a Canadian perspective we lay claim to it, but the international community is really looking at it as international waters,” said David Yurdiga, Conservative MP for Fort McMurray–Cold Lake Alberta.

“There are plans to open up the Northwest Passage and connect it as part of international shipping lanes, as they call it … even the U.S. says it’s international waters.”

Canada’s jurisdiction over the waterway was last publicly questioned at the meeting of Arctic Council nations in Finland, where U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Canada’s claim “illegitimate”.

[…]

But back in the real world, nobody cares about Canada’s claims to our Arctic archipelago, except for us, said Yurdiga. And barely a month before Scheer and Freeland duked it out on Twitter, in St. Petersburg, according to Yurdiga, only department staff attended the International Arctic Forum – not MPs, nor ministers.

“I was really shocked there was no representative from the government,” Yurdiga said. “We have international communities talking about these as international waters, and we have nobody from the Canadian government pushing back on our sovereignty. We’ve got to be an active player.”

July 17, 2019

Andrew Scheer falls into carefully prepared media trap on “conversion therapy”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley explains why federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is now being pilloried over his stance on banning so-called “conversion therapy”:

Andrew Scheer meets British Prime Minister Theresa May
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The day before Global ran its story, CBC reported it had “obtained” a letter the feds sent to the provinces in June asking them to ramp up efforts to outlaw preposterous and potentially dangerous so-called treatments designed to turn homosexual people into heterosexual people. “The provincial, territorial, municipal and federal governments all have roles to play to protect Canadians from the harms associated with this practice,” read the letter, signed by federal Justice Minister David Lametti among others. “The federal government is committed to doing everything within its jurisdiction to combat conversion therapy” — including, supposedly, amendments to the Criminal Code.

Global took that to Scheer, who had nothing nice to say about conversion therapy: “We will always … stand up for the rights of LGBTQ individuals and protect their rights and … we’re opposed to any type of practice that would forcibly attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation.”

Asked whether he would support a “ban,” Scheer responded precisely as opposition leaders always do in the absence of legislation: “We will wait and see exactly what is being contemplated.” After all, Scheer trenchantly noted, “this is something that this Liberal government is only now recently proposing.”

This entirely reasonable position begat the above-noted headline, and the above-noted headline begat mass outrage — including among commentators who know very well how the game is played. “Why would you allow any ambiguity about where you stand?” Global radio host Charles Adler fumed on Twitter, addressing Scheer. “Why can’t you just say this so-called therapy is peddled by charlatans. It exploits vulnerable people including children. Voluntary or coercive, it’s bogus.”

Now, if you think it’s self-evident that conversion therapy ought to be illegal in Canada, and you hold anyone who doesn’t share and proselytize that opinion in contempt, then Scheer has given you your answer. But if that’s what you think, you should be just as furious with the Liberals — probably more.

Not only is the “plan for (a) conversion therapy ban” referred to in the Global headline nothing of the sort, but rather a hitherto private and suddenly, conveniently, public letter that explicitly leaves open the question of federal jurisdiction. But the letter was sent just a few weeks after the Liberals ruled out exactly what the headline would have us believe they are now proposing!

VIA Rail’s “High Frequency Rail” proposal

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Trains, Bill Stephens outlines some of the strikes against VIA Rail Canada’s hopes for a dedicated passenger-train-only route between Toronto and Quebec City:

Last month VIA’s $4 billion plan got a $71 million boost that will fund additional feasibility studies. It shouldn’t take $71 million to figure out the plan is fatally flawed. Why? Because it won’t accomplish its chief aim: Eliminating the mind-boggling delays related to sharing tracks with Canadian National freight trains.

To be successful, passenger service needs to be fast, frequent, and dependable. VIA’s current service is faster than driving between Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal. It’s fairly frequent, too, with seven weekday departures between Toronto and Montreal. But it’s not dependable. On-time performance is in the low 70% range for the entire Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor. VIA blames the late trains on interference from CN freights, primarily on the double-track route linking Toronto and Montreal.

So you can understand why VIA would lobby the Canadian government for a dedicated passenger route. Last year VIA’s Eastern Corridor, the Canadian equivalent of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, carried three-quarters of VIA’s entire ridership. It stands to reason that you can fill more seats with service that’s faster, more frequent, and more reliable.

[…]

Keeping passenger and freight trains on time takes a combination of operational discipline, the right track capacity, and a willingness to make it work. CN takes pride in its operational discipline, and executives say the Eastern portion of the railroad, between Chicago and Halifax, is underutilized. What’s missing, it seems, is a willingness to expedite VIA trains.

VIA needs a cooperative host railroad more than it needs a new route that would bypass intermediate population centers, face opposition from the not-in-my-backyard crowd, take years to build, and in the end would still have to rely on shared trackage in key areas.

Also a monumental problem without an apparent solution: Squeezing extra trains into Toronto Union Station and Central Station in Montreal on new approaches that would only complicate operations and increase conflicts with freight and commuter traffic.

July 15, 2019

War by other means – the “grey zone”

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell discusses that field of conflict that isn’t recognizably war, but is still an arena of struggle between state actors:

I said, about 18 months ago, that “Western leaders like Presidents Marcon and Trump, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Ministers Abe, May, Rutte, Trudeau, Turnbull all see ‘war’ as a binary choice ~ you’re either fighting or you’re not, while Putin and Xi see it as spectrum wherein actual armed conflict is only one of many, many choices. We, in the US-led West, are not ‘playing’ the same strategic ‘game’ as our competitors … that’s a mistake on our part.” War in the “grey zone” or a strategy of “constructive ambiguity,” as The Economist explains it, is the most likely form of great power competition for the foreseeable future.

[…]

There are, the report suggests, two overarching strategic concepts for responding to the grey zone threats:

  • The report’s proposed strategic concept rests on four (interrelated) notions ~

    • – Shaping an allied strategy supportive of U.S. and partner objectives over the long term,

    – Actively, now, deterring a handful some of the more dangerous forms of grey zone aggression,

    – Preventing the day-to-day use of some of the more-elaborate grey zone techniques, and

    – Maintaining resilience in the lower-level, persistent competition areas; and

  • To implement the strategic concept, the report proposes a preliminary list of about three dozen response options for American and allied officials to consider, such as stationing permanent new military capabilities in key locations, anticipating political meddling and blunting the effects with information operations planned in advance, and denying the aggressor participation in key economic institutions.

That’s all well and good, but: how to implement such a strategy? What to do? How to do it? And who is to do it? The report recommends that:

  • America and its allies, partners, and friends ~ and this must include Canada ~ need to decide what actions are intolerable in the grey zone environment. But, the report says, it is hard to stop, much less prevent, gradual, sometimes unattributable actions involving secondary interests, so identifying the actions that the US-led West will seek to deter is the one reliable way to draw a boundary or a “red-line” around the possible effects of grey zone encroachment; and
  • The US and its allies should adopt a “multicomponent strategy” like the one outlined in the report, but we must all recognize that it will be of limited utility “if the U.S. government continues to lack a clear coordinating function with the responsibility for overseeing a renewed effort to gain strategic advantage in the gray zone.” The report concludes that an important part of any grey zone response strategy, therefore, is undertaking institutional reform, such as assembling purpose-built office in the U.S. government, and in allied nations and alliances, like NATO, with significant dedicated staff, to conduct real-time counter–grey zone campaigns.

So, what does this mean for Canada?

A couple of months ago I said that the world is changing and Canada must change, too. I made a few recommendations: I said that we have to have an interest-based strategy … one focused on our vital interests in the world. I suggested that we must be less reliant on one or two cornerstones, the USA and NATO, and, instead, build a better foundation with more friends and groups. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what Justin Trudeau has accomplished in the past 3¾ years ~ instead, he has alienated traditional allies, even Australia, and major trading partners like China and rising great powers like India. His ineptitude is stunning … our foreign policy is a national disgrace. We need to rebuild our once-sterling reputation for fair dealing and for doing a fair share. Finally, I said, we need to rebuild our hard (military) power so that we can use our soft power to good effect.

[…]

The point is that some grey zone operations are not “conventional,” and while some grey zone warriors are soldiers, many others are quite decidedly unmilitary … but, we’ve been there before, unconventional warfare is not new, nor are unconventional warriors, whichever side they might be serving. But, the grey zone is never the only area of operation. Just as soft power is only useful if one has enough hard, military power to make one’s voice heard, so grey zone operations are always part of a larger grand strategic plan that aims to secure quite conventional objectives. That’s why war in the grey zone must be fought by both conventional forces, as we fought the first Cold War, for example, and by unconventional forces which might be strange and even a little frightening to those used to seeing “‘war’ as a binary choice ~ you’re either fighting or you’re not.”

We, America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark and, and, and, are being attacked in the grey zone now, whether we like it or not and whether we understand it or not. We need to defend ourselves in both conventional and unconventional ways … and then counter-attack. In fact, the war in the grey zone is being fought, sometimes, even now, on Canadian soil, by Canadians and some political parties and leaders are sometimes complicit in activities that do real, serious harm to Canada’s relations with other great nations. But the war in the grey zone, is, as I said, just above, part of a bigger, grand strategic plan that needs to be countered by both conventional and unconventional means. As much as we need to do (and avoid doing) things that impact the grey zone we must, simultaneously, be prepared to do things that strengthen our position in the “binary,” black and white world of conventional power.

QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The public broadcaster is a sticky wicket, admittedly. If every privately held media outlet in the land wound up business there would still be CBC News, providing some very serviceable-to-excellent coverage of cities, provinces, territories and their governments across this land. It reduces the private organs’ leverage. But Britain’s private media competes just fine against the BBC, and ours compete just fine against CBC today in the world of television and online news — and well they might.

CBC’s television and online news departments are a haunted museum of bloat, larding tons of valuable content with tiresome victim-mongering; endless why-didn’t-the-government-prevent-this stories; Trudeau propaganda snaps beamed straight in from the Prime Minister’s Office; a dumb, tawdry nightly newscast; an opinion section that pays writers way over market (though, ahem, nothing more than what’s fair!); Canadian Press wire copy of which a lavishly resourced public broadcaster has no earthly need; and an entire clickbait department that’s stealing digital advertising revenue from private-sector outlets. It has no clear mandate to do much of this in the first place — indeed, the Heritage Committee recommended getting CBC out of digital revenue altogether — and unlike CBC Radio and SRC, I’m not aware of a single human being who supports the TV/online status quo.

Chris Selley, “Federal government should stop trying to help private media and fix the CBC”, National Post, 2017-06-20.

July 13, 2019

Piling on the charges to encourage plea bargaining – modern policing at work

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A recent local crime story included the following laundry list of charges for one of the accused:

Shaquille Lovell, 21, of Ritson Road South in Oshawa is charged with careless carry of a prohibited firearm, contravention of storage regulations, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking (cocaine).

He was found to be carrying a prohibited weapon (a handgun) and a controlled substance (cocaine). Those two offences should be more than enough to prosecute with strong chance of conviction. All the rest of the bafflegab charges appear to be piled on to encourage plea bargaining, because they’re literally peripheral to the main criminal activity the accused has been charged with.

Lawyers, especially legal aid lawyers, will encourage the accused to “bargain down” the charges — one of the reasons for so many separate charges being applied — to avoid the cost and delay of a full trial … and the risk of facing the full potential sentence. Even relatively well-to-do middle class people will be more likely to want to avoid a long, drawn-out legal battle because it might well cost them everything they own. Poor people don’t even have that much of an option.

Canadian law enforcement is continuing to follow down the path of the United States, where a 90% conviction rate is considered low. According to Statistics Canada, “In 2013/2014, 63% of all cases completed in adult criminal court resulted in a finding of guilt”, but also “The extent to which plea negotiations are utilized in Canada currently remains unknown.”

July 11, 2019

To lose one VCDS may be regarded as misfortune; to lose five looks like horrific leadership failure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

(Apologies to Oscar for my misappropriation of his phrasing for the title of this post.) The current Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff has announced his resignation. Lieutenant General Paul Wynnyk will resign from his current role after rumours circulated that he was to be replaced with former VCDS Vice-Admiral Mark Norman. Ted Campbell has more:

I see, from a story on Global News, broken by Mercedes Stephenson, of Global and David Pugliese (Post Media), two journalists with very good sources inside DND and the Canadian Armed Forces, that “The second in command of Canada’s military Lt.-Gen. Paul Wynnyk is resigning after he said Chief of the Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance planned to replace him as the vice chief of the defence staff with Vice-Admiral Mark Norman … [but] … Vance then reversed that plan weeks later, according to Wynnyk, when Norman settled with the government and retired from the military.”

Lieutenant General “Wynnyk was the fifth vice chief to serve under Vance, and questions are now being raised about his leadership, senior military sources told Global News … [and, the report says] … There are now questions about who will fill the job next. No one appears to be ready, the sources said.” With the utmost respect to Mercedes Stephenson’s sources, who are, I suspect three and two-star admirals and generals, almost any general officer is “ready” to be Vice Chief of the Defence Staff or to fill almost any other “flag” appointment (jobs like surgeon general and the judge advocate general being obvious exceptions). I lived through times when the head of the Army’s equipment engineering branch was not an engineer ~ but was picked specifically because he could lead and manage people and could leave the “engineering” to subordinates, and when a logistics officer ran the Army, to the horror or a few combat branch dinosaurs, and when a Signals officer was Chief of the Defence Staff, too, because, at the time, the top leaders still understood that generals are generalists. I will assert, some will disagree but they are wrong, that almost every rear admiral and major general, from almost every corner of the military, is “ready” right now, to be Chief of the Defence Staff and almost every commodore and brigadier general is equally “ready” to be the Vice Chief. If that is not the case then the Canadian Forces’ leadership system is in a crisis right now, which only a wholesale slaughter of admirals and generals will rectify … or else there will be a slaughter of young Canadian men and women when our armed forces muct face a near-peer enemy.

At the risk of repeating myself:

  • The current military command and control (C²) superstructure is beyond bloated, it is morbidly obese;
  • The military C² system has things back-asswards ~ staff officers outrank combat commanders. We have commodores and brigadier generals sitting behind big desks in Ottawa when they ought to be commanding flotillas, brigades and air groups. The desks in HQs should be occupied by Navy captains and commanders and Army and RCAF colonels and lieutenant colonels, all of whom are, already, proven executives;
  • The CDS should be a three-star officer, a vice admiral or a lieutenant general ~ Canada, with only about 110,000 men and women, regular and reserve, in uniform, doesn’t need a four-star CDS. Reducing her or his rank would be an act “pour encourager les autres;”
  • The military’s command culture must start with getting the foundation right. The recruiting, selection, training and development of junior leaders, corporals and 2nd lieutenants (using the Army as my example), must be the highest priority for every single senior officer. If the foundation is solid then developing admirals and generals will not be a problem. If, as I suspect, the foundation is weak, if there is rank inflation, as I assert there is, at the tank/rifle section and troop/platoon command levels, then problems are going to persist and be magnified at the unit (ship, regiment or squadron), formation (group, brigade, wing and higher) and command levels and in National Defence HQ, too. Eventually, if the foundation is weak then we, Canadians will pay the price in blood … the blood of our sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters.

The genesis of the administrative state during the Great Depression

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Leonid Sirota provides some interesting background on the rise of the administrative state during the 1930s:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

To a degree that is, I think, unusual among other areas of the law, administrative law in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada is riven by a conflict about its underlying institution. To be sure there, there are some constitutional lawyers who speak of getting rid of judicial review of legislation and so transferring the constitution to the realm of politics, rather than law, but that’s very much a minority view. Labour unions have their critics, but not so much among labour lawyers. But the administrative state is under attack from within the field of administrative law. It has, of course, its resolute defenders too, some of them going so far as to argue that the administrative state has somehow become a constitutional requirement.

In an interesting article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State” [PDF] recently published in the Notre Dame Law Review, Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson challenge the defenders of the administrative state by pointing out its intellectual origins in what they persuasively argue was

    a time, worldwide and in the United States, of truly awful ideas about government, about humanity, and about the fundamental unit of moral worth—ideas which, even in relatively benign forms, have institutional consequences that … should be fiercely resisted.

That time was the 1930s.

Professors Calabresi and Lawson point out that the creation of the administrative state was spearheaded by thinkers ― first the original “progressives” and then New Dealers ― who “fundamentally did not believe that all men are created equal and should democratically govern themselves through representative institutions”. At an extreme, this rejection of the belief in equality led them to embrace eugenics, whose popularity in the United States peaked in the 1930s. But the faith in expertise and “the modern descendants of Platonic philosopher kings, distinguished by their academic pedigrees rather than the metals in their souls” is a less radical manifestation of the same tendency.

The experts, real or supposed ― some of whom “might well be bona fide experts [while] [o]thers might be partisan hacks, incompetent, entirely lacking in judgment beyond their narrow sphere of learning, or some combination thereof” ― would not “serve as wise counselors to autonomous individuals and elected representatives [but] as guardians for servile wards”. According to the “advanced” thinkers of the 1930s, “[o]rdinary people simply could not handle the complexities of modern life, so they needed to be managed by their betters. All for the greater good, of course.” Individual agency was, in any case, discounted: “the basic unit of value was a collective: the nation, the race, or the tribe. Individuals were simply cells in an organic whole rather than ends in themselves.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

Unofficial High Speed Tour of Borden Base Military Museum

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The_Chieftain
Published on 8 Jun 2019

Canadian Forces Base Borden is located about an hour’s drive North of Toronto. The base is open access, so anyone can go to the museum.

In addition to the vehicles at the museum, there are others scattered as monuments around the base. I encountered a T-72 and T-55 on my way out the gate.

July 10, 2019

Liberals: “vote for us, you ignorant, uneducated conservative plebians!”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne sneaks in a literary quote from Chesterton on the eternal snobbery of the not-so-hidden class war in Canadian politics:

Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”

In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.

It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).

The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).

At the Post Millennial, Joshua Lieblein describes his initial reaction followed by sober second thoughts:

When I read the following condescending tweets from University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, my first thought was, “Well, somehow he wasn’t educated enough to predict this reaction. What did he expect?”

[…]

And then I realized that I wasn’t giving him enough credit. Professor Attaran knew exactly what to expect.

Professor Attaran wants you to read his unsolicited and deliberately insulting tweets. He wants you to talk about the tight links between the polling firm that provided him with his QUOTATION and the Liberal Party of Canada. He wants you to hurl all kinds of abuse at him.

Then, he and others will go through the pile of invective generated by this Sunday evening musing, pick out the most racist and inflammatory takes, and use them to justify the idea that facts are under assault, that minorities cannot speak out on issues of the day in Canada, that Conservatives don’t believe in freedom of speech, and that “right-wing mobs” exist and are being directed by CPC thought leaders.

It’s not like this is a new phenomenon, or something that’s new to Canada. Did you think all of Trudeau’s ridiculous behaviour was spontaneous? Sure, some of it is. The man is a certifiable moron. But we really should have guessed that we were being played for fools by the time he was doing shirtless photobombs of weddings.

July 9, 2019

Plan Red: Britain and America’s Planned Wars on Each Other

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historigraph
Published on 27 Jan 2019

If you enjoyed this video and want to see more made, consider supporting my efforts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/historigraph

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Sources:

Christopher M. Bell, “Thinking the Unthinkable: British and American Naval Strategies for an Anglo-American War, 1918-1931”, The International History Review, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Nov. 1997).

Kevin Lippert, War Plan Red: The United States’ Plan to Invade Canada and Canada’s Secret Plan to Invade The United States (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)

Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals

Ben Wilson, Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy

July 8, 2019

Ottawa defends intrusive impaired driving rules against Maxime Bernier’s criticism

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ali Taghva reports on the contretemps over federal impaired driving rules that PPC leader Maxime Bernier slagged on Twitter:

Earlier today the official Twitter account for the Department of Justice had to issue a clarification after Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, called the organization out for posting a worrying public announcement in both English and French.

In their original announcement, the Justice Canada account clearly stated that you could be arrested if you were to enjoy a drink after driving. The statement seemed to include summer time drinking on your own patio, noting that “It’s summertime and the living is easy! Whether you’re sitting on a patio or having a backyard #BBQ, remember it’s against the #law to have a blood alcohol concentration over prohibited levels within two hours of driving.”

The clarification posted since then pointed to a section in the law that prohibits conviction for those who decide to drink after arriving home safely.

I’d laugh at the awkward tweets if the actual law and the potential repercussions weren’t so damn serious.

While Justice Canada has issued a clarification, their mistake only highlights the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with the recent legal changes brought forward through the adoption of Bill C-46 and its cousin C-45.

July 4, 2019

Is there a country with which Justin Trudeau hasn’t messed up Canada’s relationship?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell responds at some length to a Globe and Mail article by Doug Saunders, outlining the degradation of diplomatic relations with almost all our allies and trading partners since Justin Trudeau became PM.

The Globe and Mail‘s award-winning international affairs correspondent Doug Saunders, someone with whom I (almost equally) often disagree and agree, has penned an insightful piece in the Good Grey Globe in which he says that “Suddenly, Canada finds itself almost alone in the world, with a Liberal government realizing that its optimistic foreign policy no longer entirely makes sense … [but, he concludes] … Even if the current crisis in liberal democracy proves temporary and short-lived, we know that it can recur – and likely will. If the institutions of 1945 no longer work and the doctrines of 2015 have failed to have an effect, we should develop new ones that will keep Canada connected to the better parts of the world for the rest of the century.”

[…]

“After the Second World War,” Mr Saunders writes, “Canada gained a few more foreign-policy outlets. Canada played a large role in creating the institutions that governed the postwar peace: the United Nations and its various organizations; NATO; the global trade body that became the World Trade Organization; the Bretton Woods institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Canada was decisive in the international agreement that authorized the future creation of the twin states of Israel and Palestine, giving it a role in the Middle East that expanded with its creation of the institution of peacekeeping after the Suez Crisis in 1956 … [but this really is a silly statement, albeit one that too many Canadians believe to be true. Canada didn’t create the “institution of peacekeeping” in 1956. It was already there, in the United Nation’s case since Ralph Bunch (USA) and Sir Brian Urquhart (UK) created it in 1948 and it had been around since, at least, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech in 1918, but it is now part of the Laurentian Elite‘s quite dishonest revisions of Mike Pearson’s sterling legacy as a diplomat and politician] … And, starting in the 1950s, Canada became a player and a spender in the new field of foreign aid and development. Under both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments, Canada used those tools to play a small but well-regarded place in the liberal-democratic order – and to slowly but profitably build its trade and economic relations.”

[…]

I agree with Doug Saunders about the sources of Canada’s current weakness. He neglected to mention the root cause: Pierre Trudeau explicitly rejected, in the late 1960s, the “St Laurent Doctrine” and replaced it with a social “culture of entitlement” which meant that our place in the world had to be sacrificed on the altar of a reinforced social safety net. I agree that Donald J Trump is the key to our and the West’s current angst and confusion, not Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Arab terrorists, all of whom are easier to understand, but I would argue that we would be much better placed to cope with president trump and the 21st century had we not abandoned our role as a leading middle power circa 1970. I have reservations about all three of Mr Saunder’s prescriptions:

  • I’m not sure another G-N, not even a “committee to save the world” is a really good idea;
  • I am nervous about interfering in the internal affairs of other countries ~ think about “do unto others” and all that; and
  • I really doubt that Canadians are ready to spend what’s needed on our defence and, I suspect, they will not be until it is (almost) too late.

Like Mr Saunders, Mr Lang and Professor Paris, I, too, want to save the liberal world order and Canada’s place in it; I’m just not sure that any of the proposed solutions offered by Doug Saunders, by Eugene Lang or even by Professor Roland Paris are going to be enough. I think we need less formality and fewer organizations in international actions and a lot more ad hocery. I hope that we will have new, adult leadership here in Canada in the fall of 2019 and I hope that a new, grownup prime minister will begin, quickly, to mend relations with Australia, India, Japan and the Philippines and other Asian nations, to shore up our relations with Europe and, especially, with Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and UK. I also hope Canada will open new, more productive dialogues with Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and with Iran, Russia and China, also. I am convinced that Professor Stein is correct and we must have an “interests-based,” even a selfish suite of foreign, defence, immigration and trade policies. We should not go about looking for enemies, but we must understand that we have precious few friends and, for now, we cannot count on America to be one of them. America, Australia and Britain, China, Denmark and India, Japan, Mexico and the Philippines, and Singapore and Senegal, too, will all act in pursuit of their own interests; Canada needs to be willing and able to do the same and to work with them, even with Donald Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia when our interests converge and, politely, stand aside when they diverge. The G7 and G20 and a proposed new G9 are all harmless, but also, largely useless, talking shops. Both diplomacy and foreign affairs must be conducted on a case-by-case, country-by-country, issue-by-issue and interest-by-interest basis and diplomacy and foreign affairs can only be conducted with positive effect when Canada is respected for both its examples and values (soft power) and for its hard, economic and military power, too.

Thus, the first step in doing our part to “save the world” is probably the one that most Canadians will have near the bottom of their priority list: rebuilding Canada’s military ~ which must start, after a lot of the fat has been trimmed from a morbidly obese military command and control (C²) superstructure, with steadily growing the defence budget … and that cannot happen until the economy is firing on all cylinders, including energy exports to the world.

July 3, 2019

Canada’s “elite”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jay Currie responded to a CBC article on a recent poll that found “nearly 80 per cent of Canadians either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement: ‘My country is divided between ordinary people and elites’.”

The CBC interviewee, Tony Laino, at Fordfest, said describing elites, “Those that think they’re better than me,” he said. “Because I don’t espouse their beliefs.”

Which misses the point. Elites really don’t think of guys like Tony Laino at all. Largely because, as Charles Murray points out in Coming Apart, the new upper class rarely, if ever, meets the Tony Lainos of the world. Murray was writing about white people in America but much the same social bi-furcation is taking place in Canada. Murray looks at education, wealth, marriage, access and what he refers to as the rise of the super-zips, areas where highly educated, well connected, well off people live with others of their class and kind. It is an accelerating phenomenon in the US and it is plainly visible in Canada. Murray quotes Robert Reich as calling this, “the segregation of the successful”.

Inside elite communities “the issues” look very different than they do in the more pedestrian parts of the country. A few pennies extra for gas or heating oil or natural gas to fight the universally acknowledged menace of “climate change” makes perfect sense if your income is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It is downright terrifying if you are making $50K. Only bigots and racists could be anti-imigration when you, yourself, live in virtually all white, old stock, Canadian enclaves and welcome refugees and migrants who you will never see.

The populist moment has not yet come to Canada and, if Andrew Scheer’s brand of Liberal lite wins in October, there will probably be another decade of elite consolidation before a proper populist movement gets off the ground. Whether it will be right populism a la Trump and Farange, or left populism with a firebrand NDP leader, is hard to say. However, as the Canadian elite grows more insular and disconnected from the ordinary life of Canada and Canadians, that populist moment draws closer.

July 2, 2019

Rebecca Jensen on strategy, tactics and the need for a Canadian approach to “operational art”

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rebecca Jensen’s submission was selected as one of five winners of the 2018 Defence and Security Essay Competition:

Over 12 years, the Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan cost 162 lives, more than 10 times as many wounded, and $18 billion in direct costs. While the tactical capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces were widely praised, it is unclear what benefit Canada or Afghanistan realized for this steep investment of blood and treasure.

“Operational art” is the term used in defence circles to describe the alignment of tactical accomplishments with strategic ends, since tactical victories alone, as coalition forces have learned in Afghanistan, do not ensure success. The development of a more rigorous approach to operational art in the CAF would help to shrink the gap between tactical accomplishments and strategic stagnation in future conflicts, particularly in coalition missions involving stabilization and development elements.

Operational art connects tactical activities to strategic objectives. Principle elements include the coordination of tactical efforts in space and time to achieve national goals, as well as the balancing of resources and risk. Fighting as part of a coalition, and in complex contingency operations that include elements of stability operations and conventional warfighting, makes the practice of operational art more difficult, as it increases the factors shaping inputs, the environment, and desired outcomes. In particular, it requires coalition members to account for, if not balance, coalition and national objectives, which may differ or even be at odds with each other.

The Canadian army adopted much US thinking about operational art in the 1980s. Confronted by a conflict in Afghanistan very different from that for which it had trained, the CAF reacted similarly, grafting American doctrine and perspectives onto the army’s existing thought and practices. Given the need for rapid adaptation in Afghanistan within an US-dominated coalition effort, this graft made had a pragmatic logic to it, but in the longer term, it is no substitute for the development of organic Canadian thought on the planning and conduct of war.

The publication of Land Operations [PDF] by Canada’s director of army doctrine in 2008 represented an important step in that direction. Crucially, it recognized the complexity of wars like Afghanistan, and the centrality of relationships with other services, nations, and agencies. However, the emphasis on particular end states, and the dualism implicit in the siloing of fires and influence operations, which take place on the physical and psychological planes respectively per the manual, is reductive and linear. When termination criteria include objectives as subjective and complex as a “stable and legitimate host government,” the military can more helpfully plan [PDF] for progress toward that state than be charged with achieving a particular result. While some military activities will be more concerned with influence than maneuver and vice versa, it is similarly unproductive to prompt the military to be aware of the physical and psychological planes. Not only are the moral and the material affected by any action, they are frequently irreducibly interconnected.

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