iChaseGaming
Published on 10 Sep 2018A Know Your Ship episode talking about C & D class destroyers, in particular HMS Crescent and Diana and their later service as part of the Royal Canadian Navy HMCS Fraser and Margaree. Enjoy!
October 5, 2018
Know Your Ship #50 – C and D Class Destroyers – HMS Crescent & Diana, HMCS Fraser & Margaree
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October 4, 2018
Prairie Gun Works Timberwolf: British Trials Sniper Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 26 Sep 2017Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of the guns in this video, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post:
http://armamentresearch.com/north-ame…
The Timberwolf is a bolt action precision rifle made by Prairie Gun Works of Manitoba, Canada. It was initially made as a commercial rifle in a number of different calibers, and in 2001 it won Canadian trials to become the C14 Timberwolf Medium Range Sniper Weapon System (replacing the C3A1 Parker-Hale 7.62 NATO rifle previously used in that role).
The Timberwolf was also tested by the British military, and the one we have in today’s video (courtesy of the Shrivenham Defense Academy) is serial number UK001; the British trials rifle. It was not adopted, and the British opted to continue using Accuracy International bolt action rifles for its snipers.
In both the Canadian issue configuration and the British trials version, the rifle is chambered for the .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge, allowing a longer supersonic range than 7.62mm NATO.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
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October 3, 2018
Quebec election results – Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority
Global News rounds up the final poll results from Monday’s Quebec election:
After a 39-day election campaign, voters in Quebec headed to the polls Monday and elected the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) to power.
The CAQ, headed by François Legault, won a majority of seats delivering a crushing blow to the Quebec Liberal Party, who had held power for 13 of the last 15 years.
The CAQ was elected in 74 of the province’s 125 ridings, compared to 32 for the Liberals.
The Parti Québécois (PQ) suffered a double blow going from 28 seats to 9 and is once again without a leader, after Jean-François Lisée announced he was stepping down after losing his riding of Rosemont.
I really haven’t been following Quebec politics at all, so I didn’t know much about the CAQ’s stance on the issues. Here, cribbed from the Wikipedia page are some of their issues gleaned from the party platform (selective emphasis mine):
- CAQ Leader François Legault has promised to reduce the tax burden of Quebecers. A CAQ government, he says, will further harmonize school taxes across the province, a tax cut valued at $700 million.
- A long-standing party proposal is to create a Quebec version of Silicon Valley, which they’ve dubbed “The Saint-Laurent Project”. It envisions turning the Saint-Lawrence Valley into a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, with the collaboration of universities.
- Hoping to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs from the province’s civil service.
- As premier, Legault says he would temporarily reduce the number of immigrants Quebec accepts annually from 50,000 to 40,000.
- To qualify for a Quebec selection certificate, the CAQ wants immigrants to pass a values and language test. Immigrants would also have to prove they have been looking for employment. Some experts have questioned the legality of the plan.
- The party favours decentralizing health-care administration, while maintaining a universal free public health care system, Legault was quoted saying “The important thing is the universality of care. … I do not want more private. Our public [health care] is a jewel of Quebec.”
- Like the PQ, the CAQ also vowed to renegotiate with the Quebec’s medical specialists in order to cut their compensation by an average of $80,000 per year. Legault believes the specialists will be open to striking a new deal.
- Would overhaul the province’s longterm care system (CHSLDs) with a new network of smaller, more “humane” homes at an initial cost of $1 billion.
- Wants to abolish school boards and replace them with service centres that would provide administrative support to schools. The party believes this would give schools greater autonomy and make the education system cheaper to run.
- Wants to increase the mandatory age of staying in school to 18, to reduce the drop out rate.
- Wants added homework help, extracurricular activities (sport and culture), additional funding for career guidance and tutors assigned to more vulnerable students.
- The CAQ is also proposing to do away with progressive daycare pricing, though over a period of four years. All Quebec parents would be charged the same daily rate, regardless of their annual income.
- Opposes the wearing of religious symbols, including the hijab, by police officers and others who wield coercive state power. The party would also ban school teachers from wearing religious symbols.
- Would pass a “Secularism Charter” to reduce the scope of religious accommodations available to civil servants.
- Calls itself nationalist. It wants more power for Quebec, but within Canada. Legault, a former PQ cabinet minister, has promised a CAQ government will never hold a referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
- Legault wants to seek additional powers for Quebec, including control over immigration, increased fiscal capacity and a say in the nomination of Supreme Court justices. Some of these measures would require re-opening the Constitution.
- Supports international greenhouse gas reduction targets and would promote “technological innovations to ensure their achievement”.
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USMCA (aka son-of-NAFTA) – what’s the damage after all?
The most common sentiment from Canadian comments appears to be “meh, it could have been much worse”. That doesn’t mean it’s particularly good, either:
All that cross-border yelling, a solid year of bluster and petulance, dire rhetoric about “stabs in the back” and “special places in hell,” fake deadlines and all-night negotiations, and we end up with pretty much the agreement we started with? All that was required to fix NAFTA, that destroyer of American jobs and pox on its prosperity, the deal Donald Trump memorably complained was “the worst agreement in history,” was to change its name — from North American Free Trade Agreement to US-Mexico-Canada Agreement? Seriously?
Not quite. The result is certainly a far heave from some of the more apocalyptic scenarios we had been entertaining ourselves with. But neither is it the largely unaltered “NAFTA 2.0” of much initial comment. There are substantive changes in there, most of them bad, and not all of them imposed by an overbearing U.S. on an unwilling Canada.
Still, it’s not quite the conflagration we’d been banking on, is it? Trump is the bully in middle school who threatens to take your lunch money, only to settle for a half a slice of your pizza. Or, in this case, 3.6 per cent of it.
That’s the share of the Canadian dairy market to which the U.S. will now have tariff-free access, a slight advance on the 3.25 per cent market share the U.S. had negotiated under the Trans Pacific Partnership — before Trump withdrew from it. (Oh, and “milk price classes 6 and 7” are eliminated, for fans of that dispute. It involves skim milk solids.) There are also some minor increases in tariff-free imports in the other supply-managed sectors: eggs, chicken, cheese and so on. Everything else will face the same triple-digit tariffs, as before.
That’s unfortunate. Supply management is a blight on the Canadian political and economic landscape we could well do without. The NAFTA re-negotiations were an ideal opportunity to bargain it away, as it should have been in the original NAFTA. That it remains more or less intact — even the dairy lobby could manage only a half-hearted jeremiad of imminent lacto-doom in response — is one of the chief disappointments in this agreement.
Still, what did you expect? There was never any chance of these negotiations resulting in a deepening and broadening of NAFTA — not with protectionists on both sides of the table. The only question was whether the status quo protectionists on this side — who wished to preserve all of NAFTA’s existing exemptions — could hold out against the expansionist protectionists on the other, who wished to cut NAFTA into little mercantilist pieces. As it turns out the answer is: surprisingly well.
A quick summary of the winners and losers in this agreement:
Is this a free trade agreement?
No. Unlike NAFTA, this latest agreement makes no pretense to be about free trade (or even freer trade). It’s a protectionist agreement imposed by the U.S. on the other two countries.
Who benefits from the agreement?
The primary beneficiaries of the agreement are labor unions, U.S. dairy farmers, U.S. drug manufacturers, and companies that provide automation for manufacturers (e.g., robot makers).
The agreement will require at least 30 percent of cars (rising to 40 percent by 2023) to be made by workers earning $16 an hour. This will force more cars to be produced in the U.S. and Canada since the typical manufacturing wage in Mexico is only about $5 per hour. The agreement also requires Mexico to make it easier for workers to form unions, which will make them less competitive against more productive unionized workers in the U.S. and Canada.
U.S. dairy farmers will also gain greater access to the Canadian market. Because of new restrictions on how much dairy Canada can export, there is the potential for U.S. dairy to gain a greater market share in foreign countries.
U.S. drug companies will also be able to sell pharmaceuticals in Canada for 10 years (rather than eight) before facing generic competition.
Because the agreement makes human labor in the three countries somewhat more costly, companies that create robots and other automation will likely be the long-term beneficiaries.
Who are the biggest losers in this agreement?
As with almost all protectionist trade agreements, consumers are the ones who will be hurt the most.
As the Washington Post notes, economists and auto experts think USMCA is going to cause car prices in the U.S. to “rise and the selection to go down, especially on small cars that used to be produced in Mexico but may not be able to be brought across the border duty-free anymore.”
Because the restrictions on Canadian steel and aluminum also remain in place, businesses that use those materials in manufacturing will pay inflated prices, and their products will be less competitive on the global market.
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October 1, 2018
The rebirth of Quebec separatism?
Conrad Black wants to provoke clinical depression in anyone who was around for the last round of Quebec separatism, and warns that we’ve been ignoring the issue while it’s been reviving in La Belle Province:
Canada is very late and very laconically beginning to consider the implications of the Quebec election on Oct. 1. If, on Monday night, as polls indicate, 40 per cent of Quebecers have voted for overtly separatist parties (Québec solidaire and the Parti Québécois) and 30 per cent for a party that declines to say separation is undesirable, only that it will not hold a referendum (Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ), no one should imagine that this is not a threat to this country. I have written here before that Canada would regret the refusal of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau to discuss methods of reintegrating Quebec into the Constitution, which would not have solved the problem permanently, but would have greatly strengthened federalism.
The issue of separatism appeared to die, but that is the nature of Quebec nationalism: it never dies, it just becomes comatose for a time. And though almost no one yet describes this Quebec election in these terms, the governing Liberals of Premier Philippe Couillard seem to be about even at 30 per cent with François Legault’s moderate left, constitutionally ambiguous CAQ. Legault was long an explicit separatist, and has not renounced that view (and his wife, Isabelle Brais, thinks English Canada has no culture and should have no status in Quebec). The Quebec Liberal party, like the British Columbia Liberal party, is really a Liberal-Conservative coalition. It governed very efficiently these past four years, but became an ecologically obsessed and eccentric regime. While it retains the support of most of the non-French, it is now pulling only a very unfeasible 17 per cent of the French Quebec vote.
Though the CAQ has been slipping, it has been losing ground to Québec solidaire, a rabidly separatist party that proposes immediate, unconditional secession. It is led by a declared Marxist who opposes the right of the State of Israel to exist, and, astonishingly, it may hold the balance of power in the National Assembly. It threatens to pass the original separatist PQ of former premiers René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, which hasn’t changed its tune but is whistling it more softly. The independence of Quebec has not been much raised in the campaign, but the implications of the emerging voting patterns assure that it will re-emerge.
And no discussion of the separatism question is complete without at least a nod in the direction of the Charlatan Accord:
The Charlottetown agreement on a substantial decentralization, put to a countrywide referendum in 1992, was defeated by 54 per cent of Canadians, though it had been approved by the federal parliament and all the provincial legislatures. Bouchard, Mulroney’s most prominent Quebec MP, deserted the government, founded the separatist Bloc Québécois, and led the 1995 referendum campaign in Quebec after Parizeau was elected premier. It was a slightly more explicit separatist question than Lévesque had posed 15 years before. Chrétien was over-confident, mishandled the campaign, and gave a slightly panic-stricken appeal to Quebec voters on referendum-eve. It was 50.6 to 49.4 per cent for the federalists, a clear separatist victory for the French Quebecers, and the turnout was 93.4 per cent.
Chrétien somewhat redeemed himself with the Clarity Act of 1999, based on the results of a Supreme Court referral, which held that any secession had to be on the basis of a substantial majority supporting a clear referendum question to secede. (I was one of those who urged that the Act also provide that any county in a seceding province that had voted not to secede and was contiguous to another province, should secede from the province and remain in Canada. My precedents, though I never got to cite them, were West Virginia and Ulster.) Lucien Bouchard lost interest in the idea of independence, and the Liberal party has governed in Quebec for 13 of the past 15 years. The present premier, Couillard, is the most unambiguously federalist Quebec premier since Jean-Jacques Bertrand in 1970, and it will not be long before he is missed by those in Ottawa who declined to discuss these issues with him. If he is out on Monday night, Couillard’s successors will blow a cold wind on Ottawa and across Canada just as the Trudeau government appears to be set to break up the relationship with the United States, and our automobile industry prepares to repatriate to the U.S. Justin might do better as the next leader of the Quebec Liberals.
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September 29, 2018
The Ontario government’s amazingly sensible approach to legal cannabis
Chris Selley expresses what a lot of surprised people must be feeling after Premier Doug Ford’s government introduced startlingly mature and sensible rules for the distribution and sale of cannabis products in the province after the federal government’s legalization is enacted:
The Ontario government tabled its cannabis retail framework in the legislature on Thursday, and it only further repudiates the Frightened Communist model envisioned by the Liberals. The government will sell pot online, as before, and will maintain a monopoly on wholesaling. But the rest will be up to the private sector, under the control of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission. As it stands, there won’t even be a cap on the number of licences; a government official said Thursday they expect 500 to 1,000 applications right off the bat.
In response, OPSEU president Smokey Thomas beamed out a furious press release on behalf of his spurned members — er, sorry, on behalf of Ontario’s “municipalities and communities.”
“Unlimited stores and unlimited places to smoke will cause unlimited problems,” Thomas averred. “It’s outrageous. We’re going to become the wild west of cannabis and Sheriff Doug Ford is going to skip town, leaving communities and municipalities holding the dime bag.”
Thomas predicted Premier Ford would hand out retail pot licences to “Conservative insiders” and “corporate donors.” (Corporate donations are illegal.) He accused Ford of funnelling what by rights should be public profits into “private pockets.”
“If Ontario’s finances are truly as bad as Ford wants us to believe, why is he giving away the millions, maybe even billions, in revenue we’d get if cannabis sales were public?” he asked.
Does the government make money on cigarettes? On alcohol sold in bars and restaurants, at privately run LCBO agency stores and, of late, in supermarkets? Of course it does. Scads of it.
So it’s all quite ridiculous, as OPSEU press releases tend to be. But Thomas is not wrong when he argues the new approach is remarkably permissive. Perhaps most notably, whereas the Liberals’ proposed rules banned using marijuana in public, the PCs’ would allow you to smoke or vape it anywhere you can tobacco (though not in cars or boats). But it’s far less permissive than one might expect in other ways as well.
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September 28, 2018
The Meuse-Argonne Offensive – Bulgarian Collapse I THE GREAT WAR Week 218
The Great War
Published on 27 Sep 2018This week, the biggest American military operation in history kicks off with 1.2 million American soldiers trying to take the Krimhilde Stellung. At the same time the Army of the Orient advances into Bulgaria and the Ottoman 7th and 8th armies collapse in Palestine.
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Ontario government lays out the path to a fully legal cannabis market
There is going to be a gap between the federal legalization date next month and the beginning of legal sales from brick-and-mortar stores in Ontario in April:
With the legalization of recreational marijuana around the corner, the Ontario government has finally answered some of the most burning questions about where residents can officially buy and smoke pot.
A day before new pot legislation is set to be tabled, The PC government announced earlier today that starting Oct. 17, weed will be up for sale at private retail pot shops by April next year.
Doing away with the cap on the number of licensed cannabis stores in the province, the government is officially taking a free-market approach to what would previously have been an LCBO monopoly under the Liberal provincial government.
[…]
Until April, cannabis will be sold exclusively online, distributed through federal wholesalers and the government’s Ontario Cannabis Store.
The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario will be in charge of regulating the marketplace, including granting and revoking pot shop licenses.
Store owners will need to apply for a retail-operator license as well as a retail store authorization for every location they open, which will be limited to a set number, to prevent possible over-expansion, Walmart-style.
There will also be restrictions for federal cannabis growers, who will only be able to hold “a single retail license at a single production site located in Ontario,” said Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney.
All currently existing pot stores who continuing to operate illegally after Oct. 17 will lose their right to ever apply for a license in the future, as will stores who have a history of dealing with organized crime and providing pot to minors.
Ontario’s new government agency, the Ontario Cannabis Retail Corp., will be in charge of handling online cannabis sales as well as wholesaling to private stores, who will potentially run the gamut from local pot shops to huge cannabis corporations.
There will be a minimum distance requirement between pot shops and schools set up in the future.
Any Ontario municipalities who don’t want pot shops on their turf — like Norfolk County in Southwestern Ontario, the first to vote no on cannabis storefronts — will have to opt out officially by Jan. 22, 2019, which they were previously barred from doing.
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September 27, 2018
“Oops” indeed!
Colby Cosh has a bit of good-natured fun-poking at the great and the good of the Canadian Establishment as an honorary Canadian turns out to be presiding over something that might be described as genocide:
President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Sometimes I am convinced that Canada is a name that will endure through the ages and travel with mankind throughout the galaxy. Sometimes I am convinced that we should be considered exclusively as a subject for absurdist fairy tales, a real-life Ruritania or Grand Fenwick. I guess it goes about 50-50. But I am afraid the emerging controversy over Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship puts us firmly in kooky Zembla territory.
The present State Counsellor of Burma was the fourth person ever to receive this distinction. Now we are talking about withdrawing her honorary citizenship because, as first minister of Burma, she has been heavily implicated in massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people of the country’s Rakhine state.
One in four: not such a great batting average, is it? Our political class devised the highest and most permanent form of honour that could be envisioned for a foreign do-gooder, and literally the fourth person on the entire surface of the planet who was deemed to have met the criteria went and became CEO of a genocide. What does this suggest about the collective judgment of Canada’s elite? You don’t suppose anyone is going to lose a job over this, do you?
[…]
Our prime minister is now spitballing the idea of having Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship withdrawn, and one supposes that if this might help save innocent lives, it ought to be considered, even at the price of turning this concocted showpiece institution of “honorary citizenship” into garbage. One of the essential meanings of citizenship is that it cannot be withdrawn, even with due process, even when a citizen has perpetrated unspeakable crimes. “Honorary citizenship” does not confer the legal rights of the real thing, but surely it is at least supposed to resemble the real thing — to represent a commitment of analogous significance and irreversibility as that which we enter into with immigrants taking the oath and joining the club over at the courthouse.
Since honorary citizenship is not conferred by Parliament, it is not clear that it could be revoked by Parliament. Probably an Order-in-Council would do (because, again, no enforceable rights are at stake). If this is done in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, it seems obvious that we should just put the institution in abeyance for a century or so. Let later generations see if they can manage not to screw up this honorary citizenship thing so thoroughly.
September 22, 2018
The Distant Early Warning Line
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 23 Apr 2018The History Guy examines how the Cold War transformed Canada with the establishment of the U.S. Air Force’s distant early warning or dew line.
The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
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September 21, 2018
Doug Ford is a bit like Trump in the way he gets his critics to froth and fizz on demand
For all the claims that Doug Ford would be “just like Trump”, they’re not all that similar, but one way the Ontario Premier does resemble the American President is the way that they both can send their opponents into rhetorical hysteria almost without effort:
Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
As much as Ford’s government has violated political norms, we shouldn’t want the remedy to do likewise — whether it’s the feds invoking Disallowance (as a majority of Toronto city councillors voted to support) or the Lieutenant-Governor refusing Bill 31 Royal Assent (as requested Tuesday by various petitioners led by former lefty Toronto mayor John Sewell), or a judge undermining provincial authority over municipalities on grounds that collapse in higher courts.
So now, perhaps, Toronto can return to reality — or as close as you can get during an election campaign.
No, there was no magic brand of fit Mayor John Tory or hypothetical mayor Jennifer Keesmaat or anyone else could have pitched that would have stopped Ford in his tracks. Torontonians’ fits are a feature for Ford, not a bug. In defending Bill 5 he has repeatedly namechecked various left-leaning allegedly do-nothing councillors. Their apoplexy sustains him. In his book about Rob Ford, councillor John Filion quoted Doug Ford on his plans for Tory after losing the 2014 mayoral election: “He’s going to take off the sheets in bed at night and find my teeth wrapped around his nuts.”
Note that Chris Selley is careful to include the “allegedly” there … no need to invite lawsuits for the National Post.
And no, there is no real hope of relief in the ongoing appeals process over Bill 5. Even if the Supreme Court were to side with Belobaba, it would only repudiate the way in which the province wielded its powers — i.e., in the middle of an election — not the powers themselves. Had the government waited four years, or even legislated a two-year council term at 47 wards to be followed by an election at 25, it would have been on plenty-thick ice. It could easily re-legislate a 25-ward Toronto after such a ruling, and without using the notwithstanding clause.
Toronto politicians are destined to be Doug Ford’s favourite punching bag at least until they stop reacting so hysterically every time he so much as looks in their direction. He may not be a Twitter troll of the same mastery as Donald Trump, but he doesn’t appear to need social media to get his critics all panty-bunched.
Similarly, while there is no telling how much Ford might meddle in Toronto’s affairs in the coming years, at every step along the way he will make the idea of meddling in Toronto affairs more toxic for future non-Conservative governments. All provincial governments have screwed over Toronto now and again; as of this summer, screwing over Toronto is Something Doug Ford Does. And no Liberal or New Democrat wants to be like Doug Ford.
When things die down a bit, the opposition parties will have to take a break from denouncing Ford and explain what they’ll do in future to strengthen Toronto’s democracy: restore control over its political boundaries, provide more taxation powers, allow road tolling, whatever. It would be Pollyannaish to suggest Ford has caused a political awakening in Toronto, but he has certainly made it more attractive for the other parties to take Toronto more seriously, and concurrently much more risky for them to be seen reneging on such promises in future.
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September 20, 2018
Perhaps we need a “Veterans’ Day”, but that’s not what Remembrance Day is for
Ted Campbell on the desire of the Royal Canadian Legion and Veterans Affairs Canada to change Remembrance Day to focus on veterans, rather than the war dead:
… given its mandate and, indeed, its very name, Veterans Affairs Canada manages, again, to totally misrepresent Remembrance Day, according to a report by CBC News. I’m not concerned that “at least half the participants in the English sessions did not recognize In Flanders Fields, nor did any of the Montreal participants.” Perhaps it is only right and proper that we have stopped teaching a poem that was intended to challenge those who, over 100 years ago, could still join the fight.
But the ‘message’ that Veterans Affairs seems, to me, to be trying to propagate, again, is that Remembrance Day is, somehow, all about veterans … that’s arrant nonsense. We veterans, I guess I count as one although it is not how I define myself, are there, as we should be, only to honour those who died, those who never got a chance to become veterans because they were blown to bits or died in a burning aircraft or drowned at sea or lay for hours, in no-man’s-land, wracked with pain, waiting for the blessed relief of death. That’s why we go to the cenotaph, once a year: to remember the 100,000+ Canadian men and women who were killed in our wars, large and small, from South Africa in 1899 (arguably, from North West Canada in 1885) until today. But, today, there is a movement, spearheaded by civil servants and the Royal Canadian Legion, to change the focus to honour their clients: veterans, like me … even at the expense of remembering our dead.
[…]
For myself, no matter what anyone else decides, I will continue to observe Remembrance Day for what it is meant to be, not what the bureaucrats and the Legion’s management want it to become; and if we have a Veterans’ Day I will stay home … I don’t need anyone’s thanks for my service; you paid me well enough, as much as your elected representatives thought fair, anyway, and I always tried my best to be worthy of my hire.
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September 18, 2018
Mad Max and the 338-candidate promise
Colby Cosh offers some electoral advice to Maxime Bernier and the still-hot-off-the-presses PPC/PP proto-party:
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have high hopes for the new Max Bernier Party. Perhaps you believe, as my colleague Andrew Coyne does, that there is still far too much fly-blown 1970s-style intervention and protectionism in Canada’s economy. Perhaps you are in favour of a more hard-headed approach to immigration policy, or you are allergic to “diversity” as a supreme ideal. Maybe you just appreciate Bernier’s devil-may-care swashbuckling spirit.
Assuming some or all of these things are true, as some or all of them are true of me: were you especially impressed by Friday’s launch of the People’s Party of Canada? Bernier, I have to say, does not seem at all sure about the order in which he wants to go about things. Sixteen months ago he came close to winning the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada: perhaps it was on the day he lost (May 27, 2017) that he decided the big Conservative tent was, as he has now described it, “intellectually and morally corrupt,” meriting only destruction. That hypothesis makes his secession from the Conservatives seem like a spasm of arrogance.
[…]So, to skip past those already familiar critiques of the Liste Maxime in the hope of adding a new one: why a full slate? Promising to run 338 candidates is a good way of maximizing the harm to the CPC, if this is just a plan for samurai revenge. A leader like Bernier, who is thoughtful about ideology and does enjoy recognition from coast to coast, would be a good central building block for a libertarian-ish or classical liberal political party, if you want such a party. But his party is bound to be judged by its 10 dumbest, least careful candidates. (They all are, with the possible exception of the Liberals!) Why couldn’t Bernier start out by using the first part of his 13 months to find 20 or 30 really good ones, and run only those?
As far as anyone knows, he is starting out with zero potential candidates who have any credibility or experience to speak of. There definitely weren’t any on the dais with him Friday. Nobody thinks Bernier is aiming to create a purely regional party, but if that is his concern, he would only have to make sure that his wedge of 10 or 20 or 50 candidates was spread around suitably.
Frankly, if I were the megalomaniac in charge of this thing, I would take some care not to launch my movement shortly before a general election, but as soon as possible after. You know what’s a good way to build an insurgent party? By-elections! In a by-elections, a party leader can work closely with a single candidate and move into the riding himself for personal appearances. Other non-cash resources can be concentrated. Turnout is usually low in by-elections, and the establishment candidates are often dire. But, then, I lived as a sullen, dopey teen in Deborah Gray’s riding, and have some memory of a thing called “Reform,” and they say those early-life experiences are often powerful obstacles to understanding.
I think this is quite sensible advice, as even finding a full slate of “paper” candidates can be a difficult task for small parties — and the PPC is quite small for the time being — so concentrating on finding credible candidates to run in winnable or merely competitive races makes a heck of a lot of sense. Even a limited slate of 30 still allows the media to find one or two who can be baited into making statements that can be played for all they’re worth by hostile editorialists, but over 300? The media sharks would be spoiled for choice. With a more limited group of viable candidates, there are fewer chances of a random blowhard (or a closet racist) suddenly being elevated by CBC anchors as the visible face of the new party.
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September 16, 2018
A suggested re-organization for the Canadian Forces
Ted Campbell continues his series on how to reform the Canadian Forces, this time looking at the overall command and control structure:
How the nation’s armed forces should be organized is a topic of nearly endless debate amongst military people. It is no secret, I think, that I favoured the joint force structure that former Defence Minister Paul Hellyer introduced in the 1960s. I was less enamoured with his idea of functional commands, but it was hard to strike a balance. I like the American model of joint, regional commands.
There is, almost always, a need for a few, national, functional organizations ~ for special forces and, perhaps global, strategic command, control and communications (C³) ~ but, in general, I believe that one large, national, strategic/operational HQ can control a half dozen commands, say four or five regional and two or three functional, something like this:
In my model (which reflects my deeply personal and often idiosyncratic views) the three star* Chief of the Defence Staff, in Ottawa, would command, just for example, four two star regional joint commanders (rear admirals or major generals) who would, in their turn, command almost every formation, base, depot, dockyard, base, combat ship and combat brigade, unit or wing in their geographic area. There would be a few exceptions ~ the one star officer (commodore or brigadier general, perhaps only a Navy captain or Army/RCAF colonel is needed) commanding the Strategic Communications System would command the specialized units scattered across the country and, indeed, around the world, but those units would get their day-to-day administrative and logistical support from their regional commander. Ditto for the one star officer commanding the Special Operations Command … except that he might need to have a bit more administrative and logistical power because of the nature of his business. There might be a perceived need for a separate Joint Operations (Overseas) Command but I doubt it is really necessary. The national Joint Staff (headed by a two star officer) in Ottawa can plan and direct the mounting of operations and each regional command should have a one star deputy commander who has a deployable HQ than can go, by sea and or air, to any trouble-spot in the world on fairly short notice.
In my model it seems obvious that Pacific and Atlantic Commands are going to be, primarily joint Navy/Air commands, likely, usually, commanded by a Navy rear admiral or an RCAF major general while Western and Eastern Commands will be, mainly, joint Army/Air commands, usually commanded by Army or RCAF major generals, but, if (s)he is the best person available there is no reason why an Army major general could not command Pacific Command and no reason why a Navy rear admiral could not command Western Command, for example. The commanders will have real commands, full of fighting and support forces … things like the current Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, will revert to being staff branches in the national HQ and the units will be part of the joint commands. Similarly, the Chiefs of the Naval, General and Air Staffs will be the professional heads of their services, responsible for things like doctrine, individual training standards and equipment requirements, but they will not be commanders.
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* One of my critics has chided me for using the term “stars” when we, Canadians, don’t put stars on admirals’ and generals’ shoulders, rather they have maple leaves to indicate the level of their rank … fair enough, except that he is, as we used to say, “picking the fly sh!t out of the pepper” because I’m not using “slang”, as he suggests, but rather, I am using that was, when I served, and I understand is, still, common parlance in Canada and amongst our allies, including in the UK and Australia, too.
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Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada
Andrew Coyne says there’s room in Canadian politics for Mad Max’s new party:
In principle, there is room for a new party in Canadian politics; arguably, there is a need for one.
That the established parties have tended to pander to narrow and particular interests, rather than the broader public interest, is well documented, as is the result: an ever-expanding state devoted almost wholly to redistributing income, not from rich to poor, but from taxpayers to well-organized and well-cultivated client groups (notably the state’s own employees). In the same way the state redistributes from consumers to producers, from west to east, young to old, and so on, in the service of neither efficiency nor justice nor even raw numbers but just whoever frightens politicians the most.
Which over time — people learn — has come to include everybody. We subsidize everything that moves in this country, and charge ourselves higher taxes to pay for it, then demand more subsidies to offset the burden of taxes. And the fruit of all this frantic attempt to redistribute from everybody to everybody? A nation brimming with grievance and resentment, every part of the country convinced the rest are making out at its expense.
A party that proposed to end the money-go-round — to wean the country’s business class, in particular, off the public teat, to shut down the “regional development” spigots and bust up the cartels that, behind our protectionist walls, are permitted to genteelly pick our pockets — would therefore be a signal addition to our politics. If it chose to frame this critique not as a fairly straightforward application of Economics 101 but as a radical determination to govern “for all Canadians,” so be it.
And if it made life difficult for the established parties, so much the better. The market for ideas thrives on competition and choice as much as any other. The cartelization of our economy is in part a reflection of the cartelization of our politics. A more robustly conservative party, in particular, less burdened by the Conservatives’ crippling self-doubt, would be a welcome addition, even if I don’t like all of its ideas: millions of Canadians do, and it is wrong that they should go unrepresented.
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