Quotulatiousness

November 20, 2013

“Ford Nation” as the Canadian equivalent of UKIP

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

In the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons tries to explain to a British audience how Rob Ford has managed to stay alive in Toronto politics all this time:

… from a British perspective, the oddest aspect of the story is Toronto’s seemingly indomitable affection for its mayor. It is only now, after months of scandal, that public confidence in him is finally starting to dip, and not particularly sharply.

The reason for this reveals the sharp divisions within Canadian society. And while it would be simplistic to offer a like-for-like comparison between different countries, it seems certain that there are lessons here for Ukip.

First some background. Toronto is a divided city. In 1998, six separate municipalities were merged as a “cost-saving measure” by the Government of Ontario. This led to a huge increase in levels of municipal staff, while ambiguity surrounded the question of whether money had actually been saved.

People felt that they had been deprived of their local identities. Even today, in many districts, such as Scarborough and North York, the old names are still defiantly used. The issue is given an added bitterness by the fact that in a referendum on the question in 1997, more than 75 per cent of voters opposed the amalgamation; it was forced through anyway.

Ironically, the unification only entrenched the distinctions between people living in different parts of the city, particularly between those with a 416 (inner city) area code and those with a 905 (the outer suburbs).

Among the metropolitan 416-ers, there is a visceral hatred of Mr Ford. In the more conservative 905 suburbs, however, where people are pro-car, pro-booze and pro-sport, voters feel unfairly removed from the levers of power. Here the mayor commands widespread affection.

[…]

Canadian divisions may not map precisely onto Britain, but the rise of Ukip has demonstrated that we too live in a split society. From the perspective of Ukip followers, their needs and views are simply not represented by the overly polished political elite known as Lib-Lab-Con.

Of course, Nigel Farage’s cigarettes and pints are nothing compared to Mr Ford’s crack pipe and drunken stupors. In Toronto, where tensions and divisions are even more marked, the suburbs have an even greater appetite for the “ordinary guy”.

November 19, 2013

Making Granny pay … full fare

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:43

In Maclean’s, a look at the feel-good but economically silly reasons for senior discounts:

The seniors discount has long been justified as a way to recognize the constraints faced by pensioners stuck on fixed incomes, and as a modest token of appreciation for a lifetime spent paying taxes and contributing to society. And for those truly in need, who would quibble? But with half a million Baby Boomers — a group not known for frugality or lack of financial resources — turning 65 every year for the next few decades, the seniors discount is in for much greater scrutiny.

[…]

There was a time when the seniors discount made a lot more sense. In the mid-1970s, nearly 30 per cent of all seniors were considered poor, as defined by Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off. But today, this has fallen to a mere 5.2 per cent. The impact of this turnaround is hard to overstate. Seniors once faced the highest rates of poverty in Canada; now they enjoy the lowest level of any age group: The poverty rate among seniors is almost half that of working-age Canadians.

Thanks to a solid system of government support programs, the very poorest seniors receive more income in retirement than they did when they were of working age. The near-elimination of seniors’ poverty is widely considered to be Canada’s greatest social policy triumph of the past half-century.

This tremendous improvement in seniors’ financial security has dramatically changed the distribution of income across age categories, as well. In 1976, median income for senior households was 41 per cent of the national average. Today, it’s 67 per cent. Over the same period, median income for families where the oldest member is aged 25-34 has fallen in both absolute and relative terms.

Then there’s the vast wealth generated for the Boomer generation by the housing and stock markets (only some of which was lost during the great recession). The stock of wealth in housing, pensions and financial assets held by the average senior family is nearly double that of working-age households. Accounting for the financial benefits of home ownership and rising house values, Statistics Canada calculates the true net annual income of retired households rises to 87 per cent of a working-age household’s income. In other words, non-working seniors are making almost as much as folks in their prime earning years, but without all the expenses and stressors that go with a job, children at home, or middle age. Not only that, the current crop of seniors enjoys historically high rates of pension coverage. The much-publicized erosion of private-sector pensions will hit younger generations who are currently far from retirement.

November 18, 2013

Toronto’s punchline mayor

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

I no longer live in Toronto, so the question of who occupies the Mayor’s seat on council isn’t of direct concern to me, but I do find the worldwide attention to Rob Ford’s antics to be amusing … the great and the good of downtown Toronto always wanted to be internationally known, but not like this. Richard Anderson wonders how the Rob Ford problem can be solved:

There are other conservatives on City Council, quite a few actually. The impression that Toronto is run by crazy Leftists is an exaggeration. Most of the former suburbs, such as North York and Etobicoke, send fairly right-leaning pols to Council. The Lefty nutters are mostly concentrated in the downtown area. There is something about high urban density that allows such beings to exists. In free open spaces they would likely die from lack of WiFi.

The more polished conservatives are too polite to say what needs to be said, too afraid of offending some crucial though obscure voting block. Their personalities are too cautious, too constrained to genuinely connect with the voters. Their language too careful to say anything clear. They censor themselves until nothing remains except a moderate with a slight rightward limp.

With Rob Ford there is only Rob Ford. This vulgar beast of a man who is what he is. There is no artifice. His frequent lies have a childlike obviousness that defies satire and even compels pity. An awkward Falstaff stumbling through the life of a city that, well within living memory, was called Toronto the Good. Yet there he is. A very sick, very brave man who tried hard to do his best. A tormented man who served his city well until he destroyed himself. The MSM often criticizes those on the Right for their alleged callousness toward the flawed and weak, yet they have shown no mercy to this man. Had his politics been different they would have hailed him as a hero.

What comes after? Someone smoother, more polished in their deceits, yet ultimately a timorous non-entity or a craven power luster. Rob Ford must go. Yet there is no one better to replace him.

The Toronto Star and the usual selection of community activists have been gunning for Ford since the start of the last election, but it’s taken Ford’s own errors of judgement and amazing lack of self-control to give them their best opportunities to attack. Each time he appeared to be finished, and each time he somehow managed to come back. I don’t know if he’ll be able to come back from his latest set of self-inflicted wounds, but if there’s any way to survive, Ford might do it. His opponents must feel they’re fighting a modern hydra-headed monster…

Update: Rick Mercer doesn’t like Rob Ford at all, but he recognizes why Ford got to be Mayor in the first place.

Update, the second: Camille Paglia was asked about the Rob Ford situation:

Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign. Why are all the energies of one of the world’s great cities being absorbed in the psychodrama of an adolescent personality? I think an honourable man would resign. It’s like a reality show. I think it’s terrible for the city of Toronto and Canada. I’ve heard some anti-Canadian things [in the States], some mocking things about Canada. I don’t think people are saying, ‘oh what a wonderful rollicking place! What a fun place!’ There’s a sense of ‘how is this happening in a major city’? It seems like chaos, like a reductive lowering. It’s very debasing.

November 13, 2013

BC school bans kindergarten kids touching each other

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Apparently Coghlan Fundamental Elementary School in Aldergrove has had a rash of injuries to kindergarten students recently, so the solution is to ban all physical contact between students:

A letter went out to Coghlan kindergarten students’ parents on Friday, one of those types that often sit in backpack over a weekend or are put aside to be read later and somehow never are.

Julie Chen found the letter, explaining a new no-touch policy for kindergarten students, on Monday morning as she was packing lunch for her five-year-old daughter.

It reads, in part: “We have unfortunately had to ban all forms of hands-on play for the immediate future … we will have a zero-tolerance policy.”

Penalties for making physical contact with a schoolmate include being grounded during play time and/or a trip to the office “for those who are unable to follow the rules.”

“I read the letter, it said there had been quite a few injuries, I said, ‘OK,’ and kept reading,” Chen said. “When I saw no hands-on would be allowed, I just got mad, I got so upset.

[…]

School employee Arthur Bourke drove up in his van and was happy to defend the policy.

“I don’t know how anyone would be against this,” Bourke said. “They’re trying to make it safe for everybody.

“They do a terrific job here of making sure everyone is safe.

“It’s something we have to do — if we don’t control it, it will get out of hand.”

The letter to parents cited “several injuries” in the past few weeks.

November 11, 2013

“The Canadian Corps … had beaten 47 German divisions since Aug. 8”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:55

In the Globe and Mail, J.L. Granatstein wants us to remember the greatest military achievement of the Canadian Corps in World War One (and it isn’t the battle of Vimy Ridge):

On Aug. 8, 1918, the Canadian Corps had secretly moved into position in front of the French city of Amiens. The German army had been on the offensive since March, and the Amiens sector was rather lightly defended. The Canadians, British and Australians struck this sector a surprise hammer blow in the early morning, a hurricane of artillery fire clearing the way for the tanks and infantry that blasted through the defences. Thousands of Germans surrendered, more were killed and within a few hours, the Canadian advance was almost 15 kilometres. This, wrote the German army’s great strategist, General Erich Ludendorff, was “the black day” of the German Army.

Lt.-Gen. Currie’s troops then moved north to the Arras area, where, at the end of the month, they struck toward and then through the Drocourt-Quéant Line, an immensely strong extension of the Hindenburg Line defended by crack troops. In heavy fighting at high cost, the Corps broke the line, forcing the Germans back behind the Canal du Nord, their last position protecting the key supply point of Cambrai.

[…]

The Germans now were in full retreat, moving eastward as fast as they could go. The Canadians took Valenciennes, smashing the enemy defences with a massive artillery barrage, and then moved into Belgium. By Nov. 11, they were in Mons, the same small town where the men of the British Expeditionary Force had first faced the invading Germans in August, 1914.

The Canadian Corps, more than a hundred thousand strong, had fought its last battles. As Lt.-Gen. Currie noted proudly, it had beaten 47 German divisions since Aug. 8, a quarter of the German forces in the West. The Corps had accomplished this because of its great fighting spirit, its fine leadership at all levels and its effective reinforcement and logistics systems. The cost in lives and in wounded was terrible — 45,000 casualties, 20 per cent of the total of Canadian losses in the entire war — but for once, the campaign had achieved measurable gains on the ground. More than that, the Canadian shock troops had battered the enemy, forced them eastward and obliged them to seek an armistice that was a de facto capitulation. It had scored its greatest victory, the greatest battlefield triumph ever by Canadian troops.

We will remember them

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

A Remembrance Day slideshow using Mark Knopfler’s wonderful “Remembrance Day” song from the album Get Lucky (2009). The early part of the song conveys many British images, but I have added some very Canadian images also which fit with many of the lyrics. The theme and message is universal… ‘we will remember them’.

November 10, 2013

Latest federal initiative shows “patronising contempt, arrogant presumption and impressive stupidity”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

The federal government is launching a program to help “ordinary Canadians” become better at managing their finances. Richard Anderson points out the amusing aspect of this:

I sometimes wonder if the hacks who put out these releases aren’t giggling to themselves the whole time, amazed at what they’re getting away with. You work for a Conservative government that wades through a sea of red ink every year. This same government has no credible plan to deal with the entitlement crisis, except point out how we’re less screwed than the Yanks. So naturally you go about lecturing the common folk on how to balance their chequebooks. This is like the morbidly obese diet coach of legend.

We see here a unique combination of patronising contempt and arrogant presumption that does not, so far as we have been able to determine, exist outside of Ottawa. Even the Soviets assumed that an ordinary adult could balance their personal budgets without being lectured to by a full time commissar. Then again they were communists, not nannies. Herein lies the great difference between the totalitarian projects of the last century and the petty authoritarianism of this one, the end result. The communist, fascists and Nazis envision a new man who would change the world. Note the underlying assumption: Man.

At some point, after rigorous indoctrination, the boy would become a man. The modern nanny state assumes that the boy never becomes a man, he’s always a boy needing to be hectored to and monitored. As the press release notes: “…brushing up on the basics of money management at any age and will include events for Canadians of all ages.” No matter how old you get, the federal government will be there to tell you how to manage your affairs. That generations of Canadians did this quite well without government involvement never comes up.

Growth forecasts continue to over-estimate Canada’s actual economic progress

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

In Maclean’s, Debbie Downer Colin Campbell takes a survey of the state of Canada’s economy:

A key qualification for landing a job at the Bank of Canada, it seems, is an unfailing sense of optimism. In 2009, the bank forecast the economy would grow 3.3 per cent in 2011. It grew 2.5 per cent. In 2011, it said the economy would grow 2.9 per cent in 2013. It will likely be just 1.6 per cent. Now it says the economy will grow 2.3 per cent next year. How likely is that? The bank has consistently viewed the economy through rose-coloured glasses in recent years, perhaps believing its low-interest-rate policy will eventually bear fruit. Rates have been held at one per cent for three years now. But the economy seems only to be getting worse.

It grew 0.3 per cent in August, Statistics Canada said last week — mostly attributed to a familiar crutch, the oil business. Elsewhere, things aren’t looking up. A new TD Bank report said corporate Canada is “in a slump,” with profits down 16 per cent from their post-recession peak in 2011. Some observers point out that Canada is still doing better than Europe and Japan. But so are most countries that aren’t in a recession, from South Africa and New Zealand to Equatorial Guinea and Guatemala. After breezing through the recession, Canada is back to old habits: hoping its fortunes (i.e., exports) will rise along with America’s comeback. But the U.S., too, is back in a rut. Last week, the Federal Reserve said it would continue with its $85-billion-a-month bond-buying stimulus program.

With the economy sputtering, Ottawa has meanwhile remained preoccupied with fiscal restraint and balancing the budget within two years. So, with neither low interest rates nor government spending providing a boost, the outcome seems predictable: Official growth forecasts will look nice, but will keep missing the mark.

November 7, 2013

Rick Mercer on the plight of injured veterans

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Harper’s convention speech – no wonder he ignored the senate scandal

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells explains why Stephen Harper decided not to say anything substantive about the senate scandal in his big speech at the Conservative convention. In short, it would be all drawbacks and no benefits to say any more than he did:

Some commentators hoped Harper would use his speech to the Conservatives to explain why any of this makes sense. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Harper decided not to rise to that challenge.

The Prime Minister’s twists and turns on the Senate affair would break a snake’s back. There is no explaining them. In the insane hypothesis that Harper had tried to explain them in Calgary, the first question we would have asked afterward is why he waited from May until November to do it. So essaying an explanation now would not really have helped. It’s just a mess, a sinkhole of judgment whose radius is very much larger than the distance between Harper’s office and the one Wright used to occupy. As another former Harper spokesman once said, more than a decade ago and in very different circumstances, “This turd won’t polish.”

So why bother? For a man whose goal is to endure as prime minister long enough to change the country, this question would have occurred to Harper very early. One can imagine him thinking something like this:

“I could try to explain away the behaviour of my appointees and the zigzags in my own response to it. I could spend the next few months talking about the terrible judgment of my plutocrat fixer-in-chief and my TV-star Senate appointee. I could air, in public, questions that will probably be tried in courts of law later, and make spotting the contradictions a national parlour game.

“Or I could talk about some other stuff.”

Easy to see why he decided to talk about other stuff.

The other big talking point of the convention was how the Conservatives kept the press cordoned off from pretty much any opportunity to talk to delegates or cover any of the events. The press collectively found themselves held in the same contempt that so many of them express for the Tories in general and Harper in particular:

Reporters were cooped up in a filing room without potable water or free WiFi. Three of the convention’s four halls were closed to reporters for the duration, and when we ventured past an imaginary line on the floor of the fourth, volunteers in blue pushed us back. After his speech, Harper and his band played classic-rock hits at a casino next to the convention centre; reporters were barred.

In its details, this cheerful contempt was an extension and refinement of the treatment Harper used to reserve for the press corps. As late as 2011, I could walk around on the floor of a Conservative party convention at leisure and unharassed. The Conservative party had meetings to decide how much further to tighten the cordon sanitaire, appointed staffers to enforce it who might have been given other tasks. A few Harper supporters will be delighted to hear we were denied our “perks,” as if water and freedom of association are luxuries. Here again, Harper was just being Harper. It’s worked for him for nearly a decade. He won’t stop now.

November 6, 2013

“Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

David Warren explains why Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford had to exist:

… every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

[…]

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

Update: Take it away, Taiwanese animators!

November 3, 2013

“More bombshells” in the police document on Mayor Rob Ford, says the Toronto Star

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

I’ll be honest: I haven’t been following the twists and turns of the crusade by the Toronto media to oust Mayor Rob Ford. That’s not to say there isn’t actually news on the situation:

More bombshells are contained in a weighty police document used to obtain a search warrant for Mayor Rob Ford’s friend and occasional driver, according to a Star analysis of court information already released.

“Project Traveller and the Rob Ford connection” is the bold heading atop one section of still-sealed information. The pages are blacked out pending an ongoing court challenge.

Project Traveller was the recent guns and gangs investigation that saw massive arrests in north Etobicoke. Police Chief Bill Blair has said information learned in that probe led to the creation of the Ford investigation, dubbed Project Brazen 2. (Brazen 1 was an unrelated Scarborough investigation.)

Nearly 500 pages of a document presented before a judge to obtain a warrant to search Alexander “Sandro” Lisi’s home were released Thursday. Half is censored pending a court challenge by the Star and other media lawyers.

In examining the document, the Star has learned that some remarkable information remains sealed.

Whether any of the censored pages relate to the mysterious second video the Star first learned about in early August, and Blair confirmed last week, is not known.

The Star has been told by two sources this second video also features the mayor. Blair has said the second video is “relevant to this investigation.”

In his dramatic Thursday news conference Blair answered a question about whether Ford was in the first video. The chief first said the mayor was in “those” videos, then caught himself and only spoke about the first video.

Update: It’s worth noting that Ford’s popularity actually increased after the latest news came out.

November 2, 2013

FATCA may have significant (negative) influence on Canadian law

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

In Maclean’s, Erica Alini tries to explain just what the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is, and why Canadians should be very concerned about it:

To say that FATCA is controversial is an understatement. The law is so complex and onerous to implement that some foreign banks have reportedly kicked out their U.S. clients in order to avoid dealing with it. Americans living abroad are queuing to give up their U.S. passports over it. The other problem with FATCA is that it asks foreign banks to do things that are often illegal in their home countries, such as passing on certain private information.

It has caused a stir in Canada as well, but the press here generally portrays it as something that affects only dual citizens and green-card holders. Given the number of Americans who live in Canada, that would be enough to make it a big issue (and a big headache for Ottawa). But the truth is FATCA has the potential to touch a much larger number of unsuspecting Canadians.

[…]

In general, what you get for signing an agreement to enforce FATCA is a pledge that the U.S. will do its best to share some of its information on your country’s potential tax cheats. You read that right: Not a duty to reciprocate your efforts, but a lame “we’ll try hard” promise. That’s because the U.S. government does not, at the moment, have permission to force U.S. banks to share information with foreign governments. Only Congress can change that.

That sounds bad enough, but it gets worse for Canada. We are the exception — the only country with which the U.S. has an automatic information-sharing agreement. Now, the trouble with FATCA is that it demands some new information: Not about the Canadian assets and incomes of people who live in the U.S. but about the assets and incomes of people who live in Canada but might have some ties to the U.S. While Canadian taxation, thankfully, is based on residency — you owe the CRA if you’ve been living in Canada — the U.S. has started demanding that its citizens file taxes regardless of where they live.

One of the unforeseen effects of this legislation is that it’s been making it much harder for US citizens to do business in other countries or to work in other countries for extended periods of time. If foreign banks refuse to allow US citizens to open accounts, you’re imposing significant costs and extra inconvenience on people who are in no way attempting to hide assets or income from the IRS. As with so many government initiatives, it probably won’t inconvenience actual criminals all that much, but will primarily impact ordinary — innocent — US citizens.

It’s “time” for a change

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

In Quartz, Allison Schrager wonders why we still bother with daylight savings time and four separate timezones for continental US states:

Click to see full-size version at Quartz

Click to see full-size version at Quartz

This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again — no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).

It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce. According to Time and Date, a Norwegian newsletter dedicated to time zone information, America started using four time zones in 1883. Before that, each city had its own time standard based on its calculation of apparent solar time (when the sun is directly over-head at noon) using sundials. That led to more than 300 different American time zones. This made operations very difficult for the telegraph and burgeoning railroad industry. Railroads operated with 100 different time zones before America moved to four, which was consistent with Britain’s push for a global time standard. The following year, at the International Meridian Conference, it was decided that the entire world could coordinate time keeping based on the British Prime Meridian (except for France, which claimed the Prime Median ran through Paris until 1911). There are now 24 (or 25, depending on your existential view of the international date line) time zones, each taking about 15 degrees of longitude.

Now the world has evolved further — we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

October 31, 2013

Canada’s shipbuilding strategy – the worst of both worlds

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) both are badly in need of new ships. The federal government has been aware of this for quite some time and has made plenty of announcements about addressing those needs … but the actual steps taken do not give me hope that the needs will be met economically or in a timely fashion. Canada no longer has a domestic ship-building industry with experience in producing military vessels, and it does not make economic sense to re-create it for the relatively small number of ships the RCN and the CCG actually need.

Politically, it can be a good election ploy to pour lots of government money into new shipyards which will employ hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers. The newly employed will be spending their salaries in Halifax, Vancouver, and Quebec and the visible signs of construction (both of the facilities themselves and of the hulls of the ships) will be a steady reminder to voters that the feds are investing in their cities. From the political viewpoint, it makes lots of sense to design and build the ships in Canada.

Economically, the situation is quite different. None of the remaining shipbuilding firms have the trained staff for either designing or assembling modern military ships. They’ll need to expand their yards and hire new skilled workers to take on the contracts. The civilian economy probably does not have all the necessary trained would-be employees ready to hire, so many would need to be brought in from other countries while training courses eventually turn out enough Canadians able to take those jobs. This will all increase the cost of the shipbuilding program, and delay the already belated eventual delivery of the ships. J.L. Granatstein explains:

The government’s National Shipbuilding Strategy aims to provide Arctic patrol ships, supply vessels and eventually replacements for the RCN’s fine frigates, as well as a large icebreaker and 10 smaller ships for the Coast Guard. The cost, including the frigate replacement, is estimated at $80 billion, and the process involves re-establishing the nation’s shipyards in Vancouver and Halifax, in effect re-creating a defunct industry. Up to 15,000 jobs are to be created.

But this is Canada, so pork and high costs are inevitable. National Defence and Public Works are deeply involved, politicians’ hands are all over the plans, and costs are sky-high. Consider the two Joint Support Ships to be built in Vancouver for $3 billion. They will likely be fine ships when they hit the water, years late. Britain’s Royal Navy, however, is buying four roughly similar ships from South Korean builders for $750 million — for all four. Should the RCN ships cost eight times those of the British? The Dutch navy is buying ships built in Romania; the Danes use ships built in Poland. Why? Because the cost is far less, the quality is good, and the work of installing the armaments and communications systems can be done in home waters, creating good jobs.

Take another case, the 10 small vessels to be built on the west coast for the Coast Guard for $3.3 billion. In 2007, the Danes bought similar, larger ships for $50 million each, ships with an icebreaking capacity the CCG ships will not have. Even with six years of inflation factored in, the CCG ships will cost at least three to five times as much.

But, the government will say, the jobs being created on the coasts are good ones, paying well for the skilled workers who are being trained to fill them. It is true, but will the Canadian public support the RCN and the Coast Guard when it realizes the massive costs involved to create each job? Moreover, no government can bind its successors to follow any policy. Jean Chrétien killed the maritime helicopter project when he came to power two decades ago, and the RCN still has no new ones. A future government might well say that the deficit is too high and the ship projects cannot proceed. After all, governments have killed the shipbuilding industry in this country before — after the two world wars and after the RCN frigate program ended in the 1990s. There are no guarantees in politics, and neither the Liberals nor the NDP seem high on defence spending for anything other than peacekeeping.

However, any time the political equations and the economic equations point in very different directions, you can almost always count on the politicians to go for the most expensive/most politically advantageous answer.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress