Quotulatiousness

April 19, 2012

“Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices … in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:

It’s no secret that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 — the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago — the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.

Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.

“Ontario’s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,” says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. “That number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,” he says in an interview.

[. . .]

Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. “The government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,” Mr. Adams says.

The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.

The (richly deserved) end of the Tory era in Alberta

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Unless all the polls are way off, the election in Alberta will see the eternal rule of the Progressive Conservatives finally come to an end. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, the Tories have unleashed the last of their secret weapons to hold back the Wildrose barbarians — perhaps the most embarrassing political video ever posted. David J. Climenhaga saves you the pain of watching the video:

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

[. . .]

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

I’m not kidding about the quality of the video — I couldn’t make it past the first minute before feeling too humiliated on behalf of the folks who made it and I had to shut it off. If you want to watch it in all its cringe-inducing glory, David has it embedded on his site.

Pentagon sleuths foil Anglo-Canadian military plan

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

The story of Ensign Chuck Hord’s memorial portrait in the Pentagon, with both British and Canadian military angles:

In a Pentagon hallway hung an austere portrait of a Navy man lost at sea in 1908, with his brass buttons, blue-knit uniform and what looks like meticulously blow-dried hair.

Wait. Blow-dried hair?

The portrait of “Ensign Chuck Hord,” framed in the heavy gilt typical of government offices, may be the greatest — or perhaps only — prank in Pentagon art history. “Chuck Hord” can’t be found in Navy records of the day. It isn’t even a real painting. The textured, 30-year-old photo is actually of Capt. Eldridge Hord III, 53 years old, known to friends as “Tuck,” a military retiree with a beer belly and graying hair who lives in Burke, Va.

[. . .]

Capt. Hord at the time was director of the Multinational Interagency division, a new Pentagon office designed to coordinate military logistics between the U.S. and its closest allies.

Office colleagues say Capt. Hord developed close bonds with his British, Canadian and Australian counterparts. Their office boasted its own beer fridge.

Several of Capt. Hord’s work colleagues attended the 2004 party, including a British captain who smuggled the portrait into his car and put it on display at the office. Capt. Hord, amused, called it an act of “buffoonery.”

[. . .]

Back on the wall in the office, visitors often asked who it depicted. “They all looked at it and said, ‘Man, what year was that? It looks like the 1800s,'” said Canadian Lt. Col. Brook Bangsboll.

That was the light-bulb moment. On one of his last days at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Bangsboll went to a jewelry shop to have a brass plaque engraved, egged on by colleagues and co-conspirators. “We didn’t know what to do so we said, ‘Let’s just lose him at sea,'” Lt. Col. Bangsboll said. “It makes it interesting and kind of mysterious.”

He kept the circumstances of the ensign’s death vague because he thought some nosy Navy historian would spot the ruse if the plaque cited a specific battle.

April 18, 2012

Another Conservative comes around on marijuana legalization

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

This time, it’s National Post columnist Barbara Kay accepting the arguments on legalization:

Tobacco is harmful in any amount and it remains perfectly legal. Alcohol, while benign in reasonable quantities, is a gateway to alcoholism — the most intractable and damaging of addictions — which causes far more domestic and social misery than marijuana possibly could. And finally, there comes a certain tipping point when resisting the common will for no easily defined reason stops making social or economic sense.

Two thirds of Canadians want marijuana to be decriminalized. It seems clear to me that sooner or later marijuana is going to join alcohol and tobacco as a substance that the government recognizes cannot be eradicated.

Unless the moral argument is too powerful to override — in this case it isn’t — economic realities can’t be ignored. The street value of the cannabis industry in British Columbia is worth an estimated $30-billion a year; it would be worth double or triple that amount if it could legally attract tourists from the U.S. and other countries. Enforcement of our present laws is said to cost $1-billion a year; that money could be put to better use by rehabilitating hard drug addicts. The federal government brings in about $5-billion annually in tobacco taxes; legalizing marijuana would bring in at least a billion or two more.

However, she’s still a Conservative (as the tax angle above clearly shows):

I’d like to see marijuana legalized, but highly regulated. The government should oversee its growth, its potency and its distribution. It should be heavily taxed, as all recreational substances that can be abused are. But I’m not naive. Because it wouldn’t be legally available to minors, and because the strength would be too muted for many potheads, a black market in more potent stuff would spring up immediately. Criminals will focus their efforts on marketing stronger, illegal marijuana to minors. And we shouldn’t be surprised if our First Nations suddenly discover that growing and selling pot are ancient traditions in their culture that exempt them from paying sales taxes.

Legalization will no doubt come with its own set of problems. Commercialization and widespread marketing will bring in masses of new users. And, as I’ve argued before, for accountability and liability purposes, legalization will embroil government, insurance companies, schools and the medicare system in such a tortuous maze of regulatory and enforcement interference with their privacy, that potheads — and the libertarians who see legalization as a liberating panacea — will yearn for the paradoxical simplicity of illegal, but unencumbered access.

Why do we even bother calling them “life sentences”?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

According to a recent Globe and Mail article, among the civil service jobs at risk in the government’s cutbacks are 26 convicted murderers who’ve been paroled and are paid to minister to another 2,280 paroled murderers (numbers from the 2010-11 report).

The Globe and Mail has learned that one of the many federal programs that will be cut in its entirety is LifeLine, a program aimed at helping people with life sentences — or “lifers” — successfully re-integrate into society once they’ve been paroled.

At a starting salary of about $38,000, the program hires and trains successfully-paroled lifers to mentor other lifers who are still incarcerated or who have been recently released on parole.

[. . .]

Under the Criminal Code, offenders serving a life sentence for murder may be considered for parole after serving 15 years of their sentences. Offenders serving life sentences for first-degree murder can be eligible for day parole after 22 years and full parole after 25 years.

April 17, 2012

Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:45

Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:

A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.

The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.

The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.

The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.

Stephen Harper admits the current drug war approach is “not working”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:07

Okay, pretty pedestrian stuff for most Canadians, but an amazing admission for one of Canada’s foremost and outspoken drug warriors to make:

Harper met Canadian journalists and readily admitted differences over the exclusion of Cuba from the Latin summit. He admitted, too, to a disagreement over British rule in the Falkland Islands.

But he was not ready to agree that the division over drug policy is so clear-cut. Rather, he insisted that there is much agreement. Then came the most interesting quote of the day.

“What I think everybody believes,” Harper said, “is that the current approach is not working. But it is not clear what we should do.”

This would be intriguing from any prime minister. From Stephen Harper, whose government’s crime bill ratchets up the penalties for drug possession, it was startling.

But don’t worry, Conservative hard-liners: after that brief slip into honest talk about the ongoing failure of drug prohibition, he quickly rallied and got back to the standard drug warrior talking points:

Lest anyone think he’d undergone a conversion in Cartagena, Harper quickly added the other side of the story.

Drugs, he said, “are illegal because they quickly and totally — with many of the drugs — destroy people’s lives.”

Update: Chris Selley reads the tea leaves and thinks there’s a hint in Harper’s words that may indicate a slight improvement:

So, there’s the same old lunacy. Ending alcohol prohibition was a pretty “simple answer,” wasn’t it? One doesn’t hear many regrets about it nowadays. It is amazing that it still needs to be said, but one more time: Prohibition ensures the overall supply of any given drug will be far more dangerous, if not more addictive, than it would be otherwise. Criminals have only made as much money trafficking drugs, only killed as many scores of thousands of people as they have, because those drugs are illegal. And in light of this, cracking down on otherwise law-abiding people for growing and distributing small amounts of marijuana is patently insane.

Still, if we parse Mr. Harper’s words closely — perhaps too closely — we find him arguing that “many” drugs “destroy people’s lives,” which implies that some don’t. If the “current approach is not working,” as Mr. Harper says, and if “there is a willingness” to consider other approaches … well, what else can we possibly be talking about except, at the very least, lightening up on pot?

Most likely, of course, this was just situational rhetoric. If Mr. Harper was going to go temporarily squishy on drugs, it would be among presidents and prime ministers whose constituents are slaughtered to feed Mr. Harper’s constituents’ habits. Central and South American leaders grow weary of this, as you might imagine.

April 16, 2012

Stephen Harper’s “world view is based on the premise that the United States is in relative decline as a superpower”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Eugene Lang has an interesting view of how Stephen Harper has changed since coming to power and how this is reflected in Canada’s foreign policies:

Stephen Harper became Prime Minister six years ago with little interest in or experience of international affairs. He was a domestic policy wonk — particularly interested in economic and fiscal affairs. Yet, in about half a decade, he has fashioned the clearest Canadian foreign policy posture in at least a generation, whether you like that posture or not. We can now speak of a Harper Doctrine which forms the cornerstone of our foreign relations.

In a largely ignored interview with Maclean’s magazine last summer, the Prime Minster stated: “We also know, though, the world is becoming more complex, and the ability of our most important allies, and most importantly the United States, to single-handedly shape outcomes and protect our interests, has been diminishing, and so I’m saying we have to be prepared to contribute more, and that is what this government’s been doing.”

These remarks are an important insight into the Prime Minister’s perception of the changes in America’s geopolitical position, and how Canada should respond. They suggest his world view is based on the premise that the United States is in relative decline as a superpower, and that Canada must step up to the plate to help our distressed ally police the world. It is a striking acknowledgement. And it was not just words.

Canada has been needing to diversify its trading relationships to reduce its dependence on, and exposure to, the vagaries of the US economy and the meddling of the US government. President Obama’s recent decision to veto the Keystone XL pipeline is merely the latest spur to get Canada to work more closely with China and other growing economies rather than be subject to presidential whim in our dealings with the US.

During his first half-decade in office Stephen Harper was putting most of Canada’s economic eggs in the American basket, as had his predecessors — from Brian Mulroney to Jean Chrétien to Paul Martin. The Prime Minister was accused of willfully ignoring unprecedented economic opportunities in China.

But that is a thing of the past. Over the last year, the Harper government has embarked on the most ambitious trade and economic diversification agenda in memory. Ottawa is now pursuing free trade agreements with India and the European Union simultaneously. The government has done a 180 on Chinese trade and investment, actively and aggressively pursing both. Canada is trying hard to become a member of the Trans Pacific Partnership, a multi-lateral free trade agreement centred in Asia. And now Canada has begun free trade negotiations with Japan, the world’s third largest economy. Little of this was on Ottawa’s radar screen 18 months ago.

It’s my opinion that the US economy is being held back at least in part because of fears of what the federal government may do — instead of smoothing the worries of business, the government is stoking them and adding to the uncertainties that make business decision-making less bold. The more regulatory changes the government makes (or even hints that it might make), the less investment will be made in areas that might be affected by those changes. The current presidential election campaign with its naked fanning of class warfare isn’t helping the situation either.

Since the global financial crisis, the evidence has mounted that the United States is in economic decline. Its system of government seems congenitally incapable of coming to grips with America’s fiscal crisis. For the first time in living memory, the U.S. recovery from recession has been weaker than Canada’s. The United States continues to have a higher unemployment rate than Canada, virtually unheard of historically. The American economy is amazingly resilient and might yet come back strong, but right now the evidence suggests a long period of relative economic stagnation south of the border. This is the most important structural change affecting Canada since Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.

A more sensible way to analyze the F-35 issue

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

In the National Post, Shaun Francis and John Kelleher offer an easier-to-understand method of analyzing the costs and benefits of the F-35 program:

Consider a car. Let’s say you’re considering buying a subcompact or an SUV, which you plan to hold onto for five years. A subcompact has a one-time purchase cost of $20,000 followed by $7,000 in annual, recurring costs on things like gas and maintenance. Your total costs over five years are therefore $55,000, or $11,000 average cost/year.

Meanwhile, the SUV has a one-time purchase cost of $25,000 and recurring costs of $7,500, leading to a five-year total cost of $62,500, or $12,500 average total cost/year.

To examine whether buying an SUV makes sense, you take the costs of the SUV and you subtract the costs of your next best alternative, the subcompact. Then you ask yourself, is it worth a premium of $1,500 per year to drive an SUV versus a subcompact?

From a decision point of view, it doesn’t make sense to get upset over the $62,500 total cost of the SUV. That’s not the pertinent figure here. You can’t walk to work. You need a car. So the pertinent question is the cost differential — in this example the $7,500 premium between your preferred choice and the next best option.

Canada’s F-35 decision should have been framed in a similar fashion by the Auditor General. The appropriate question? Do we want to pay a premium for the world’s best fighter jet, which will be cutting edge for decades to come, or can we make do with more reasonably priced planes that are bound to become obsolete sooner?

In the article they say “no one is questioning whether Canada needs fighter jets”, which is not actually true. Significant portions of the NDP, the Greens, and even some Liberals feel we should not be buying any military equipment that does not have a primarily humanitarian use. In their view, transport aircraft might be acceptable but combat aircraft would not. Trucks, yes, but tanks, no.

April 15, 2012

Increasing taxes on the “1%” won’t close the gap — and might make it worse

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Joseph Brean in the National Post:

That the rich should contribute more than their current share to the common good is a proposal with popularity. From Paris and London to Nova Scotia and Alberta, “tax the rich” has become a dominant theme in budget debates and elections around the world.

In Ontario, for example, NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s proposal to create a new tax bracket for people who make more than half-a-million dollars a year, illustrates the persistent attraction of such schemes for governments in deficit.

“The issue really is one of perceived fairness,” said Robin Boadway, a taxation expert and professor of economics at Queen’s University, who notes that the income of the highest earners has been increasing much faster than the middle and lower ranks. Taxation, to a great degree, relies on the goodwill and trust of citizens, he said, and inequality in tax codes can violate that trust.

Governments acting like Robin Hood, however, have tended to provoke unforeseen problems, most recently in Britain, where an effort to tax the rich ended up — quite literally — costing the government deeply.

It always seems to be a surprise when people respond to incentives in creative ways … and this applies especially to creative ways to avoid paying higher taxes. People will adjust their behaviour to minimize their tax burden — both legally and not-as-legally. This is after all one of the reasons that there are so many tax provisions: the government wants to encourage certain kinds of behaviour (and so gives a tax credit) and discourage other kinds of behaviour (and so levies a specific tax on it). Flexibility occurs on both the tax-levying and tax-paying sides of the fence.

One of the complaints of middle-class taxpayers is that there are few mechanisms they can use to legally reduce their tax burden, while the wealthy have lots of ways to do this. This isn’t going to change if the government increases the top rate of tax — in fact it will encourage more creative use of the tax-lowering provisions of the law (and lawyers and accountants will benefit by helping their wealthy clients ot take advantage of those provisions).

April 14, 2012

Recent immigrants didn’t come here because “Canada is diverse and signed the Kyoto Protocol”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

An interesting aside in this Toronto Star article by Rondi Adamson:

However, what is most interesting about these stories is what they reveal about immigrants and Canadian politics. There was a time when the Liberal party could count on immigrant votes. For years, many immigrants who came to Canada under a Liberal government — which would cover much of the last century — reflexively voted Liberal. Part of this was out of gratitude and part of it because the Conservatives (or Progressive Conservatives) never bothered to court the immigrant vote.

[. . .]

Anyone who thinks people choose Canada because of multiculturalism or bicycle lanes in big cities would do well to remember our last municipal election, when Rob Ford received over 50 per cent of the votes of Torontonians born outside Canada. I can tell you my own tale — a couple of summers ago I taught ESL in a Toronto suburb. My students were teenagers new to Canada. I asked them why their parents came here. Almost down to a kid they said, “Because we couldn’t get into the States.” They did not say, “Because Canada is diverse and signed the Kyoto Protocol.” They did not have a Panglossian view of this country. They saw it as they saw the United States — free and fair — though not as powerful a draw.

It is nice when politicians attend cultural celebrations and clumsily do ethnic dances and don hats that make them look goofy. But new and old Canadians respond positively to substance in the form of sensible policy, as opposed to making a show of being inclusive. It was Chen’s case that brought about support for Bill C-26, intended to expand the right to defend one’s home and property. I am pleased that, since the Maroli case, no politician has proposed a correlated Spice Registry, which may have been their wont a decade ago.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

John Moore thinks that Canada is stupid to consider Vimy Ridge a “defining moment”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Writing in the Pacifist Times National Post, John Moore expresses the opinion that Canada should derive its sense of national pride from “compassion, hard work and character” rather than remembering anything positive from the bravery and sacrifice of Canadian soldiers in the war against Imperial Germany:

The tropes are well known to Vimy devotes. Over four days in April in 1917, Canadian soldiers accomplished through planning, guts and guile what 150,000 dead French and British soldiers had failed to achieve: The capture of seven kilometres of land rising up to a ridge held by the Germans. It was the first time all four divisions of the Canadian Corps had fought together — 3,598 Canadians lay dead; 7,000 were wounded.

But is Vimy really the best of Canada? Does our modern identity and national purpose hinge on the harrowing slaughter of our citizens on a foreign field of mud in a pointless war?

Canada went to war in 1914 at the same moment that Britain did. Britain went to war because they had guaranteed the independence of Belgium, but Germany needed to violate that independence in order to push the massive right wing of their armies past the French frontier forces in an attempt to outflank and destroy the French army. If Canada entering the war was “pointless”, then we should never have taken part in World War 2 (which Moore paints as being “one of the most unambiguously moral wars in history” either.

If anything, modern Canada should reflect on Vimy and our total First World War sacrifice as a national tragedy. Sixty-thousand Canadian men died in a war in which we had no real casus belli and which was largely administered by damnable incompetents. A generation of teachers, milkmen, farm hands, labourers, students and artists died on the field of battle, so hollowing out the population that many of the women they left behind would never marry. One hundred and seventythree thousand returned home suffering from burns, chemical poisoning, amputations and traumatic stress disorder that would leave them depressed and spastic for the remainder of their lives.

So why, 95 years later, do we venerate Vimy? Perhaps because it’s far easier to stir emotions where military matters are concerned. You can’t erect a heroic statue to the civility for which Canada is renowned. Social justice has never been able to muster an inspiring flypast. The national understanding that in Canada we look after each other doesn’t have a solemn bugle call to draw a tear.

So Moore thinks that Canada is defined by social justice and civility? I guess that’s at least a bit better than the even more common notion on the left that Canada is defined only by socialized medicine.

April 13, 2012

Filling in for Envisat: “the CSA’s Radarsats 1 and 2 will try to fill some of the gaps”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Science, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:43

The European Space Agency is still at a loss on why their flagship Envisat satellite suddenly went silent, but while they’re trying to diagnose and hopefully fix the problem, the Canadian Space Agency is helping to cover some of the gaps:

Controllers say the eight-tonne spacecraft appears to be in a stable condition, but they are not receiving any data at all from it.

Contact was lost with Envisat at the weekend shortly after it downloaded pictures of Spain’s Canary Islands.

A recovery team, which includes experts from industry, is now trying to re-establish contact with the craft.

Mission managers said on Friday that they were working through a number of possible fault scenarios but conceded they had little to go on.

[. . .]

Of more immediate concern are the operational and scientific projects that rely on Envisat data.

The satellite’s information is used daily to monitor for oil spills at sea, to check on iceberg hazards, and to provide information for meteorological forecasts, among a wide range of services.

All this had now been disrupted, said Prof Liebig.

“What we have done is [activate] the contingency agreement we have with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) which we have had for many, many years. Canada has responded very positively. So, for a certain time, the CSA’s Radarsats 1 and 2 will try to fill some of the gaps.”

April 11, 2012

HMCS Windsor scheduled to return to the water today

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

One of the Royal Canadian Navy’s four submarines, HMCS Windsor, is supposed to be getting wet again later today:

Good news, of a sort: One of Canada’s four Victoria-class submarines is set to achieve a major milestone Wednesday. It’s going to be in the water. Huzzah!

After years of extensive refit work, HMCS Windsor is set to be lowered — lowered “extremely slowly,” but lowered — into the Atlantic Ocean. Assuming it does not instantly sink, explode or simply dissolve like a giant, oddly shaped sugar cube, the Windsor will then begin a long series of tests at sea. It is hoped that the sub will be fully operational by early 2013. Fingers crossed. Canada should have submarines. They are a useful part of a modern navy’s arsenal, and Canada has an enormous coastline. Although the subs have had an uneven history, to say the very least, they finally seem to be getting to a state where they’ll be useful to us. There had been speculation before last month’s federal budget that they’d be scrapped, but at this late point, that would be wasteful. It’s cost a lot to get these incredibly complicated machines as operational as they are (again, fingers crossed).

[. . .]

Purchased second-hand from the British for the rock-bottom price of $750-million in 1998, they’ve fallen well short of expectations. They only entered Canadian service in 2003, and have proven glitchy and outright dangerous — HMCS Chicoutimi caught fire during its maiden voyage in 2004. Lt. Chris Saunders was killed fighting the blaze, and the sub has been out of service undergoing repairs ever since. It, too, is hoped to be back in service next year. All told, the subs have been at sea, collectively, only 900 days since 2003, and have cost billions of dollars to bring up to spec — money the cash-strapped navy didn’t really have. Costly, under-performing, sucking up needed resources … sound familiar?

April 10, 2012

Jack Granatstein calls for the heads of the deputy and associate deputy minister of defence

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

Jack Granatstein is very well respected as a military historian and analyst. His interpretation of the F-35 situation leads him to — in effect — call for the dismissal of people whose names are not generally being bandied about in the media:

Then let us look at the decision-making process in the Department of National Defence. Almost all the commentary in the media and Parliament has pointed fingers at the CDS, Gen. Natynzcyk. But he is only the military leader of the department, not the sole ruler. Co-equal to him — and, in fact, in most knowledgeable observers’ judgment substantially more than that — is the deputy minister, Robert Fonberg, in his post since 2007. The associate deputy minister materiel, responsible for all procurement projects, reports to Mr. Fonberg, and the deputy determines what his minister, Peter MacKay, and eventually the cabinet sees. The public messaging in the department is handled by the assistant deputy minister (public affairs), who also reports to Mr. Fonberg. The civilian defence bureaucrats truly wield the power.

The point is this: The uniformed officers of the department provide the best military advice they can. Sometimes they are incorrect; most times they pray they are right because they know their decisions will affect their comrades’ lives. But the estimates of costs, and the spin that has so exercised the Auditor-General, the media and the Opposition, are shaped and massaged by the deputy minister, in effect DND’s chief financial officer, who advises the minister of national defence.

No one comes out of the F-35 affair smelling like a rose. Mr. MacKay undoubtedly made mistakes in overselling the aircraft, and Gen. Natynzcyk likely did as well. But it would be a miscarriage of justice if these two lost their heads to the vengeful axe demanded by an aroused media, and the deputy minister and his civilian bureaucrats escaped unscathed.

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