Army University Press
Published 20 Dec 2023Between 20 and 28 December 1943, the idyllic Adriatic resort town of Ortona, Italy was the scene of some of the most intense urban combat in the Mediterranean Theater. Soldiers of the First Canadian Infantry Division fought German Falschirmjager for control of the city, the eastern anchor of the Gustav Line. The Army University Films Team is proud to present, The Battle of Ortona, as told by Major Jayson Geroux of the Canadian Armed Forces.
December 21, 2023
The Battle of Ortona
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December 19, 2023
Behind enemy lines at the WPATH symposium
Eliza Mondegreen reports her experiences at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health gathering in Montreal last year:
This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.
It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s symposium in Montreal in September 2022, I often felt as if I’d slipped sideways into some strange universe that operated in accordance with other laws: where up is down and girls are boys and medicine has left its modest brief — healing — far behind in its breathless pursuit of transcendence.
I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I hadn’t misrepresented myself — I am what I claimed to be: a graduate student researching gender identity — but this was a convocation for believers and I’m a sceptic. When WPATH, the world’s most prestigious and influential gathering in transgender healthcare, came to Montreal, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see up close the people and ideas I had pursued through so many articles and books.
[…]
It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.
A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.
A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”
During the Denver conference, presenters role-played how to secure informed consent for a hysterectomy and phalloplasty in the case of a schizophrenic, borderline autistic, intellectually disabled “demiboy” with a recent psychiatric hospitalisation. At no point do the role-players encounter any real barriers. Instead, they persevere. At first, the patient struggled to understand why a phalloplasty might require multiple surgeries, but then the clinicians “explained everything” and the patient understood. This is called “lean[ing] into the nuance of capacity”.
The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.
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Christmas Message from the Museum – MERRY TANKMAS 2023
Ontario Regiment Museum
Published Dec 17, 2023Merry Christmas from the volunteers and staff of the Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum and our friends at World of Tanks. Please enjoy this festive message and get a look into Santa’s Tank Workshop!
This segment originally aired in the TANKMAS 2023 – LIVE Stream on 8 December 2023. Hosted by The Tank Museum (Bovington), and sponsored by our friends at World of Tanks.
https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/live…Full video and stream can be found on The Tank Museum YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/_5cMsW5Z…Meet our hosts from World of Tanks and Wargaming.net:
Nicholas “The Chieftain” Moran and Cmdr_AFMeet our Executive Director: Jeremy N Blowers AKA Tank_Museum_Guy
Wishing you and yours a Very Merry Christmas, and a safe and Happy Holiday season.
PLAY NOW at www.worldoftanks.com
FREE to play and build your own “Tank Museum” garage.Thank you to Wargaming.net for the video production and sponsorship of this museum centered Christmas streaming event.
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Henry Dundas, cancelled because he didn’t do even more, sooner to abolish slavery in the British Empire
Toronto’s usual progressive suspects are still eager to rename Dundas Street because (they claim) Henry Dundas was involved in the slave trade. Which is true, if you torture the words enough. His involvement was to ensure the passage of the first successful abolitionist motion through Parliament by working out a compromise between the hard abolitionists (who wanted slavery ended immediately) and the anti-abolitionists. This is enough, in the views of the very, very progressive activists of today to merit our modern version of damnatio memoriae:
Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville.
Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
Henry Dundas never travelled to British North America and likely spent very little of his 69 years ever thinking about it. He was an influential Scottish career politician whose name adorns the street purely because he happened to be British Home Secretary when it was surveyed in 1793.
But after 230 years, activists led an ultimately successful a push for the Dundas name to be excised from the 23-kilometre street. As Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in deliberations over the name change, Dundas’s actions in relation to the Atlantic slave trade were “horrific“.
Was Dundas a slaveholder? Did he profit from the slave trade? Did he use his influence to advance or exacerbate the business of slavery?
No; Dundas was a key figure in the push to abolish slavery across the British Empire. The reason activists want his name stripped from Dundas Street is because he didn’t do it fast enough.
[…]
The petition was piggybacking off a similar anti-Dundas movement in the U.K. – which itself seems to have been inspired by Dundas’s portrayal as a villain in the 2006 film Amazing Grace, a fictionalized portrayal of the British anti-slavery movement.
Dundas was responsible for inserting the word “gradually” into an iconic 1792 Parliamentary motion calling for the end of the Atlantic slave trade. A legislated end to the trade wouldn’t come until 1807, followed by an 1833 bill mandating the total abolition of slavery across the British Empire.
The accusation is that – if not for Dundas – the unamended motion would have passed and the British slave trade would have ended 15 years earlier.
But according to the 18th century historians who have been brought out of the woodwork by the Cancel Dundas movement, Henry Dundas was a man working within the political realities of a Britain that wasn’t yet altogether convinced that slavery was a bad thing.
The year before Dundas’ “gradual” amendment secured passage for the motion, the House of Commons had rejected a similar motion for immediate abolition.
“Dundas’s amendment at least got an anti-slavery statement adopted — the first,” wrote Lynn McDonald, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in August. McDonald added that, in any case, it was just a non-binding motion; any actual law wouldn’t have gotten past the House of Lords.
The parliamentary record from this time survives, and Dundas was open about the fact that he “entertained the same opinion” on slavery as the famed abolitionist William Wilberforce, but favoured a more practical means of stamping it out.
“Allegations … that abolition would have been achieved sooner than 1807 without his opposition, are fundamentally mistaken,” reads one lengthy Dundas defence in the journal Scottish Affairs.
“Historical realities were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician suggests,” wrote the paper, adding that although Wilberforce opposed Dundas’ insertion of the word “gradually,” the iconic anti-slavery figure “later admitted that abolition had no chance of gaining approval in the House of Lords and that Dundas’s gradual insertion had no effect on the voting outcome.”
Meanwhile, the British abolition of slavery actually has some indirect ties to the road that bears Dundas’s name.
The road’s construction was overseen by John Graves Simcoe, the British Army general that Dundas had picked to be Lieutenant Governor of the colony of Upper Canada.
The same year he started building Dundas Street, Simcoe signed into law an act banning the importation of slaves to Upper Canada – and setting out a timeline for the emancipation of the colony’s existing slaves. It was the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, and it was partially intended as a middle finger to the Americans’ first Fugitive Slave Act, passed that same year.
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December 17, 2023
How RFK, Jr. helped destroy British Columbia’s resource-based economy
Elizabeth Nickson found herself added to one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fundraising mailing lists:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.
I am on RFKJr’s campaign mailing list, probably through Children’s Health Defence and they asked me for money, and I said sure, just as soon as he fixes the catastrophe he caused in the province where I live.
Got a message back!
It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”
No problem, I said.
1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world
2. It paid for education and universal “free” health care.
3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.
4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.
5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)
6. That triggered the protest.
7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.
8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.
9. Forested communities died.
10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.
11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching – which died. More families bankrupted.
12. They were told to go into tourism.
13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.
14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.
15. The government needed money.
16. Casinos provided it.
17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are – moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.
18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.
19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.
20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.
21. Green has destroyed the province.
And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reason Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.
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December 16, 2023
It was forty years ago today
Elizabeth and I got married in Toronto on this date in 1983. It was a bit of a race to get to the courthouse on time — my so-called best man decided that he had to go back to Mississauga “for a shower” that morning, and was quite late getting back into Toronto. Trying to get a cab to hurry in downtown Toronto traffic was a waste of effort, so I very nearly missed my own wedding. Elizabeth was not pleased with me holding up the show (even though I could rightfully claim it wasn’t my fault). The rest of the day is rather a blur to me now.
We had the reception that evening at a lovely house in the Playter Estates (during which my father tried to pick a fight with Elizabeth’s uncle), and then set off for our very brief honeymoon in Niagara-on-the-Lake the next day. We could only afford two nights at the Prince of Wales hotel, and because we got married on Saturday, we were in NOTL for Sunday and Monday nights. Back in 1983, Ontario still had fairly restrictive Sunday closing laws, so there was very little to do — almost everything was closed. (And that was probably for the best, as we had almost no money to spend anyway…)
One of the few businesses we found open in the area was the original Chateau des Charmes estate winery (not the huge, imposing facility of today: a small industrial-looking building a few kilometres away), where the only person on duty was Mme Andrée Bosc who gave us an exhaustive tasting experience and showed us around the winery. Neither of us were experienced wine drinkers, so this was wonderful for both of us. I’d love to say that we started our wine cellar that day, but that would only be partially true: we bought about a dozen bottles of various Chateau des Charmes wines, but we couldn’t afford to restock after those had been opened. We visited the winery every year on our anniversary for about a decade, until we got out of the habit of going back to NOTL (which was around the time our son was born).
After our brief honeymoon, we both had to go back to our jobs. Very shortly after that, my employer (the almost-unknown-to-Google Mr Gameway’s Ark) went bankrupt, which was financially bad timing for us, having just spent most of our tiny cash hoard on our honeymoon.
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December 15, 2023
Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”
You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:
“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)
After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).
I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.
However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.
The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:
- The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
- The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
- The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).
The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.
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December 13, 2023
Ontario discovers that even “great ideas” with the “best of intentions” sometimes go wrong
In The Line, Adam Zivo reports on Ontario’s “safe supply” drug program running into another one of those pesky human nature problems that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen:
Image courtesy of Meme Generator
New research from Ontario has yielded further evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” drug programs are being widely defrauded and putting addicts’ lives at risk.
These programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing drug users with pharmaceutical alternatives to potentially tainted illicit substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing large volumes of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, in the hope of reducing consumption of illicit fentanyl.
Addiction experts have widely reported that, based on their clinical experiences, drug users regularly trade or sell (“divert”) some (perhaps much) of their safer supply on the black market to fund the purchase of stronger substances. This has flooded some communities with hydromorphone, crashing its street price by up to 95 per cent over the past three years while spurring new addictions, especially among youth.
The federal government denies that these problems exist and has said that any evidence of harm is “anecdotal” — but two addiction experts working in a hospital in London, Ontario recently used patient data to show that the problem is indeed very real.
Dr. Sharon Koivu and Allison Mackinley (a nurse practitioner) examined the charts of 200 patients who had been referred to Victoria Hospital’s addiction medicine consultation service between January and June 2023.
The review showed that 32 per cent of patients who were not in a safer supply program had self-reported using diverted hydromorphone — the vast majority of these patients indicated that their hydromorphone came from purchasing drugs provided to someone else as part of a safer supply program.
“It was more common for them to actually specify safer supply than to say they didn’t know the source,” said Dr. Koivu in an interview. “They said things like, ‘The person in the apartment beside me goes and picks up her safer supply and when she comes back I get 20 of her pills’. It was quite specific.”
Diversion was not the only problem that was validated.
The chart data suggested that safer supply clients were roughly five-to-10 times more likely to be hospitalized than drug users receiving traditional, evidence-based addiction medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine (these medications are known as “opioid agonist therapy“, or “OAT”). Compared to OAT patients, drug users on safer supply were more than 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for serious infections.
These findings were so concerning that when a group of 35 addiction physicians recently wrote an open letter calling upon the federal government to reform safer supply, they included this data in their accompanying evidence brief.
(This chart, included in a recent evidence brief, compares the number of hospitalized patients with the number of drug users in London, Ontario who receive safer supply (250), methadone (2,000), and buprenorphine (300).)
Safer supply patients also had a slightly higher hospitalization rate, and only slightly lower infection rate, than patients who were receiving no addiction treatment at all, which suggests that the health benefits of safer supply may actually be negligible.
Dr. Koivu said that the hospitalization rate seen among safer supply patients was “alarmingly high” considering that safer supply programs provide significant wraparound supports (i.e. access to doctors, housing and social assistance) in conjunction with free hydromorphone. Any patient who receives such supports should see substantially improved health outcomes.
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December 12, 2023
Canadian politics – if you don’t like something, call it some kind of “genocide”
Tristin Hopper on the political mis-use of the technical term “genocide”, to the point that it’s almost become routine to describe something you oppose as a “genocide”:
Victims of genocide
Photo by Cantetik2 via Wikimedia Commons.
In recent weeks, it’s become popular among Canada’s activist groups and even mainstream politicians to accuse Israel of “genocide”. In a since-deleted Thursday evening social media post, for one, NDP MP Don Davies accused Israel of “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. The United Church of Canada has also begun using the g-word in its official literature.
The charge doesn’t hold up on any material grounds. Unlike most genocided people, the Palestinian population has been soaring dramatically ever since the 1960s — all while retaining their traditional language and religion. Israel’s prosecution of its current conflict against Hamas, meanwhile, has featured any number of factors that are markedly out-of-step with an attempted genocide, including detailed evacuation orders and a rate of civilian casualties markedly lower than the global average.
But the charge doesn’t need to make sense, because it turns out Canada has been abusing the term “genocide” for quite some time. Coined amidst the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, “genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of an entire demographic of people.
While the most notable genocides involve systematized mass-murder, it’s not a requirement. As per the official definition struck in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide can also include attempts to erase a people via birth control or indirect methods such as famine. It’s on these grounds that Canada has officially accused China of genocide regarding its Uyghur minority. Although Beijing is not mass-murdering the Uyghurs, they are rounding them up into “re-education” camps and mandating forced sterilization with the explicit intention of destroying the Uyghur way of life.
But among Western academic and activist circles, “genocide” has now been stretched to apply to almost anything, from emissions policy to the ethnic ratios in prisons. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of just how much of Canadian life has been accused of being genocidal.
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December 7, 2023
Canada is great at gesturing on the international stage … far less so in doing anything substantive, especially militarily
In The Line, Harrison Ruess channels his inner Star Trek geekiness to illustrate the Kobayashi Maru situation the Royal Canadian Navy (and the rest of the armed forces) find themselves in:
Canada is, and has been for some time, caught between two irreconcilable positions. We don’t want to spend any money on the military but also continue to prioritize how important and influential we want to be in the world (“Canada is back”, etc).
Friends, either of these things is possible. We just can’t do both at the same time.
So let’s have an honest conversation and decide which road we want to go down, commit to it, and then do the best we can in whichever adventure we choose. Talking, domestically and internationally, about how determined Canada is to make a positive impact in the world, while not investing in the systems to give our words weight, sets both Canadians and our allies up for disappointment. The old adage that it’s best not to over-promise and under-deliver should be remembered. We seem to aspire to the reverse.
If Canadians really don’t want to invest in our military, then we need to be honest about the consequences of those decisions. It means a more inwardly focused Canada, less able to support our allies, with fewer seats at big tables, less able to respond to emergencies or disasters, and likely less able to help our own. Given our unstable world, I would not personally advocate for this road, but there is a case to be made for it. So if you are someone who thinks this is the right path, then make your case honestly. Explain why you think it’s swell that our navy will need to launch under-equipped vessels, or not launch them at all. Defend your ground. But stop trying to sell Canadians a fable that we can have a shell of an armed forces while at the same time having increased global influence and impact.
On the other hand, if we do think Canada has a positive role to play — and even a responsibility — in trying to bring some order to the world, help those who need it, and ultimately protect our own interests, then we need a military, and a military budget, strong enough to meet the demands of the task. This includes procurement budgets, maintenance budgets, budgets to offer competitive wages, and budgets to sustain missions, both training and the real deal.
Proponents of this position need to do a much better job of explaining why this is the best path to both improving the lives of Canadians and stabilizing our destabilized world. Then our governments must pursue and defend this road, even when defence isn’t top of the polling priority list — which it never is.
The current status-quo doesn’t work. It’s dishonest. And most importantly, it hurts Canadians and our awareness of what our country is — or isn’t — capable of doing. Kudos to V.Adm. Topshee for, in not so many words, trying to explain the impact of this reality on the navy.
Having a capable, equipped military costs money — starting with perhaps the NATO-agreed upon two per cent of GDP. That’s the cost of doing business as a serious, mature, supposedly globally oriented country. Are we that? Do we even want to be?
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Burying the lede … and the victims
Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier sent out a fundraising letter to PPC supporters that included some disturbing new data from Statistics Canada:
As usual, the biggest news in Canada is being ignored by all of our crooked establishment politicians and the dishonest corporate media.
Last week Statistics Canada released a report on deaths in Canada (causes of death, overall life expectancy, etc), which include the latest data from 2022.
I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or even a statistician, but when I saw the table below, a few things jumped out at me.
First, deaths related to covid-19 (check the fourth line) were at an all-time high in 2022!
Can you believe that? There were more covid deaths in 2022 than the two years before.
And yet that same year saw the end of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and most covid measures.
For two years the elites blasted us with propaganda and warped our society around this mild illness, but when deaths were rising, they were silent. Bizarre!
To be clear, I am not advocating for any of these unnecessary draconian restrictions to return, I am just demanding some honesty and consistency from our morally corrupt politicians, public health officials, and media!
It has never been so obvious that covid restrictions were not scientific, they were just about politics and control.
But the most disturbing part is what I have circled at the bottom of the table. Deaths with “ill-defined or unspecified causes” have been steadily increasing since 2020.
These deaths have almost TRIPLED since 2020 from 6,841 to 16,043 in 2022.
What could be causing this? What happened in 2021 that could have caused this explosion of unexplained deaths over the last 2 years?
An experimental pharmaceutical product was rushed to market and forced on Canadian society, is what happened.
They told us it was “safe and effective” but over the last few years we have learned more and more about how that covid shot was neither.
Now more and more Canadians are dying from causes very likely related to the covid shot.
And where is the accountability?!
There is no admission of any possible error on the part of the government. On the contrary, it’s still encouraging everyone to get boosters!
There are no demands for an inquiry by the opposition parties to investigate the potential risks associated with the covid jab.
There are no investigative journalists trying to get to the bottom of one of the biggest medical scandals in Canadian history.
No! They’re just trying to sweep it under the rug and move on!
We can’t wait for the political establishment to hold itself to account. We saw throughout the covid years that the government, the opposition, and the media will all work together to protect themselves and each other.
And we can’t let them get away with it!
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December 6, 2023
Halifax Explosion: Minute by Minute
Terra Incognita
Published 5 Dec 2017100 years ago, the Canadian port city of Halifax was struck by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. How did it happen?
(more…)
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December 1, 2023
“You’ve reached the Royal Canadian Navy. Your naval emergency is very important to us, so please stay on the line for … a few years and we will send a frigate when one becomes available”
Paul Wells was disturbed by a recent extremely downbeat video posted on YouTube by the head of Canada’s Navy so he got in touch with the man himself for an interview:
That was a hell of a video that Vice Admiral Angus Topshee, the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, put on Youtube this week. Topshee depicts a Navy in a “critical state”, facing “very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond”.
The Navy’s not alone — the Air Force and Army are “confronted with similar challenges”, Topshee says in the video. The biggest challenge is that the Navy’s getting smaller, about 14% smaller today than in 2014. The West Coast fleet is “beset with a shortage of qualified techs” and the fleet can only deploy one of its three offshore patrol vessels at a time. The Halifax-class frigates that form the basis of Canada’s oceangoing capability will need to keep floating for 15 more years, even though they should already have been retired. All of the 12 frigates: Topshee’s political masters have made so many commitments there’s no margin for a reduction in the Halifax-class fleet.
Here’s the video:
To borrow a naval term, it’s quite a broadside. So I emailed Topshee on Wednesday and asked for an interview. He wrote back promptly and we were on the phone within hours. Here’s our interview in Q&A format, edited for length.
PW: Are you in the habit of putting out videos that are this stark in their diagnosis? If I went back, would I find one of these every year?
AT: No, there was a unique combination of circumstances that led to video being produced. The promise I made when I took command of the Navy is that we have to be honest. Things are the way they are. They’re not necessarily the way we want them to be. And we’ve got to be very honest about that difference. And so I’ve tried to be frank, and we try and rebuild trust. And to be completely honest, we went through a cultural crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. And my feeling is that if you want people to trust you, then you have to be completely open, transparent and honest with them. That’s the approach I’ve taken throughout my tenure in command of the Navy.
PW: Is the fact that this video’s on YouTube a reflection of any difficulty you’re having getting heard internally?
AT: No. I’ve shared my assessments with the leadership of the Department, up to and including this minister and the previous Minister. I feel I’m being heard and respected. This was more about, we wanted to put the message out internally. Unfortunately, there’s some very specific IT challenges around how we disseminate internal messages. And so [Youtube] was the channel we used.
[…]
PW: It’s slower to train up recruits in the Navy, because you have to put them on a ship, and that has logistical implications? Whereas in the army, I could take them to an open field?
AT: The commander of the army is going to hate me for saying this, but it’s always been easier to raise an army than to generate a navy or build an air force. Fundamentally, the basic core tasks of an infantry soldier really come down to those individual capabilities that can be trained relatively quickly. Now, actually commanding and controlling and employing that army is a fantastically complicated thing. But it starts with the infantry soldier: relatively easy to build. The training required to generate a sailor is pretty significant. The Mar-Techs that I talked about? [In the video, Topshee says the navy has been losing a highly-trained marine technician every two days.] You know, we’re talking five to 10 years to get to the level of training and experience that they require. So that’s why, you know, we need to make some immediate changes to stabilize ourselves. To grow back to health is going to take time. If we don’t change the system, it will take virtually forever to get back. So we need to make changes to allow us to accelerate how quickly we can do this. Because the honest truth is that while we’re short sailors at the moment, we would probably actually need more sailors to meet the needs of the future fleet that we’re building right now
PW: On the West Coast, you say you are having to prioritize the Halifax class [the big ocean-going frigates that form the Navy’s backbone] at the expense of the Kingston class [smaller ships primarily for coastal service and patrol].
AT: Historically, the West Coast has always had greater personnel generation problems. Partly because there’s a there’s a smaller personnel footprint over there. So when you’re short a number of sailors you feel it more acutely, because the denominator is smaller. So yes, that’s the coast where we’ve felt the pressures most acutely. We’re seeing similar pressures building on the East Coast, but we have not been forced to make any changes. So what we’ve done is we’ve made sure that we can continue to operate our frigates, because right now the West Coast is deploying two frigates, Ottawa and Vancouver, in the Indo-Pacific alongside Asterix [a supply ship]. We need to sustain that level of commitment to meet the requirements of the Indo-Pacific Strategy.
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November 30, 2023
Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity
The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:
Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.
In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.
Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.
The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.
This did not turn out to be so.
Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.
That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.
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Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War
WW2TV
Published 1 Feb 2023Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War
Part of Canadian Week on WW2TV With Megan HamiltonThe Canadian Army of the Second World War spent more time preparing and training their citizen soldiers then they did in sustained action. This chiefly took place across Canada and in the United Kingdom. Adequate training functioned as a cradle for collective action, morale, empowerment, self-confidence, and, ultimately, success in battle. Yet, due to a number of factors, a sufficient standard of training was not always achieved by all.
There were limits to the Canadian Army’s ability to control the morale of its men as it created a vast organization from scratch. Training camp experiences varied, influenced by factors such as food, weather, comfort, group cohesion, leadership, skill level, discipline, social activities, and interactions with local civilians. In fact, it required a constant negotiation between camp leadership and the rank and file. Drawing from her research on both the Canadian and wider Commonwealth armies, Megan’s presentation will explain why soldiers’ morale in training was a difficult, yet vital, balancing act.
Originally from Vernon, British Columbia, Megan Hamilton is a social and military historian of the 20th century. She has an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo. Her federally-funded master’s research focused on the Canadian experience of the Second World War, specifically the Vernon Military Camp. Megan’s work has been published by a number of platforms and in 2022 she won the Tri-University History Program’s top essay prize for master’s students.
She is currently located in London, England, where she has begun a fully-funded PhD at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum, supervised by Dr. Jonathan Fennell. Her dissertation is a study of Second World War army training across the Commonwealth.
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