An investigation into the conduct of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) shows an organization that firmly believes — and acts — as though it is above the law:
To its credit, RCMP leadership accepted the findings of the CRCC [Civilian Review and Complaints Commission]. But the rank and file membership, the actual police officers who interact with the public, and their union, have rejected the report, calling it biased.
All of this is a stain on Canada’s top law enforcement agency, and part of a deeper failure by the RCMP to meaningfully address its own reluctantly acknowledged systemic racism toward Indigenous peoples, but it is far from criminal misconduct.
Unfortunately for the RCMP, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence is very much a criminal offence and it looks like the boys in red should lawyer up.
In the course of the CRCC investigation, the commission requested all recordings, transcripts, and radio communications from the day of the shooting. These communications would have undoubtedly been important to the investigation and could have provided a window into why the RCMP engaged in illegal and discriminatory conduct.
But the RCMP destroyed those records. They claimed that it was part of a routine procedure and that records with no evidentiary value have a shelf life of two years. Except the RCMP knew that there was an ongoing CRCC investigation and a civil lawsuit by the Boushie family when they destroyed the records.
If you or I destroyed relevant records, while staring down a barrel of a civil lawsuit or investigation, we would end up before a judge on charges.
Every time I ask the RCMP to destroy records relating to my clients who have been acquitted at trial, even after years have passed, I am met with a wall of resistance. So it seems a bit convenient when relevant documents are so easily destroyed when it is the RCMP who are being investigated.
The CRCC report also discloses that the RCMP conducted a parallel investigation into the Boushie incident — with officers questioned and evidence gathered. This RCMP investigation not only potentially contaminated the CRCC inquiry, but the RCMP kept their investigation a secret and failed to disclose the fruits of their internal investigation to the CRCC.
This all reeks of a cover up and an attempt to obstruct justice.
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Like it or not, we’re already a few years into a new Cold War, this time with the Chinese Communist Party. The Canadian government seems to be among the last in the world to recognize this change in the geopolitical situation. In The Line, Andrew Potter shows why Justin Trudeau must stop trying to cuddle up to Xi:
The outrageous secret trials in China of Michael Spavor last Friday and Michael Kovrig this Monday are nothing more than punctuation marks on a storyline that has been obvious for some time now.
Which is why it was enormously gratifying to see more than two dozen diplomats show up to seek admittance to Kovrig’s trial. The fact that none was admitted is unfortunate but largely beside the point — what matters is the public display of solidarity. Even more gratifying perhaps is the announcement (by Canadian officials) that the U.S. has promised to treat the two Canadians as if they were American citizens. After all, it was our acquiescence to a U.S. request to arrest Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at Vancouver International Airport in 2018 that prompted Beijing to nab Spavor and Kovrig in retaliation. While Chinese officials have denied that what this amounts to is hostage diplomacy, they’ve also made it clear that the fate of the Michaels is tied to that of Meng.
What makes the public support from all of these countries so remarkable is that a lot of them — the Czechs, the Finns, the Romanians — have very little to gain from sticking their neck out for Canada. More to the point, every one of these countries has good reason to wonder just how committed Canada itself is to this show of collective strength. After all, it was only five years ago that senior members of the Liberal party were freely — privately, but freely — saying that as far as the Liberal government was concerned, the U.S. was yesterday’s news and China was the horse Canada was going to ride into the future.
And while a lot has changed over the last five years (not least of which is the fact that Donald Trump has come and gone as president of the United States), it remains incomprehensible that it was just last year the Canadian National Research Council placed its disastrous COVID-19 vaccine bet with CanSino Biologics, a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese military. What are our allies to make of the fact that only last month, the federal granting agency NSERC partnered with Huawei to sponsor computer engineering at Canadian universities. Or that Canada’s visa office in Beijing is owned and staffed by a Chinese police force?
Whether it is a matter of naïveté, bad faith, or outright cravenness, Canada continues to give every indication that it is a country that is still hedging its bets.
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The weekend round-up at The Line includes a bit more on the ongoing scandal where over a third of the senior military leadership of the Canadian Forces are currently under investigation for sexual impropriety:
Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan in better times.
We agree with Saideman. Sajjan should quit or be sacked, frankly, pour encourager les autres. He should be epically sacked for birthing one of the stupidest possible excuses for inaction that we’ve ever heard from a minister of the Crown. Sajjan, under sharp questioning at committee, said — he really said this, we shit you not — that it wasn’t his place to get involved when allegations of sexual misconduct by retired army general Jonathan Vance were brought to his attention because, since Sajjan is an elected official, his involvement would politicize the matter.
Think about that for a minute. The entire goddamned basis of our system of government is ministerial accountability. Once upon a time, before it became awkward and inconvenient for him personally, Prime Minister Trudeau used to even boast about how he was bringing back government by cabinet, in contrast to that nasty, evil, centralizing Harper fellow. But according to Minister Sajjan, ministers are actually the wrong people to get involved in these serious issues … because they’re politicians. This completely inverts the way our government is supposed to work, though it might actually be a depressingly accurate summary of how Trudeau’s cabinet ministers interpret their roles.
But think about the message it sends to to our women (and men!) in uniform who’ve been the victim of abuse and harassment, sexual or otherwise: sorry, guys, I’d love to help and all, but I’m too busy being a fucking Liberal politician to step in as minister of National Defence.
Sajjan’s gotta go. Now. If he doesn’t quit he should be fired. And as we’ve been saying for weeks now, this is only getting worse — the sexual misconduct scandal that was frantically ignored by Canada’s self-styled feminist government has now made The New York Times, which means, if you’re an Ottawa Liberal, this is about as real as it gets. All that media attention was nice when it was fawning, with nice photo spreads, but … this? This isn’t fun for the Liberals at all.
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I somehow missed this article by Sir Humphrey when he posted it a few weeks back. He’s looking at the Australian and Canadian governments’ respective decisions to use the British Type 26 design to replace their current anti-submarine fleets and considering some of the economic and military concerns that led to the decision.
In both cases there have been media articles in the last week over the programmes and concerns. In Canada, the challenge has been that the cost has grown to a total of $77bn for 15 escorts. There has been cost growth from an originally scheduled $14bn many years ago, and the first of class will not now be delivered until 2031. This has led to suggestions in some media quarters that Canada could do things faster and more cheaply if it simply bought an off the shelf foreign design now and got on with things.
An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be). (BAE Systems, via Flickr)
[…]
The issue now is that Canada will need to establish, almost from scratch, a frigate construction programme and workforce for a finite period of time without a clear plan of what follows on when the last hull is completed. At the same time it will need to run on ships that are becoming increasingly elderly – it is likely that most of the Halifax class will see more than 40 years of service, and some may approach their 50th birthdays before being replaced – something that will pose an increasing maintenance and resource challenge.
Could things be done more cheaply or quickly? Almost certainly yes, but only if you are willing to make massive compromises. It could be possible, for example, to look to licence build an existing design that is already in service. There are plenty of designs out there that could be licence built and brought into service in the next few years — probably at less cost than the T26 programme.
But while this may sound easy, its also a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to look at country X and say “they’re buying this ship for that much” and assume that Canada is getting a bad deal. But Country X is likely to have a very different set of requirements, and their design will reflect it.
For example, Canada needs a ship able to operate with NATO and 5 EYES as a fully integrated player – this adds cost to fit specific systems and equipment that is compatible. Canada will also want to fit bespoke systems to meet national needs – again this will require design changes, that come at a price. Bolting on all manner of different requirements that Canada needs to meet the unique operational circumstances adds price and complexity to the design.
While you probably could take an off the shelf design and build it now, it would be just that, an off the shelf design. It wouldn’t be optimised for local needs, and it wouldn’t have the right equipment, comms, meet local design standards, or be certified for use with national equipment.
You are then faced with two choices – either bring a cheap ship into service that is entirely unsuitable and not designed for your needs, but is a lot cheaper, or spend an enormous amount of money shifting the design to better reflect your needs. If you choose the latter, then suddenly you are adding cost and time in, and the 2031 date will slip even further.
If you choose the former, then you have to accept that the design is “as it comes” and will have minimal Canadian input – so limited industrial offsets, very little economic benefit, and the long-term support solutions will firmly be tied into the country of origin and not Canada. In other words, Canadian taxpayer dollars will be spent to support a foreign economy.
That last point is really the key. Canadian governments, in my lifetime at least, never look at the military requirement as the top priority and sometimes not even the second or third priority. The economic spin-offs, especially in those cases where the benefits can be allocated to marginal parliamentary constituencies, will be the top priority. As is always a talking point in the case of any major military hardware acquisition, this is going to be the “single largest expenditure in Canadian government history”. Just as the replacement of the RCAF’s aged CF-18 fighters will be the largest expenditure in its turn.
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In The Line, Peter Menzies explains the economic underpinnings of the newspaper world back in the “good old days” before first radio, then TV, and finally the internet took all the profits out of their model:
We will hear a lot in the months ahead about who’s making money from news, so let’s get something straight: Even in the profit-soaked heyday of Canadian newspapers, no one made money from news.
That all ended about 100 years ago when radio — and then television — began delivering it for free.
Oh sure, the occasional ongoing news story would inspire people to buy more newspapers. But in my 30 years in that business the only event that did so in any significant way was the death and funeral of Princess Diana. Even then, after the extra cost of newsprint and distribution, the financial return was insignificant.
But mythologies die hard. People in newsrooms believed news made money — and apparently some still do — even when year after year, surveys of readers showed that there were lots of other things that sold and sustained newspapers.
Some people bought them because they were looking for a job. For others, it was a house, a plumber, a companion, a pet, a car or, really, almost anything else you can think of that might be needed. Classified pages were every town and city’s marketplace. That’s where you found stuff you had to get and bought an ad when you had something to sell or tell people about. It was where you announced the births of your babies, the graduations, engagements and weddings of your children and the deaths of your parents. The lives of communities were recorded in the classified pages of their newspapers.
After a glance at the headlines, many other readers’ first and sometimes only stops were the horoscope, comics, crossword (an error there generated far more calls than a rogue columnist ever could) and other pleasant distractions. For still more, it was the stocks listings, sports scores or recipes to which they were primarily drawn.
There were movie and entertainment listings — even a TV guide so you’d know where and when to find Seinfeld. On Thursdays, you might buy a paper just for the Canadian Tire flyer. On weekends, specialty sections discussed books and told tales of travel adventures well-supported by the latest deals advertised by travel agencies. Housing developers pitched their latest home designs in special real estate sections. And there were magazines. Honestly, there were.
It’s been literal decades since we last subscribed to a print newspaper, and nearly as long since I picked one up from a news stand. My mother is the last person I recall still depending on buying a physical newspaper — she only stopped buying a Saturday Toronto Star in the last year or so — but that was mainly for the TV listings. Back when I still occasionally travelled on business (also more than a decade ago, now), it was a nostalgic treat to find a copy of USA Today at the door of my hotel room in the morning.
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Over at The Line, they’ve had to double the number of fainting couches available for overwhelmed and emotionally depleted staff members after discovering that the ongoing military leadership scandal goes up to the man at the top, Justin Trudeau himself:
We told you a week ago about the sexual misconduct scandal(s) at the very top of the Canadian Armed Forces. Army General Jonathan Vance recently retired after serving as the chief of the defence staff, the highest post in the military. Shortly after, Global News reported that he had faced two allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct during his career. Then, Vance’s successor was also required to step aside while being investigated for allegations of a sexual nature.
This is embarrassing for the military, but as we noted last week, there’s danger here to the government — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was told about the allegations against Vance, and passed that up the chain of command … meaning the PM knew, and did nothing.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean Justin Trudeau might have not lived up to his own self-branding and may have even — this is hard to even type — fallen short of the standard he sets for others?!
OK, OK. We had to sit down a minute there and catch our breath. It’s all just so much to take in. The government clearly knows it’s in trouble. Sajjan gave some testy testimony in which he said that it would have been inappropriate for him take an active role in any investigation. This is an awfully god-damned novel interpretation on ministerial responsibility that we’re excited to see become even dumber as this unfolds. The PM, for his part, has adjusted his ass covering; where once he said that he was not aware of the allegations against Gen. Vance, he now admits he was told in 2018, but says he did not know the details.
Think about that for a minute. The prime minister of Canada, the self-styled feminist prime minister of Canada, was told that the country’s top soldier, a man in a position of incredible power and authority, was accused of sexual misconduct, and … that’s it? Like he didn’t ask any questions? Give the old general a buzz and ask what’s up? A government that tried to sink an admiral in a case so flimsy it collapsed once readily available facts came to light couldn’t be bothered to find out if all that smoke around the general may have been from a fire?
This is, remarkably, not even the funny part. Everything above is embarrassing and awful and pathetic, but it actually gets worse.
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Ted Campbell regards this new fig leaf of appointing some sort of “watchdog” for the Canadian Armed Forces — in light of the ongoing investigations into impropriety on the part of too damned many senior officers — as worse than a waste of time:
Another “watchdog” is going to do exactly nothing. The former Ombudsman did his job, he did the right thing. The problem was that the political leadership ~ specifically Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan ~ decided to ignore him and then to shut him out of the process. I have no idea why Minister Sajjan decided to put the interests of the most senior military officers ahead of those subordinate to them, but he did. The Ombudsman was the watchdog we needed. He did all the right things. Defence Minister Sajjan failed the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces, he failed the institution and he failed Canada. Another watchdog will not fix that.
Some years ago I said that our military needed to be seen in human terms. Our men and women in uniform, I said, needed to be tough, superbly disciplined, well trained, adequately equipped and also properly organized and well led, too. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces are not well enough led and that has led to a breakdown in discipline which I said, back in 2016, “is the sine qua non of soldiering.” I stand by that. Nothing, not firepower, not leadership, not fighting spirit, not huge budgets and the finest hardware, nothing else matters as much as discipline. I will not be moved off that position because I know that I have 3,000 years of history to back me up.
I remember, in 1961, reading an article, I’m pretty sure it was in Time magazine, but Google doesn’t help me out there, which noted that Lieutenant General Geoffrey Walsh had taken over (as Chief of the General Staff) (and I’m about 99% sure I have the words correct) “the small but superbly disciplined Canadian Army.” I showed the little article to an older soldier who said something like “this is some [expletive] Yank magazine, eh? Well, it figgers; they look at us and they think we’re the [expletive] Grenadier [expletive] Guards. All they see is the marchin’ and the drill and we look great ’cause they’re a sloppy bunch of [expletive]. But you remember, kid, what I tell ya. The real discipline ain’t on the parade square, it’s in the field and you listen to what I [expletive] tell ya’ and then you do like I [expletive] tell ya’.” (It was that kind of [expletive]😉 army 60 years ago.) And he was right of course. Yes, our Regiment was a thing of beauty when we trooped the colour ~ as good as any other regiment in the world ~ but what made us better than any of the rest was self-discipline, learned the proper way by the examples set by good, tough leaders. Somehow the Canadian Armed Forces seems to have lost too much toughness, too much discipline and far too much leadership.
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Everywhere one turns one sees a tendency toward mimesis — we tend to copy rather than invent — qualified by intellectual emptiness. In other words, it may be that the vacancy of the Canadian mind reflects the vacancy of the Canadian landscape. Of course, much of the land is variegated — lakes, rivers, forests, the impressive mountain ranges running down the length of “beautiful British Columbia” — in the same way, metaphorically speaking, that we can boast a number of resonating exceptions to the staple of tepid cultural and intellectual sameness.
One thinks of novelist Mordecai Richler, poet Irving Layton, critical minds Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. Our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the ne plus ultra of our political class; there has been none like him since, which may explain why he is now on posthumous trial for war crimes and a hue and cry has gone up to remove his statues and rename eponymous schools.
The constitutive factor, however, exceptions aside, is the “howling emptiness” of a vast landmass that may partially account for the emptiness of our intellectual topography — if, as Jared Diamond had argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, geography governs the development of culture and spirit.
Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.
Ted Campbell talks about the way the Royal Canadian Navy plans for warship purchases … and how the best-laid plans can be derailed by ignorant political advisors:
An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (until the RCAF gets their replacement for the CF-18 Hornet). (BAE Systems, via Flickr)
Once upon time,* about 25 to 30 years ago, in the mid 1990s, when I was the director of a small, very specialized team in National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) in Ottawa, something like this happened: One of my colleague, who had a title like Director of Maritime Requirements or something similar said to one of his principle subordinates, “Look, now that the 280s (Canada had four Tribal Class destroyers with pennant numbers starting at 280, they were often just called ‘280s’) are finished their mid-life refit and now that the new frigates are entering service it is time to put a ‘placeholder’ in the DSP for their eventual replacements.” The DSP was (still is?) the Defence Services Programme, it is the internal document which sets out the long range spending plans (maybe hopes is a better word) for the Canadian Armed Forces.
Anyway, the Navy commander (the officer assigned to write the document, not the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy who is nicknamed the Kraken (CRCN)) sat at his desk and consulted the most recently approved planning document which, as far as I can remember, called for a surface fleet of 25 combat vessels and four large support ships plus numerous minor war vessels (like minesweepers) and training vessels. The officer then prepared a memorandum for the joint planning staff which said that the Navy would need 25 new combat ships, to be procured between about 2015 and 2035, in five “batches” of five ships each** at a total cost of about $100 Billion, in 2025 dollars. He didn’t say much beyond that, actually, he was just intending to “reserve” some money a generation or so in the future. His memorandum sailed, smoothly, past his boss and the commodore but questions came from a very senior Air Force general: Where he asked, did the $100 Billion come from? That was an outrageous number, he said.
A meeting ensure where the Navy engineering people came and said, “$100 Billion is a very reasonable guesstimate. Our brand new frigate are costing $1 Billion each when they come down the slipway. They will each have cost the taxpayers two to three times that by the time we send them to be broken up thirty or forty years from now. Adding in the inevitable costs of new technology and inflation, which we know is higher for things like military ships and aircraft than it is for consumer goods, then a life-cycle cost of $4 Billion for each ship is very conservative. The admirals and generals huffed and puffed but they didn’t argue ~ they knew that the engineering branch insisted on using life cycle costing, even though no-one but them understood it, and they also knew that arguing with engineers is like mud-wrestling with pigs: everyone gets dirty but the pigs love it.
A decade later, when a new government was planning the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, which was all about making the Canadian shipbuilding industry competitive and had very little to do with ships ~ except they would be the “product” for which the Government of Canada would pay top-dollar, the Navy was told it could have fewer ships, in two classes, and someone ~ NOT the military’s engineering branch ~ assigned a cost figure to the project which was, to be charitable, pulled out of some political/public relations staffer’s arse.
[…]
* The story is true, in general, but I was not directly involved in any of it. I learned about what happened from three main sources: 1. routine briefings that my bosses (directors-general and branch chiefs) gave, regularly, to we directors, dealing with what was going on in the HQ and in the big wide world; 2. periodic chats with my colleagues, after work on Friday afternoons, in the bar of the Officers’ Mess ~ many of us regarded 2. as a more reliable source of information than 1.; and 3. in the case of the story about the Navy engineers and the Air Force general, by a friend and colleague who was in the room.
** The idea, long before the National Shipbuilding Strategy, was to keep shipyards moderately busy on a continuous basis. The 25 ships would all be similar: the first “batch” of five would be identical, one to the other; the second “batch” would be very similar but with some improvements; the five ships of batch 3 would be similar to the ships from the second batch and those from batch 4 would be rather like their batch 3 sisters. Finally, the batch 5 ships would be product improved versions of batch 4 ~ they would still be “sisters” of the batch 1 ships, but not, in any way, twins. The idea was that about the time that the batch 5 ships were being delivered the first of the batch 1 ships would be getting ready for a mid-life refit (after 15 to 20 years of service) which would result in it being much more like the batch 5 ships … and so on.
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Matt Gurney on how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest act of moral cowardice probably won’t hurt him at all in the polls:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
It has been fascinating to watch the reaction to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s profile in non-courage this week, after he and most of his cabinet skipped a vote on a Tory motion seeking to declare China’s brutal campaign against the Uyghur people a genocide. (Marc Garneau, who was probably desperately wishing he was back in low-Earth orbit, showed up to abstain … because that’s a good use of an astronaut.) If there is anything close to a consensus on the matter, it’s that the PM was in a difficult spot and found a way to slither out of it at the cost of some dignity, but no other real loss.
Kaveh Shahrooz, in a piece here at The Line on Thursday, made that case well. He savaged Trudeau for his hypocrisy — “when the chips were down, the [gender-based analysis], the intersectional lens and the feminist foreign policy were tossed aside in favour of appeasing China,” he wrote — but he also noted that the entire affair won’t really hurt the PM. “Sadly, the worst that will happen to Trudeau because of the hypocrisy and incompetence displayed is some angry tweets and a few articles like this one,” said Shahrooz.
Maybe. But maybe not. Shahrooz and others are certainly right that the prime minister won’t pay an electoral price, and probably won’t see his polling waver. But history makes its own judgments. And I suspect this prime minister is more aware of that than most.
It seems a long time ago now, but in his first term, Trudeau made a habit of apologizing. Only rarely for stuff that he was actually himself responsible for — he’s kinda averse to doing that. But formal and public apologies for past failures? He was all over those. In 2018, the BBC even ran a piece noting the PM’s habit, and asked in the headline, “Does Justin Trudeau apologize too much?”
It’s not that there weren’t things worth apologizing for. In 2016, he apologized for Canada turning back the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying mostly Sikhs that was then forced to return to India, where 20 of them were killed in a riot. The next year, he apologized to survivors of residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, and to LGBT Canadians for discrimination they faced at the hands of the federal government. The next year, Jews and members of the Tsilhqot’in Nation received apologies for historical wrongs inflicted on them. And so on. It was a thing.
A man who so clearly adores taking a stage to shed a few tears while acknowledging wrongs committed by someone else, long ago, probably can’t avoid wondering who, in a hundred years, will be apologizing to Uyghurs for his refusal to clearly state that what is happening to them is a genocide.
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The Canadian national temper is a funny thing, riddled with contradictions. It is plainly an abstraction, and yet it does seem to have discernible traits. Some jokingly regard it as absurdly apologetic — a Canadian is someone who says “sorry” when he is jostled. Canadians are polite and amiable, pacifist by nature; they are the world’s peacekeepers. Canadians regard themselves as morally superior, especially with regard to Americans. Canadians are inwardly attracted to failure, as Margaret Atwood contended in Survival — Canadians have a will to lose as powerful as the American will to win. And so on.
Canada is a huge but under-populated country. The wind echoes in our ears. Much has been made in our literature of the hardiness and resilience necessary for existence in a punishing climate and of the harsh labor required to extract the benefits of a resource-based economy. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush is an early classic detailing the rigors and challenges of domesticating an unforgiving milieu. Canadian fortitude is a national foundation myth.
Jen Gerson considers the moral smallness of Canadian government wiggling out of labelling China’s treatment of their Uyghur minority as the genocide it certainly is:
This week, the Prime Minister of an admittedly genocidal G7 state refused to condemn China for its treatment of its minority Uyghur population. A treatment that has included family separation, forced sterilization, and warehousing thousands of people in what can only be described as modern concentration camps.
Justin Trudeau failed to condemn China, noting, quite rightly, that genocide is an “extremely loaded” term. One not to be bandied about lightly. It demonstrates some moral cowardice on his part, certainly, but also a degree of pragmatism. Canada’s squeaky and lonely objection would do little good. We’re already in a vulnerable position, what with the ongoing captivity of two Canadians who remain in Chinese detention as an act of retaliation for our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. A declaration of genocide in this case is probably better handled by a collection of nations. As long as we can live with the shame of the smallness that such an argument implies.
(Although perhaps it was unwise to pin so many of our early hopes of an early vaccine rollout on a doomed collaboration with a Chinese manufacturer with a vaccine backed by China’s Institute of Biotechnology and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Who could have predicted we would run into problems with such a notoriously reliable and honourable global partner that occasionally engages in hostage diplomacy? But I digress.)
The real issue with Trudeau’s grovelling little deflection on the question of Chinese genocide is that it made his own position on the subject not two years ago impossible to ignore in comparison. The final report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry stated that the truths it uncovered in the process of its years-long investigations:
… tell the story — or, more accurately, thousands of stories — of acts of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.
Several pundits at the time noted at the time that this stretched the definition of “genocide” beyond ordinary recognition. “Genocide” is not the result of a set of compounding government failures over time: it’s a word that we reserve to describe a discreet set of acts motivated by the deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population. But after a day or so of hemming and hawing on the issue after the report was released, our prime minister noted: “The issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term … We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”
There was some careful phrasing in this response. Note, Trudeau agreed that this was genocide, not that it is genocide. The prime minister dodged the implication that Canada is engaged in deliberate ethnic cleansing. But it’s worth peeling back the skin of the onion, past the obvious and easy allegation of hypocrisy, and instead ask ourselves why?
Why can we get away with calling ourselves a genocidal state, but not China?
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This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Newfoundland Railway by Kevin J. Holland, the longest 42″ gauge (3’6″ between the rails) in North America. The earliest stretch of the railway was constructed in 1881 from St. John’s and continued west toward Halls Bay until 1884 when the original backers declared bankruptcy. Eventually Robert G. Reid agreed to continue expanding the line across Newfoundland westward to Port aux Basques, which was connected to the rest of the island in 1898. Reid was given land grants and outright ownership of the entire railway system — including several government-subsidized branches off the mainline — which operated along with coastal ferries as the Reid Newfoundland Company. Reid’s company ran into financial difficulties before the First World War which were worsened due to wartime and post-war losses and the entire operation was nationalized (colonialized?) in 1923 as the Newfoundland Government Railway (abbreviated to Newfoundland Railway in 1926).
Newfoundland played a pivotal role in World War II during the Battle of the Atlantic and as a staging point for ship convoys and aircraft movements. Construction of Allied bases and the associated movement of personnel resulted in a railway traffic surge. A British and Canadian airfield grew near the main line at Gander, and the United States also exploited Newfoundland’s relative proximity to Europe. The two largest American installations were a naval base at Argentia — site of the 1941 shipboard meeting between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill — and Harmon Field, an Air Force base on the west coast at Stephenville. Rail traffic was a barometer of wartime pressures; between 1941 and 1943, NR’s passenger count rose from 223,000 to 500,000; freight tonnage also doubled. So important was the line to American military interests that the U.S. government allocated $2 million of “lend-lease” funds for locomotive and car construction.
Newfoundland Railway’s Overland Limited (a.k.a. the “Newfie Bullet”) calls at Corner Brook in 1948, the year before CN took over. Canadian National photo via Classic Trains
Although the war brought profits and a revitalized equipment roster, the railway was not immune from the conflict’s brutality. On October 14, 1942, the Port aux Basques–North Sydney (N.S.) ferry Caribou was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. Of 237 passengers and crew on board, 136 perished.
Newfoundland Railway main and branch lines, post-1949. Map via heritage.nf.ca
Canadian National control
Newfoundland’s 1949 entry into Canada saw responsibility for much of the transport infrastructure assumed by the Canadian government, whose Canadian National Railways was charged with the management and operation of the railway, as well as coastal steamship services and the ferry link to Nova Scotia. The federal government agreed to subsidize the operations. Despite wartime profits and some postwar rebounds, though, the railway had been and would continue to be a chronic money-loser.
Newfoundland Railway was exclusively steam-powered for all but the final seven months of its pre-Confederation existence, as GE 47-ton center-cab diesels 5000–5002 arrived in August 1948. The last new NR locomotives were class R-2-d Mikados 324–329, built by Montreal and delivered just weeks before Confederation. They became the youngest steam locomotives, by five years, on the entire CNR. In all, four 4-6-0s, a 2-8-0, 10 4-6-2s, and 30 2-8-2s were conveyed to CN.
[…]
Well into the 1960s, the railway provided the only land link spanning Newfoundland. When the first road across the island opened as part of the Trans-Canada Highway in late 1965, it triggered an irreversible shift of traffic off the railway. In the highway’s first 15 years, the percentage of island freight handled by train dropped by more than half. More than 24 hours — double the road time — was required for the St. John’s–Port aux Basques rail trip, and that was if the trains ran on time, a spotty prospect especially in winter.
Passengers benefitted from CN’s continued investment in rolling stock, although the non-air-conditioned fleet couldn’t provide mainland comfort levels. The principal pre-Confederation passenger train was the overnight Overland Limited. CN renamed it Caribou in 1950, a fitting tribute to the ferry lost in 1942. To most folks, though, the train was known from the war onward as the “Newfie Bullet,” a wry reference to its leisurely schedule (daily in summer, triweekly the rest of the year). Although CN buses replaced the “Bullet” in July 1969, mixed trains kept serving isolated mainline points and the Carbonear, Bonavista, and Argentia branches.
From the Wikipedia entry on the post-abandonment fate of the line:
The former Newfoundland Railway station in St. John’s now hosts the Railway Coastal Museum. Numerous towns across the island have preserved railway equipment on display.
With few exceptions, the roadbed now forms the T’Railway Provincial Park rail trail. Until 2005, the Trinity Loop Amusement Park operated a miniature train, one of the few remaining places on Newfoundland with tracks still in place. The park closed down and was abandoned in 2005 due to lack of interest. Since then, all of the buildings have been heavily vandalized and Hurricane Igor washed away part of the park, including a large section of the rail bed. Local railway fans have been pushing government to retain the park as an historic site but officials have expressed little interest.
Some rolling stock was converted to a narrower gauge of 914 mm (3 ft) and sold to the White Pass & Yukon Route (WP&YR) railway, which reopened for service in 1988. Gravel cars used by WP&YR are still painted in CN orange; unconfirmed information indicates that some Newfoundland passenger cars were converted into passenger cars of vintage appearance for WP&YR.
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HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) was a Majestic-class light aircraft carrier that served the Royal Canadian Navy from 1948-1957.
The third ship of the Majestic class, Magnificent was built by Harland and Wolff, laid down 29 July 1943 and launched 16 November 1944. Purchased from the Royal Navy (RN) to replace HMCS Warrior, she served in a variety of roles, operating both fixed and rotary-wing aircraft. She was generally referred to as the Maggie. Her aircraft complement included Fairey Fireflies and Hawker Sea Furies, as well as Seafires and Avengers.
Tags: HMCS Magnificent, CVL 21, Majestic Class Light Aircraft Carrier, Royal Canadian Navy, RCN, CV, Maggie, Fairey Fireflies, Hawker Sea Furies, Seafires, Avengers, Canada, aircraft carrier, Canada
From the comments:
Tibor80
5 years ago
That’s me with the mike in hand, interviewing the staff. It was the last TV work I did in Canada before leaving the industry and settling on Madison Avenue in the fall of 1954. Don Harron had been hosting a series titled ON THE SPOT, produced by NFB for 2-year old CBC-TV. They were running behind and NFB called me to fill in. I had never before done ad lib of this sort. They were supposed to have an advance man to do research and provide points to be covered or some sort of script but that never materialized. There was no crew either, so I doubled on grip work, hauled equipment from setup to setup — couldn’t do the camera and be in front of it, too — though I’m sure NFB would have loved that.
I was just naturally very interested in the ship and asked a lot of questions and it worked out fine. The ship had no air conditioning. We were on maneuvers in the Gulf Stream near Bermuda in August. The heat was a killer. I couldn’t sleep. I shared a cabin with a lieutenant, a really nice fellow. He said, “Hey, Andy, you’re a V.I.P. here, I could get you a cot on a deck.” There was a little deck at the rear below the flight deck. All lights were out on maneuvers. I had never seen so many stars in my life — and the sea was filled with phosphorescence — like millions of fire flies. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
We only had one week on the Maggie making the documentary but I was tempted to sign up for life. The navy had turned me down once before. A buddy and I got terrible marks in high school in the spring ’45 so we ran down to the Navy Recruiting station in Toronto and asked to sign up. A wiseguy behind the desk said, “Leave your names and if Hitler attacks Toronto, we’ll give you a call.” (Hitler shot himself a week later)
A video editor friend up in Belleville found this video and wrote to me saying there was a fellow with my name in this video. I told him that was me 70 pounds ago. Great days.
HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) was a Majestic-class light aircraft carrier that served the Royal Canadian Navy from 1948–1957. Initially ordered by the Royal Navy during World War II, the Royal Canadian Navy acquired the carrier as a larger replacement for its existing operational carrier. Magnificent was generally referred to as Maggie in Canadian service. Following its return to the United Kingdom in 1956, the ship remained in reserve until being scrapped in 1965.
Description and construction
The 1942 Design Light Fleet carrier was divided into the original ten Colossus-class ships, followed by the five Majestic-class ships, which had some design changes that accommodated larger and heavier aircraft. The changes reduced the weight of petrol and fuel storage by reducing them to 75,000 gallons, to offset the additional weight from strengthening of the deck to operate aircraft as heavy as 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg). Further improvements over the Colossus class included larger aircraft elevators (54 by 34 feet, 16 m × 10 m) and improvements made to internal subdivisions for survivability purposes and accommodations.
The ship was 698 feet (212.8 m) long with a beam of 80 ft (24.4 m) and a draught of 25 ft (7.6 m). The carrier displaced 15,700 long tons (16,000 t). The ship was powered by steam from four Admiralty three-drum boilers. This propelled two Parsons geared steam turbines driving two shafts creating 40,000 shaft horsepower (30,000 kW). Magnificent had a top speed of 24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph).
The aircraft carrier was armed with 24 2-pounder and 19 Bofors 40 mm guns for anti-aircraft defence. Majestic-class carriers were fitted out with Type 281, Type 293 and two Type 277 radar installations. The ship had a complement of 1,100, including the air group.
The third ship of the Majestic class, Magnificent was ordered 16 October 1942. The order was placed with Harland and Wolff in Belfast who were also constructing the Colossus-class ships Glory and Warrior. Magnificent was laid down on 29 July 1943 with the yard number 1228 and launched on 16 November 1944.
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Michael Geist updates the situation with the federal government’s attempt to massively rework the Canadian broadcast and internet regulation framework without proper scrutiny or transparency:
I have not been shy about expressing my concerns with the Bill C-10, the Broadcasting Act reform bill. From a 20 part series examining the legislation to two podcasts to a debate with Janet Yale, I have actively engaged on policy concerns involving regulation that extends far beyond the “web giants”, the loss of Canadian sovereignty over broadcast ownership, the threat to Canadian intellectual property, and the uncertainty of leaving many questions to the CRTC to answer. Yet beyond the substance of the bill, in recent days an even more troubling issue has emerged as Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, his Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin, and the Liberal government abandon longstanding commitments to full consultation, transparency, and parliamentary process.
Last week, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of what it is calling a “pre-study” on Bill C-10. In this case, “pre-study” is euphemism for avoiding the conventional parliamentary process. Bill C-10 has not yet passed second reading in the House of Commons and has not been referred to committee for study. There have been extensive debates in the House and last week Conservative MP Michael Kram called for the bill to be withdrawn, noting that politicians could do Canadians a lot of good by “rewriting it from scratch.” That move drew criticism from Guilbeault during an interview at the CMPA Prime Time event, as he called for pressure on the Conservatives to support referring the bill to committee. There are instances of pre-study, but doing so concurrently with second reading makes no sense since a pre-study allows for a wide range of amendments, whereas after second reading the permitted amendments are more limited.
In an earlier era (or with a different government), the prospect of conducting a study of the bill while simultaneously engaging in second reading would garner loud objections. In fact, at the Heritage Committee hearing last week, opposition MPs wondered why they were already being asked for amendments to the bill when they had yet to hear from witnesses, much less conduct an actual study of the bill. Indeed, for a government that once prized itself on robust consultation, it seemingly now wants to avoid any genuine consultation on Bill C-10, content to have potential amendments presented through lobbyists, rather than on the public record in open hearings.
The secrecy does not end there. At the same hearing (I was a witness and waited patiently for these issues to play out), Conservative MPs raised questions about promised data on how the government had arrived at claims that the bill will generate over $800 million in new money. Leaving aside the fact that Guilbeault has often inflated that figure to over $1 billion, there has no public disclosure about the source of this claim. Cartt.ca reports that officials told the committee that the calculations could be “confusing” without a verbal explanation. Days later, Dabrusin told the committee that in fact the data had been provided to the committee late last year but perhaps not distributed to committee members.
When I was questioned by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh during my appearance before the committee, he again raised concerns about the claim. Dabrusin interjected with a point of order to make it clear that the data had been provided to the committee, albeit not distributed to MPs. What made the exchange so striking was that Dabrusin – a parliamentary secretary – seemingly did not give any thought to the fact that the data has not been made publicly available. Promoting long overdue disclosures to a handful of MPs while the public is kept in the dark is hardly the stuff worthy of praise or a point of order.
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