Glen And Friends Cooking
Published 2 Oct 2024Today on Cocktails After Dark we explore the fascinating history of Gander Airport’s iconic Big Dipper bar, once a bustling stopover for the world’s rich and famous during the 1940s to 1960s. This video dives into the golden age of aviation when propeller planes made Gander, Newfoundland, a key refuelling point for transatlantic flights. Discover how legends like Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, and Frank Sinatra sipped cocktails at the Big Dipper while planes refuelled, and learn how to make the bar’s signature cocktail using the infamous Newfoundland Screech rum. If you’ve ever been curious about Gander’s aviation history, old-time airport bars, or unique cocktails, this video has it all. Plus, find out how “Screech” became a part of Newfoundland’s folklore. Whether you’re a history buff, cocktail enthusiast, or simply curious about this legendary airport, you won’t want to miss this journey back in time. Grab your shaker, some rum, and let’s make history — one drink at a time!
The Big Dipper
1½ ounces Newfoundland Screech
1 ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup
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January 22, 2025
Discover the ‘Lost’ Big Dipper Rum Cocktail Recipe
QotD: The Who
The Who’s case for being the greatest rock band in history, and it has one, depends on the band having been a four-piece act in which all four pieces had the absolute maximum of performing ability and musical personality. To find any equivalent — maybe Zeppelin comes close — you would probably have to quit rock and go rummaging through the jazz section.
But I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t no Moon over there. I mean, good Lord: OF COURSE Keith Moon and John Entwistle were a difficult rhythm section for a guitarist to play in front of. Have you listened to those records? Professionals have talked about how watching Moon play up close was an exercise in constant suspense — you would see him take off at the start of the bar and go roaming around the drum kit and wonder how he could possibly make it back in time. He usually did make it — when he wasn’t so zonked he was falling off his stool, which is also a thing that happened sometimes.
This intricate, frantic quality is what made Moon the most inimitable of the great rock drummers — someone whose style you could recognize in a matter of seconds if he were playing on biscuit tins — but the difficulty of playing in front of a notional “timekeeper” so adventurous, and particularly doing it in concert, ought to be self-evident.
The standard advice for a rock guitarist in this predicament would be to make sure he had a very steady, unadventurous bass player to anchor the group. And the bassists for many excellent groups do, in fact, secretly stick to four or five notes they’re real comfortable with. But Entwistle offered Moon-like challenges as part of a rhythm section, albeit without inducing the same terror. At any moment his left hand might start leaping like a salmon on the fretboard, and if he played half notes in one bar, this was no guarantee he wouldn’t be doing startling, blinding sixteenths in the next.
That’s what makes Who records Who records; that’s what lifts the best ones above even the empyrean level of Townshend’s songwriting. But it meant, as Pete explained in his apology, that he could never step out and “shred” as a guitarist. The entire structure of the traditional rock group was topsy-turvy with the Who, and Townshend, whose ego is at least as big as the next fellow’s (spoiler: it’s bigger), was forced in some regard to be the responsible one, the custodian of the rhythm.
Colby Cosh, “Leave Pete Townshend alone!”, National Post, 2019-11-29.
January 21, 2025
Claim – First Nations lived sustainably and harmoniously with their natural environment. Reality – “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump”
Pim Wiebel contrasts how children are taught about how First Nations before contact with Europeans were living fully sustainable lives in a kind of Garden of Eden until the white snakes man arrived and the rather less Edenic reality:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort McLeod, Alberta.
Photo by Mike via Wikipedia Commons.
Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.
Each of these notions require scrutiny.
For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.
It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used“. An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules”, that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”
But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?
The evidence suggests something quite different.
Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.
Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.”
Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”
The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.
QotD: Raw democracy
(And this is what our political, economic and media elites want to export across the globe?)
Doug Newman, “An Understatement: The Founding Fathers Hated Democracy”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-08-14.
January 20, 2025
“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”
Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:
There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.
“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.
Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.
But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Substack
I subscribe to a lot of other folks’ Substack blogs and I’ve been linking to a lot of posts there over the last year or so. It’s a very good site and you’re bound to find things of interest there if you like some of the things I’ve been linking to.
If you would like notifications/summaries of posts here but don’t want to check in every day, you can subscribe to my Substack at https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson as I mail out a daily update with links to all of the day’s blog posts. For example, yesterday’s summary looked like this:
Campo-Giro M1913 – Spain’s First Domestic Selfloader
Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 May 2015The Campo-Giro was Spain’s first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is an early one, and particularly interesting to look at for that reason. The gun is a straight blowback design in 9mm Largo, and only lasted as Spain’s standard pistol until its descendent, the Astra 400, was adopted in 1921.
QotD: Brainwashing
Like Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (another must-read), I read Meerloo years ago, so my recall of the details is fuzzy, but the upshot is obvious: The techniques of “brainwashing” have been known since at least the Middle Ages, and they’re still the same. Suspected witches in the Early Modern period, for instance, got Der Prozess, and though the witch hunters also had recourse to the rack and thumbscrews and all the rest, none of it was really necessary — isolation, starvation, and sleep deprivation work even better, provided you hit that sweet spot when they’re just starting to go insane …
I’m being deliberately flip about a horrible thing, comrades, because as no doubt distasteful as that is to read, the fact is, we’re doing it to ourselves, everywhere, all the time. Not the starvation part, obviously, but we eat such horribly unnatural diets that our minds are indeed grossly affected. Want proof? Go hardcore keto for a week and watch what happens. Or if that’s too much, you can simulate the experience by going cold turkey off caffeine. I promise you, by the end of day two you’d give the NKVD the worst dirt on your own mother if they sat a steaming hot cup of java in front of you.
Severian, “Kickin’ It Old Skool”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-04.
January 19, 2025
Mark Carney is a serious man … that doesn’t mean he’d be a good political leader
The Line‘s Jen Gerson likes Mark Carney, but she hastens to add that this isn’t necessarily good news for Mr. Carney as she felt the same way about Jim Prentice who was very briefly Premier of Alberta but “demonstrated the political nous of a chicken nugget” and quickly was out of power:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I learned the most valuable lesson from that period of political reporting, one I try to carry with me unto this very day: Never, never let one’s personal feelings about an individual candidate corrupt one’s political analysis. And if you think about it, this is a very important lesson to learn.
I am not a normal person. That which appeals to me is very unlikely to find purchase with sane, feeling voters who hold ordinary jobs and live lives filled with meaningful human connections and real, not-political conversations.
I was thinking about this as I watched Mark Carney announce his intention to run as Liberal leader in Edmonton on Thursday. Carney is a serious man. He has a real CV and a long list of meaningful accomplishments. He’s a man who seems to understand that the “good old times are over”. He’s a man who has navigated several international crises — as he was keen to point out. He’s a man who despises the excesses of both the right and the left. He’s a man who is is focused on building Canada’s economy.
He’s a man who has correctly identified one of the Conservatives’ core weaknesses, their tendency to channel legitimate anger and grievance into thin slogans that offer few substantive plans toward the kinds of significant changes that this country will be required to make. The fact that Carney is making this critique while coming to the fore without offering any substantive plans of his own is only to be expected considering the timeline’s he’s working with, I suppose.
Regardless, Carney is giving Jim Prentice Energy. Jean Charest Energy. Jeb! Energy.
I like him.
[…]
For that matter, if Carney wants to present himself as a strong supporter of Canada, a defender of our sovereignty in the face of America’s re-articulated expansionist ambitions, why did he preempt his leadership launch with an appearance on The Daily Show? What message are we to take from this: that Carney is well liked and respected by the American political milieu that was roundly trounced by Donald Trump?
It doesn’t signal a lot of faith in Canada as a cohesive cultural concept to soft launch your political leadership campaign through a marshmallow chat with an American comedy host. (As an aside, I realize that foreigners aren’t real to Americans, but I’m begging literally any television journalist on a mainstream U.S. network to stop treating our politicians like kawaii pets [Wiki] on loan from a northern Democrat utopia that exists only in their minds. These people can handle hard questions — even about matters that are important to an American audience; like, for example, Canada’s delinquent NATO spending.)
Did Mark Carney not believe that the CBC that I presume he will be campaigning to preserve was up to the challenge of doing the first interview with him? Look, I wouldn’t turn down a chat at Jon Stewart’s table if I got the call, but if the best possible way to reach potential Liberal leadership voters in 2025 is to pop onto American TV, we might as well pack it in, call ourselves 51 and be done with it.
By the way, in case anyone hasn’t yet pointed it out; the average age of a Daily Show audience member is 63. The audience is in steep decline, and it doesn’t even air on any Canadian TV channels anymore. To watch the Carney clip, Canadians have to seek it out on Apple TV or YouTube. Usually the day after because the target demo is usually in bed by 9 p.m. MST now.
Dozens of Dead Tiger Tanks at Prokhorovka? – Prokhorovka Part 6
World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2025As the dust settles on the fields of Prokhorovka, Indy takes a look at the losses suffered by the Red Army and the Waffen-SS. But we soon see that Rotmistrov and the Soviets have launched a calculated propaganda operation to distort the numbers and paint the battle as a crushing victory.
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California’s wildfire plight
Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:
Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.
Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.
So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?
First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.
Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.
Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.
How to Make a Wallclock | Episode 5
Paul Sellers
Published 13 Sept 2024The main joinery for the clock and the panel all came together, and now we are ready to form the roundovers to the top and bottom pieces.
We will use the traditional method using a bench plane and, in our case, a #4 version. Following this shaping, we can focus on the final finishing of all of the components by scraping and sanding the surfaces.
After all of the parts are sanded, we follow specific patterns for gluing up the main carcass of the clock.
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QotD: Role-playing games
So why were such games seemingly only invented in the 1970s? Humans have been telling stories presumably since we evolved to speak. We’ve been using dice, or something quite like them, since at least 3,000 BCE. Why did it take us so long to combine them? Certainly, some elements were already present in the mid-1820s in Kriegsspiel, a Prussian battle simulation game, in which regiments had hitpoints that needed to be depleted to remove them from the field, as well as an umpire — much like the later Dungeon Masters — to roll the dice and decide if players’ orders succeeded. Even the 1820s, however, seems rather late.
One of the responses I saw on Twitter was that such games required a bureaucratic mindset — that it’s an essentially modern thing to reduce attributes like health or skills or the strength of an attack to numerical values. Children (and adults) have always played at roles, of course. In ancient Egypt children had miniature wooden swords; in thirteenth-century England, even kings played at being Arthurian knights. But tabletop role-playing games require systematising and formalising that play. It’s not just saying “I pull out a sword and hack the goblin’s head off”. Instead, first roll this die to see if you succeed. But is this really so modern? Obsessive counting of things, at least in the English-speaking world, seems to date at least from the seventeenth century — perhaps it wasn’t that widespread, but lists like actuarial tables and demographic statistics were already being compiled. The craze in seventeenth-century English policy circles was for “political arithmetic”. All in all, if the lack of such an attitude even was a constraint, it seems a soft one. If the predominantly agrarian society of 1820s Prussia could come up with Kriegsspiel, why not earlier still?
Another response I got was that such games needed literacy or numeracy, or had something to do with printing. But the whole thing can be done, and indeed invented, with just pen and paper. It could even be done with chalk on slate, or with sticks in the sand. As for the counting elements of such games, they essentially involve just agreeing a number — your health in the story, for example, or your ability to attack — and then comparing it with another number, such as an opponent’s armour or their ability to attack. It barely requires numeracy, let alone literacy. Tallying would cover most of it. And, of course, games might still be popular among a smaller group of literate people, even if much of the overall population was illiterate. Again, it seems too soft a constraint.
Finally, there was the response that the invention of such games required higher population densities. But that would be an argument against the invention of all games. We’ve had chess for millennia, however, and card games for centuries. If anything, we’ve been storytelling for even longer. An interesting variant of the argument, suggested by Matt Clancy, is that in fact tabletop role-playing games have been invented and re-invented many times, all over the world, but because of the lack of printing and low population densities, they have become lost and forgotten. Perhaps. Though I find it hard to believe that an activity so fun would never have been mentioned.
Anton Howes, “Where Be Dragons?”, Age of Invention, 2020-02-13.
January 18, 2025
Buying military surplus is often a bargain, but buying new military equipment is usually a financial black hole
The Canadian government has — since at least 1968 — always viewed major equipment purchases for the Canadian Armed Forces first and foremost as “regional economic development” projects which channel federal dollars into vote-rich areas in need of jobs or to reward provinces and regions for their support of the party in power. This virtually always requires getting all or most of the manufacturing/construction/assembly done in Canada.
To most people this sounds sensible: big military equipment acquisitions mean vast sums of taxpayer money, so why shouldn’t as much of that money as possible be spent in Canada? The answer, in almost every case, is that it will usually be VASTLY more expensive because Canadian industry doesn’t regularly produce these exotic, spendy items, so new factories or shipyards will need to be built, all kinds of specialized equipment will need to be acquired (usually from foreign sources), companies will need to hire and train new workforces, etc., and no rational private industries will spend that kind of money unless they’re going to be guaranteed to be repaid (plus handsome profits) — because CAF equipment purchases come around so infrequently that by the time the current batch need to be replaced, the whole process needs to start over from the very beginning. It would be like trying to run a car company where every new model year means you shut down the factories, fire the workers, destroy the tools and jigs and start over from bare ground. Economic lunacy.
Items like clothing, food, non-specialized vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) may carry a small extra margin over run-of-the-mill stuff, but it will generally be competitive with imported equivalents.1 Highly specialized items generally won’t be competitively priced exactly because of those specialized qualities. The bigger and more unusual the item to be purchased, the less economic sense it makes to buy domestically. As a rule of thumb, if the purchase will require a whole new manufacturing facility to be built, it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper — and usually faster — to just buy from a non-domestic source.
How much more do Canadian taxpayers have to shell out? Carson Binda has some figures for current procurement boondoggles:
Take the new fleet of warships being built for the Royal Canadian Navy – the River Class Destroyers. The Canadian River Class is based on the British Type 26 Frigates.
The Brits are paying between $1.5 and $2.2 billion in Canadian dollars per ship. Meanwhile, Canada is paying upwards of $5.3 billion per ship, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
That means we’re paying double what the Brits are, even though we are copying their existing design. That’s like copying the smart kids’ homework and still taking twice as long to do it.
If we paid the same amount per ship as the British did for the 15 ships of the River Class, we’d save about $40 billion in procurement costs. That’s twice as much money as the federal government sends to Ontario in health-care transfer payments.
[…]
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government bungled F-35 fighter jet procurement is another example of taxpayers losing out on military procurement contracts.
In 2010, the Harper government announced plans to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets for an inflation-adjusted cost of $190.8 million per unit.
The Liberal government canceled that procurement when it came to power. Fast forward to 2023 and the Trudeau government announced the purchase of 88 F-35s at an inflation-adjusted cost of $229.6 million per unit.
That massive increase in cost was totally avoidable if the Liberals would have just kept the Harper-era contract.
[…]
Because so much budget is wasted overpaying for big ticket items like ships, jets and trucks, soldiers aren’t getting the basics they need to keep Canadians safe.
The defence department bureaucrats can’t even figure out how to buy sleeping bags for our soldiers. National Defence spent $34.8 million buying sleeping bags that were unusable because they were not warm enough for Canadian winters.
Recently, Canadian soldiers sent to Ottawa for training had to rely on donated scraps of food because the military wasn’t able to feed them. Soldiers have gone months without seeing reimbursements for expenses, because of bureaucratic incompetence in our cash-strapped armed forces.
1. Note, however that during the 1980s, the Canadian army wanted to buy Iltis vehicles that were built in Germany at a $26,500 cost per unit. Getting the work done under license in Canada by Bombardier more than tripled the per-vehicle cost to $84,000.
