Quotulatiousness

November 18, 2025

Canada’s major projects announcements are an economic “hostage release” program

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg vents about Dear Leader Carney’s penchant for even-more-Trudeauesque-than-Justin performative governing. Far more emphasis is put on the PR value of an announcement than on the common sense practicality of the thing being announced. And Carney is also starting to re-announce already announced “projects” as if speaking it aloud will magically manifest it into reality:

Canada’s major projects announcements are a national embarrassment — an economic “hostage release” program — that tells the world just how uninvestible Canada has become under the Liberal party.

1970s central planning Liberal govt arrogance is at an all time GDP destroying high.

Try naming another OECD nation (we’re at the bottom now) where the press waits with bated breath for a “dear leader” politician who has never built anything in his life to fly in to grant a bureaucratic benediction on a few projects his bureaucrats will allow past the gate of the caps, taxes, green rules and red tape his govt imposes on everything.

Idea: set up the Major Dumb Redtape office in Calgary instead and get rid of the 10 anti-business rules written into law by the Montreal green alarmist fringe that’s holding Canadian energy, ag, forestry, and manufacturing back while other nations grow …

But PM Carney seems to like his bureaucratic power over what used to be a leading free market economy. Even while our GDP grinds down to the worst in the OECD.

The arrogance is breathtaking.

So is the ineptitude. This same central planning genius just punched a record new $78billiom hole through our public finances because he can’t manage basic public service delivery without more crushing debt.

The budget is a train wreck solidifying the final year of a Liberal decade steeply eroding purchasing power, national wealth, personal security and living standards and public services.

The irony is that this has driven Canada to ever-greater 51st state economic dependency. Donald Trump didn’t do that. They did.

But he’s been a too-convenient way to con the elderly with “elbows up” PR.

But should the next generation really be forced to lend this govt another $78bn in addition to the 1 trillion they’ve already taken to fund their failed decade of central planning, green slush funds and EV mandates while real infrastructure projects wait years for the Liberal party to bless them?

It’s not going to last.

Fitch just questioned the sustainability of all this. Unlike our lacklustre press they aren’t buying “net debt” or “operating/investment” Liberal financial illiteracy.

I had high hopes PM Carney would return fiscal sanity to Canada after openly borrowing Conservative policies to get elected by cutting the carbon and cap gains taxes.

But this budget, this major projects farce and his inability to kill a dozen economy killing rules of his own govt is showing the work how uninvestible Canada has become — and it’s accelerating national economic decline.

2026 is the end of the Liberal lost decade. First recession. Then debt downgrade. Then an election. And Carney can go back offshore to his assets and all the other global investors who like him don’t invest in Canada under Liberal mismanagement.

@SteveSaretsky thx for the brilliant line chart as usual.

A day later, after his post got significant attention on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, he posted this follow-up:

This angry post I wrote a day ago got 300,000 views.

Canadians are tired of the fake “major projects” PR by the same people who prevented those projects for a decade with their green taxes and prohibitions.

Announcing the release of 7 hostage projects is a joke. Some of these projects aren’t major and most aren’t new. None needed the govt to do anything but get out of the way from the beginning.

All the several hundred major projects still in purgatory need is for this govt to reverse their anti-job and anti-infrastructure tanker ban, industrial carbon tax, emissions cap, and electricity regs.

Oh — and also clarify by law that in Canada property rights are not overridden by leftist judges and UN wishful thinking.

Then get out of the way so a couple trillion dollars can flow in, major projects can get built and the govt revenue will flow to better public services — and to pay down that debt they just added $78bn to.

September 30, 2025

When your prime minister is addicted to photo ops

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You might think, from my headline, that I’m referring to former prime minister Justin Trudeau — who really, really did love him some gushing media coverage accompanied by advertising-agency-quality visual effects. But it’s actually our current prime minister who has somehow managed to show even more love for the photogenic backdrop and the appealing props in media coverage:

Twice in four days, Prime Minister Mark Carney scheduled official photo ops in front of environments that weren’t entirely real.

During a Sept. 19 visit to Mexico, Carney led cameras through a railyard stocked with pallets of artfully arranged sacks decorated with a maple leaf and the words “product of Canada”.

The site was the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ferrovalle train yard, located outside Mexico City.

The yard is indeed equipped to process incoming railcars of Canadian wheat, but that’s all done in bulk. Hopper cars are positioned over large tanks to disgorge their loads, multiple tonnes at a time.

If any sacks ever enter into the equation, it’s long after Canadian producers have exited the process.

“Canadian grain farmers haven’t shipped wheat in sacks for over a century!” read a reaction by Chris Warkentin, Conservative MP for the heavily wheat-growing riding of Grande Prairie, Alta.

Sylvain Charlebois, a food scientist at Dalhousie University, wrote in a column this week that “bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies”.

“We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability,” he wrote.

But it was a housing announcement just outside Ottawa where Carney would run into more direct accusations of being deliberately deceptive with his photo backdrop.

On Sept. 14, just before the opening of the fall session of Parliament, Carney stood in front of two under-construction homes in the Ottawa area and announced the official launch of Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency tasked with developing subdivisions of manufactured homes on federal land.

“The two sets of homes behind me were manufactured in two days, assembled on site in one,” Carney said to applause.

“We wanted to keep the townhouses open; we held back the workers from finishing it so you could see how things fit together,” he said, adding that one of the homes was being shipped “to Nunavut”.

Once the press conference was over, both homes were dismantled, and the site returned to what it had been before: A patch of fallow government land located near the Ottawa airport.

The land is a right-of-way for high-voltage power lines, which is why it currently doesn’t contain any development.

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies congratulates Brian Passifume for being one of the only legacy media reporters to look past the literal Potemkin Village structure Carney had assembled for his photo op:

Our Orwellian theme continues but, this time, it’s to credit Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun for his work digging into how our prime minister and his staff work to create fantasy settings for their announcements. Canadian Press and others were happy to play government propagandist by captioning a photo taken at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Builds launch by stating “Workers from Caivan Homes look on from a modular home under construction in Ottawa during Prime Minister Carney’s announcement for the new agency.”

Near as I can tell, most other media were happy to play along. Except Passifume who broke from the pack and pointed out the whole scene was, essentially, a movie set.

After one X user pointed out that the entire scene was fake, Passifume jumped in with “Dude I was there, that’s exactly what happened. It was a freshly-graded gravel lot with no utilities or services run. I was discussing this very topic with other reporters covering it — they didn’t even move the crane or remove the lifting apparatus, they just repurposed it to hold a gigantic Canadian flag.”

I expect some in the trade will say “hey, everyone does it” and no doubt that is true. But when people with power and those who crave it misrepresent reality, journalists are obliged to point that out. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive, just “Carney said in front of a set created for the announcement”.

Journalism isn’t actually that complicated. You just have to subscribe to its principles.

September 22, 2025

The Liberals fervently believe that saying something is the same as doing something

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the most irritating aspects of Justin Trudeau’s long reign of error was his evident joy in making announcements about this or that topic. It got to the point that even the pro-Liberal media started to notice that the same policy would be announced several times over a few months but no actual progress was made (except where they could start setting up a new government program … they’d hire the staff very quickly, but little or nothing would get done beyond that). Mark Carney was supposed to be a clean break from the Trudeau years — even though most of his ministers were Trudeau retreads — but Carney may actually be worse than Trudeau in that he just loves photo ops with pretty props for the cameras. As Dr. Sylvain Charlebois notes, we need a lot fewer photogenic Potemkin Villages in how our federal government operates:

In recent weeks, we have witnessed politicians lean on powerful visuals to make their case on food and trade. But these staged moments rarely serve the public interest. Worse, they often deepen food illiteracy in a country where understanding how our system works is already fragile.

Take Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s stunt. Upset with Diageo’s decision to close its bottling plant in Ontario, he theatrically dumped a bottle of Crown Royal and urged Ontarians to boycott the brand. What he didn’t mention is that the bottle in question was made in Manitoba and bottled in Quebec by unionized Canadian workers — jobs unaffected by the Ontario closure. The Windsor facility mainly serviced the U.S. market, and Diageo’s decision was years in the making. Ironically, the boycott risks punishing Canadian workers who will continue producing Crown Royal for Canadians. And for future investors, the message is chilling: why put capital into Ontario if a government will trash your brand on television for a corporate restructuring decision?

The federal stage brought us another head-scratcher. During a trade visit to Mexico, Prime Minister Mark Carney posed with bags of Canadian wheat stamped with a maple leaf. The problem? Canada doesn’t export wheat in bags. We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability. Bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies. For Canada to present itself this way trivializes our status as a modern agri-food powerhouse. Beyond being misleading, the image suggests to global partners that our system is less advanced than it truly is — a dangerous misrepresentation for a nation that depends on reputation as much as price.

Even I didn’t realize how bad it got until the feds paid contractors to put up a fake building site for Mark Carney to pose in front of, then tore it all down:

April 20, 2023

It’s not your imagination, you really did just hear that song again … and again … and again

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia on some sort of scam-like activity going down on Spotify and other large web platforms:

Adam Faze kept hearing the same song on Spotify over and over again.

Such things aren’t unusual. Hit songs get played repeatedly—although this one seemed more annoying than most.

But in this case, something even more bizarre was happening.

When Adam looked to see the name of the song, it was always different. The titles were a wild assortment—almost as if a random word generator had been used to pick them:

  • “Trumpet Bublefig”
  • “The Proud Dewdrop Amulet”
  • “Thorncutter”
  • “Viper Beelzebub”
  • “Whomping Clover”
  • Etc. etc.

But the music was always the same.

Even stranger, the artist was also different in each instance. And if you clicked on the writer credits, those were all different too.

How could the same track be attributed to dozens of different musicians? How could the same song be written by dozens of different composers?

Adam started compiling a playlist, and adding each new iteration of this song when he found it. When he got to 49 versions, he shared the playlist on social media. “I’ve officially stumbled upon the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen”, he announced.

A Twitter user, alerted by this, quickly discovered another 10 iterations of the same song. This banal tune was everywhere. The use of multiple aliases made it difficult to gauge the full extent of the deception, but Spotify was pushing this track so aggressively that it was impossible to hide the charade they were playing.

When asked how it was possible to find so many examples, Adam replied: I’m completely serious when I say it was starting to be every other song after a while.”

The song itself is just 53 seconds. And you’re glad when it’s over, because this tune is a loser — almost a Frank-Ocean-at-Coachella level of bad. Even call centers have better taste in their on-hold music.

April 25, 2022

“We live in such a degraded information environment that we can’t get to discussions of principle”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the increasing inability or deliberate choice of most legacy media outlets to avoid presenting basic facts in favour of pitching a scenario with the preferred outcome prepackaged and largely predigested for the consumer to accept uncritically:

Over and over again, journalism doesn’t begin to accurately describe; consuming it, we don’t get to the starting line of a functioning political discourse, which is just knowing what’s happening, more or less. We’re buried in fakery, in representations of reality that have no connection to reality. […]

I wrote last week about the disappearance of basic information on the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live. We have an ongoing debate over our Woke DA’s policy choices — but the more I look at the debate, the more I’m sure it’s a debate about nothing, because the slogans used to represent the DA’s policy choices really don’t seem to begin to reflect the reality of the DA’s actual policy choices. The slogans look from here like cover words, chaff fired as a rhetorical countermeasure to cloud the air. I’ve been trying to get clear information from people in Los Angeles County government, which has been … interesting, so stay tuned on that question. But what are we debating if we’re exchanging our thoughts on the empty fakery the DA is deploying to prevent us from noticing what he’s doing?

Back in 2016, the vapid mayor of a tiny city in Los Angeles County boldly announced that she had banned Donald Trump from her community, ordering city staff to burn the witch. Journalists reported it straight: TRUMP BANNED FROM LOCAL CITY.

It was left to lawyers with a media presence to seriously examine all of the problems with the remarkable claim that a part-time small-town mayor owns a personal fiefdom and can ban people from it. A not-especially-gifted politician with ambitions for higher office made up some nonsense to get herself in the news, and it worked. But the news was about nothing, because she had no authority to do the thing she announced in the press release.

This is more than half of the news: Noise with nothing it, a press release from an idiot typed up by idiots. What debate over questions of principle can proceed on the foundation of an informational void? (“I’m for empty hole!” “Oh yeah, well I’m against empty hole!”)

We’re beginning to solve some big pieces of that problem with alternative media, which is why you’re hearing so much complaining about misinformation. “Our democracy,” that hilarious phrase that doesn’t mean what it says, relies on the screen of fakery. Nothing happens until we punch enough holes in that screen.

May 24, 2021

The hard core of “mostly peaceful protest” activists

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why the same people seem to show up at “mostly peaceful” riots protests in so many different cities and even in the rare cases they’re arrested, are quickly bailed out again:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One of the advantages of the collectivists is that they organize like nobody’s business, while we liberty minded … Well — pats heads all around — well, you guys are adorable, but the individualists failed to organize, okay.

Now, while many of you translate this to a paramilitary clash and panic, don’t. Most of their supporters aren’t nor will they commit violence, unless the can do it when no one is looking, sneakily, and against someone old, disabled, frail or very young.

Most of their supporters are in fact the “go alongs to get along” who just want to be “nice people” by siding with lunatics who want to put a boot on their necks. Oh, they also want to be smart because their college professors told them every “very smart” person believes in Marxism. This is why at the back of their brains every single one of the infantile “activists” thinks he or she will be in charge and not one of the lumpenpoletariat. No, they have never looked at actual communist countries, and if they did, as their panic at the Xi-flu proved, they don’t get statistics or numbers at all.

So, yeah, the people they are using and weaponized-and-paid psychopaths, whom they bus from city to city. They’re armed and well organized partly because they do this all time and are given weapons and training. They’re very fearsome FOR ONE CITY AT A TIME.

In other words they are a Potemkin army, raging across the country to intimidate the citizens. Which is why they have to punish Kyle Rittenhouse, because he pierced the paper silhouette. And why blue states refuse to arrest the rioters. They have very few of them. They’re the precious.

It does work on corporations and — apparently — Supreme Court Judges who, being in a highly social profession just buy what the news tell them and don’t investigate anything for themselves.

Look, I don’t think this bullshit will hold. And it’s part of the reason I think we’re going to have a brief, intense, localized clash.

This is not the seventies. They really had a majority of the indoctrinated youth then, and the youth then were a majority. With the attendant side effect that the youth then hadn’t been raised as little emperors, because they were the all-too-precious single offspring.

Those were the real Marxist riots. This is the Memorex. And like Chinese troops clashing with Indian troops, their rank and file are more likely to cry for their mommies, if they meet real opposition.

They have the psychos they train and bus around and which have a rap sheet long as their arm, and then they have the daft survivals of the sixties, at protests with their oxygen bottles and walkers.

And they have the get alongs. Who are useless in battle, but quite good at coordinated action on other fronts.

September 26, 2020

QotD: A visit to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1

Filed under: Asia, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

He [Anthony Daniels] sees throughout these Marxist backwaters a physical infrastructure comprising perhaps the most ugly and dehumanizing architecture known to man. The cavernous emptiness of all public spaces and the gigantism of the buildings are designed to intimidate, to belittle and to discourage insurrection by making every crowd seem small. Any pre-Communist architecture not destroyed to make way for these monstrosities is charming only because it is preserved by a lack of economic development, which also, however, ensures its eventual degradation.

What few consumer products he finds are of the very worst quality, with packaging that provides as little information as possible and that destroys all confidence in its contents. Even the material shortage of these products has its uses to the state, however, as they remind the comrade that it is only by the good grace of their leaders that they eat, and when one spends all afternoon queuing for an item that turns out to be unavailable, there is little time or energy left for revolution. Besides, isn’t the desire for consumer goods artificially created by capitalists to enslave the proletariat?

Nowhere is the dishonesty of this last belief (as well as the sheer insanity of modern North Korea) better illustrated than in Daniels’ description of his visit to the creatively-named Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. He wanders into the store without a minder and is dumbstruck by his eventual realization: the entire store is a fake. Although it is a frenzy of activity and is filled with beautifully packaged and artfully arranged consumer goods, no one is actually buying anything. Daniels watches individual “shoppers” go up and down the escalators or exit and re-enter the store in a continuous loop of simulated shopping. At the line for a cash register, cashiers and customers stare aimlessly past each other, unmoving. Under Daniels’ gaze some of them realize they are found out and cast about nervously, wondering what to do next. “I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep,” he says. “But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.”

Arnold Beichman, “The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World”, National Review, 1991-10-21.

May 19, 2018

QotD: Operation “keeping up appearances”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s hard to blame the Army, and even if it wasn’t not all of even most of the blame can be laid at the Army’s doorstep.

Government, both Conservative and Liberal kept repeating Pierre Trudeau’s lie that “we’re here and we’re doing our full, fair and agreed upon share.” Kudos to Prime Minister Mulroney who, when faced with irrefutable and embarrassingly public evidence that we simply could not deploy and sustain two small brigades in war, cancelled the North Norway brigade commitment and pulled the Germany-based brigade back to Canada.

canadian-defence-spending-ted-campbell

This graph, which is only rough, being drawn from three different sources and “rounded” for ease of plotting, shows, essentially, what happened between 1964 (Prime Minister Pearson) and 2014 Prime Minister Harper). As you can see defence spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product ~ a fair measure of our national, political commitment to our defence of Canada and of our allies and neighbours, has declined steadily even though, generally, with one “blip” in the Chrétien era, when he was trying to wrestle with the deficit, the actual dollars spent on defence have grown in number. What it really shows is that our GDP grew a lot in the past 50 years ~ it’s now almost $2.5 Trillion (that’s $2,500,000,000,000.00) ~ but our political willingness (or appreciation of the necessity) to spend 2% of GDP, as we did in about 1970s and as we have, sort of, agreed (in NATO) do aspire to do again, has not kept pace with our increasing prosperity. In fact, while the dollars spend on defence have doubled, in 50 years, the % of GDP spent of defence has fallen to ⅓ of its 1964 level. But ministers’ desires to “talk good fight” remain at historically high levels and even as resources shrink admirals and generals are told to “keep up appearances”. That, keeping up appearances, was what the admirals and generals wanted to do … no one really wanted to go into various international military fora and say “as our resources decline we’re going to have to do less,” instead they went out and said “we’re learning new ways to do more with less,” which is, of course, utter nonsense. Meanwhile more and more quite senior officers came back from tours of duty in the USA and brought with them some very American ideas about organization and management. Now American organizational models might work very well for armies with 1,000,000+ soldiers, or even for those with 495,000, like South Korea’s perhaps, even for those with 100,000+ like the French army, but they are not always or even often suitable for an army with 20,000± regulars and 25,000± reservists. The new organizations might make us look bigger, on paper, but they hide the fact the army has been hollowed out since 1970.

The Army of 1964, the one that consumed its fair share of the 3% of GDP that Canada spent on defence had four brigades, the largest had about 6,500 soldiers in it, the smaller ones had about 5,000 each. That was more men and women in combat units than we have in the entire, top heavy, Canadian Army today in total. But we still have three of the four brigades, we have nine instead of 13 battalions of infantry and three instead of four regiments of artillery … but how? Simple: it’s the Potemkin village, again, battalions that should have 950 soldiers have 500 … if their lucky. In fact there are no combat ready infantry battalions. Any battalion being readied for operations must be reinforced from other infantry battalions … we have nine battalion commanders and nine regimental sergeants major and so on but we only have enough soldiers in rifle platoons to staff five battalions … maybe only four if the battalions are properly equipped with mortars and heavy assault weapons. Why? Because no one, not ministers, not senior civil servants and not the generals want to “cut his coat according to his cloth.”

Ted Campbell, “A Canadian Potemkin Village”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2016-09-15.

May 27, 2017

Canada’s hollow army

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Thanks to a post at Army.ca, here is the rough outline of the NATO battle group that Canada will be leading in Latvia later this summer (oddly lacking in attached artillery support):

… the Canadian-led battalion level battle group will be composed of about 1,138 soldiers, as well as armor, armored transport and combat support. Of that number, 450 will be Canadian mechanized infantry bringing with them armored vehicles and various support elements. A specialized Canadian reconnaissance platoon will also be on the ground. Albania will send 18 combat (explosive ordnance disposal) engineers. Italy will send a mechanized infantry company consisting of 160 soldiers plus armored fighting vehicles. Poland will send a tank company with 160 troops. Slovenia will send 50 soldiers specializing in defense against weapons of mass destruction, (chemical, biological and nuclear weapon defense, decontamination operations etc). Spain will send the second-largest contingent: 300 soldiers from a mechanized infantry company and armored vehicles, combat engineers and support elements.

As Ted Campbell points out, this is an odd and unwieldy formation and seems unnecessarily multi-national for such a small tasking. Why isn’t the Canadian Army just sending a full battalion with the necessary supporting troops (artillery, armour, engineers, medical and logistics, etc.) to minimize operational and linguistic friction? It’s because we don’t have enough troops to do that successfully:

There is an old, tried and true, military expression to describe this: “it’s a dog’s bloody breakfast!” Can you imagine trying to command and control that organization? Especially under NATO’s rules that, as we saw in Afghanistan, allow each country to impose caveats on what where when and how its forces may be told asked to do anything at all.

So how did we, Canada, get to this? How is it that we cannot, it appears, deploy a complete battle group without Albanian, Italian, Polish, Solvenian and Spanish troops? After all, we had a full battle group in Afghanistan just five years ago, didn’t we?

Well, yes, but …

First, a “battle group” is rarely a formed unit (never in the Canadian Army). It is, usually, either a full up armoured (tank) regiment or infantry battalion with add-ons: tanks or infantry, artillery in direct support, engineers and so on and so forth. Our battle group in Afghanistan was always based on one of Canada’s nine infantry battalions with attachments from a tank regiment, an artillery regiment and so on. But even the infantry battalion, the “base” of the battle group had to be augmented. Canada has not had one, single, full strength, properly organized and equipped infantry battalion for more than a decade. A battalion ought to have 950± soldiers and its own, organic, mortars, heavy machine guns, anti-tank or assault weapons, and, and , and … but many years ago, in an effort to “balance” the army the infantry was (stupidly) stripped of its mortars ~ the artillery will take care of it, it was said … and, bless ’em, the gunners have not let the infantry down, but that doesn’t mean the decision to strip the mortars, especially, from the infantry made any military sense at all. It didn’t; it was a dumb decision ~ the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons. But, a good friend tells, me, the prevailing view in the Army, especially, is that nothing must ever be cut because it will never, ever be gotten back. Thus we strip the battalions but leave the empty shells ~ a Canadian battalions circa 2017 has 500+ soldiers, not the 1,000- it needs. Even at the height of the Afghan campaign, when Major General (then Lieutenant Colonel) Omer Lavoie led Operation Medusa (you know, the one which Harjit Sajan said he conceived as “the architect”) his battalion, the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment 1RCR) had to be augmented with a company from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry because there were not enough companies in all three of the RCR battalions that had not been deployed within the last 18 months … the Army, in other words, had been hollowed out for years, even decades.

March 21, 2017

Catherine the Great – V: Potemkin, Catherine’s General, Advisor, and Lover – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 25 Feb 2017

Catherine had many lovers during her life, but perhaps none meant so much to her as Grigory Potemkin. Although their romance did not last a lifetime, it did form the basis of a working relationship that would change the face (and future) of Europe.

September 25, 2016

QotD: Canada’s “Potemkin village” tactics

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some of us, in another forum, were discussing why UN peacekeeping seems to go so very wrong, so very often ~ not always, I hasten to add, just usually ~ and I quipped, with just a wee bit of hyperbole, that “Simple human decency says that a country like Canada should have dropped a light brigade into South Sudan and destroyed the South Sudanese Army in a short, brutal campaign of exemplary speed and violence … should have if we could have, but, of course, the Canadian Army is a fat, overstaffed, poorly managed corporal’s guard, that cannot deploy any brigade anywhere because we don’t have any nearly fully staffed brigades and even if we did they don’t have enough logistical “lift,” so they are useless once they have marched more than 15 km out of the camp gate … unless a country with a real army (you know, one with trucks and people a to drive them) decides to support and sustain us.“

Sadly no one, not even officers who have, fairly recently, commanded brigades in the regular army, challenged my assertion that the Canadian Army has been hollowed out until, now, it is a sort of military Potemkin village in which bits and pieces are deployed and redeployed to create the (entirely false) impression that we, Canadians, are getting a real army for the $20 billion or so that we spend, year after year after year, on out national defences.

The process began, in earnest, in about 1970, when, in response to quite draconian cuts imposed by Pierre Trudeau (but not, it has been suggested, as deep as he wished) the Canadian Forces began to try to “make do” with a “pint sized” brigade in Germany ~ when a full sized (6,500± soldiers) one was need by promising (and practising) to augment it with “fly-over” troops from Canada who were trained and equipped and could move, fairly quickly on to “pre-positioned” equipment … if it was properly maintained. It worked well enough, in a peacetime/training situation, except for the fact that we, eventually (early 1980s), understood that we could not sustain a brigade in Germany with “fly overs” when we needed the same troops to “fly over” to Norway to keep another promise, made to try to placate our allies about our deep defence cuts, and by the late 1980s the Norway task (promise) was quietly shelved (broken) about twenty years after it was started, and after a quite disastrous “test” (Exercise BRAVE LION) proved to civilian planners and military commanders alike that the Canadian Army (which was much larger than it is today) simply did not have the where-with-all (especially the logistical “tail”) needed to sustain “fly over” missions to Europe. But the damage was done … in twenty years, almost a generation, the Army, especially, had gotten used to “faking” its combat effectiveness with Potemkin village tactics.

Ted Campbell, “A Canadian Potemkin Village”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2016-09-15.

September 16, 2011

Ontario’s clean energy Potemkin village

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

John Ivison reports on a recent photo op by Premier Dalton McGuinty:

The solar energy company touted this week by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty as a flagship of the province’s clean energy economy has halted production because of slow demand.

Mr. McGuinty was flanked by Eclipsall Energy Corp.’s workforce when he visited its Scarborough solar panel plant Tuesday, but there was no mention that the production line is temporarily shut down. When my colleague Tamsin McMahon visited the plant she found the reception desk was empty, the cafeteria was closed and only a handful of employees milling around inside the sparsely furnished building.

Leo Mednik, Eclipsall’s chief financial officer, said the production line halt is because the company has already completed its current order book. “It’s no secret that the market is slow and there have been delays. That’s part of it — part of it is logistics. Our production team went through our purchased inventory a lot quicker than expected,” he said.

Not only is the plant not working to capacity: it’s only working at all because of government subsidies:

The Liberal government’s efforts have created jobs — though the 20,000 number touted by Mr. McGuinty seems highly questionable, far less the 50,000 he says will be created by the end of next year. In addition, they are hardly high wage, high skilled jobs the Premier claims (Eclipsall pays 20% over minimum wage to its workers, who assemble glass and solar cells imported from Asia, thereby qualifying for the Liberal Green Energy Act’s 60% domestic content rule).

The question is: how sustainable are these jobs? Mr. Mednik admitted that if the domestic content rule was removed, Eclipsall and other Ontario manufacturers would not be able to survive. “Frankly, it would be very difficult for any start-up to compete” against cheaper Chinese producers, he said.

He said it is a question of when, rather than if, the 60% threshold is removed. Both the European Union and Japan have taken the FIT program to the World Trade Organization and want the local content requirements removed. They claim this Buy Ontario provision is a prohibited subsidy. The FIT program might also soon become subject to a NAFTA dispute case, after American renewable company Mesa Power Group said it would file a complaint.

June 9, 2011

Is the Shi Lang a naval “Potemkin Village”?

Filed under: China, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:30

David Axe is not losing any sleep over the soon-to-be commissioned Chinese carrier Shi Lang:

Leaving aside her modest size compared to American carriers, her incomplete air wing and escort force and the fact that she’ll sail without the company of allied flattops, Shi Lang could be even less of a threat than her striking appearance implies. Shi Lang’s greatest potential weakness could be under her skin, in her Ukrainian-supplied engines.

Powerplants — that is, jet engines for airplanes, turbines for ships — are some of the most complex, expensive and potentially troublesome components of any weapon system. Just ask the designers of the Pentagon’s F-35 stealth fighter and the U.S. Navy’s San Antonio-class amphibious ships. Both have been nearly sidelined by engine woes.

China has struggled for years to design and build adequate powerplants for its ships and aircraft. Although Chinese aerospace firms are increasingly adept at manufacturing airframes, they still have not mastered motors. That’s why the new WZ-10 attack helicopter was delayed nearly a decade, and why there appear to be two different prototypes for the J-20 stealth fighter. One flies with reliable Russian-made AL-31F engines; the other apparently uses a less trustworthy Chinese design, the WS-10A.

For Shi Lang, China reportedly purchased turbines from Ukraine. Though surely superior to any ship engines China could have produced on its own, the Ukrainian models might still be unreliable by Western standards. Russia’s Kuznetsov, also fitted with Ukrainian turbines, has long suffered propulsion problems that have forced her to spend most of her 30-year career tied to a pier for maintenance. When she does sail, a large tugboat usually tags along, just in case the carrier breaks down.

If Shi Lang is anything like her sister, she could turn out to be a naval version of the mythical “Potemkin village” — an impressive facade over a rickety interior.

H/T to Nicholas “Ghost of a Flea” Packwood for the link.

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