Quotulatiousness

April 14, 2024

More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney discussed this issue along with several others in this week’s Line podcast (highly recommended listening/watching, by the way):

Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).

An evolving line of defence we see from the federal Liberals is that they’re actually doing a great job. It’s those darned provincial premiers that are screwing things up.

We touched on this in our last dispatch. And you know what? There’s some truth to it. Some, I stress. A lot of issues that are much vexing Canadians today aren’t fully or even primarily in federal jurisdiction. Health care and housing are two obvious examples. Canada is a complicated place, and the Liberals no doubt prefer to not talk about things that they’ve done that have exacerbated challenges faced by other orders of government. But the basic point is fair: Justin Trudeau ain’t to blame for all that ails you. Or at least, the blame ought to be spread around some.

This national disgrace, though, lands squarely on him.

You might have read about the shortage of judges across the country. It’s a pretty niche issue, so you might have missed it. Even if you’ve heard about it, you may not have paid much attention to it. Most Canadians won’t have much contact with the criminal justice system over their lives, let alone make their careers in it. But the crux of the issue is this: appointing judges to provincial superior courts, where many of the most serious matters are heard, is in the federal jurisdiction. Solely. Ditto appointments to the courts of appeal: totally in the federal jurisdiction. And the feds have fallen way behind on filling vacancies and aren’t appointing judges fast enough to erase the backlog. Despite a spate of recent appointments, there are dozens of vacancies across the country. These are funded positions that ought to be filled and overseeing cases. But they aren’t, entirely because the feds haven’t made the necessary appointments. That’s the issue.

A lack of judges is creating bottlenecks in the justice system. Arrests are being made and charges are being laid and cases are being prepared and then … nothing happens. Because you can’t hold a trial if there isn’t a judge available to oversee it.

The Toronto Star‘s Jacques Gallant has established something of a bleak speciality in his recent reporting. He’s written a series of articles in recent months documenting serious criminal cases that are being thrown out of court, with the accused set free, because their trial has been delayed so much that it cannot be completed before the Supreme Court-ordered limit for a “reasonable” wait for a trial runs out. That’s 18 months for more minor issues, and 30 months for serious ones.

To be clear: the decision to throw out the cases is, in a legal sense, correct. Indeed, it’s mandatory. The Supreme Court determined what a hard limit should be, and a case that exceeds that is dead. Full stop. That’s the law of the land. The judges forced to preside over these dismissals are not to blame, and are increasingly venting their frustration in their rulings. They’re mortified, and they’re criticizing the government in unusually blunt terms, to put it mildly. You don’t often read court rulings that come off more like op-eds, but we live in weird times.

But it’s a good thing that they’re saying something. Because these vacancies are having appalling real-world consequences. Gallant wrote recently about a case that I felt would mark the low point in the entire embarrassment. A woman had accused a man of raping her. She did a brave thing and reported it. The police believed her and made an arrest. The Crown reviewed the evidence and believed her, and proceeded with a trial. A jury believed her, and after considering the evidence against the accused and hearing his defence, convicted him of the crime.

And then the judge tossed the case, setting aside the verdict and letting the accused go free, innocent in the eyes of the law. Because the clock had run out.

December 6, 2023

QotD: What Charles VIII brought back from his Naples vacation

Filed under: China, Europe, France, History, Italy, Military, Quotations, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the basic formula for what would become gunpowder (saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in a roughly 75%, 15%, 10% mixture) was clearly in use in China by 1040 when we have our first attested formula, though saltpeter had been being refined and used as an incendiary since at least 808. The first guns appear to be extrapolations from Chinese incendiary “fire lances” (just add rocks!) and the first Chinese cannon appear in 1128. Guns arrive in Europe around 1300; our first representation of a cannon is from 1326, while we hear about them used in sieges beginning in the 1330s; the Mongol conquest and the sudden unification of the Eurasian Steppe probably provided the route for gunpowder and guns to move from China to Europe. Notably, guns seem to have arrived as a complete technology: chemistry, ignition system, tube and projectile.

There was still a long “shaking out” period for the new technology: figuring out how to get enough saltpeter for gunpowder (now that’s a story we’ll come back to some day), how to build a large enough and strong enough metal barrel, and how to actually use the weapons (in sieges? against infantry? big guns? little guns?) and so on. By 1453, the Ottomans have a capable siege-train of gunpowder artillery. Mehmed II (r. 1444-1481) pummeled the walls of Constantinople with some 5,000 shots using some 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; at last Theodosius’ engineers had met their match.

And then, in 1494, Charles VIII invaded Italy – in a dispute over the throne of Naples – with the first proper mobile siege train in Christendom (not in Europe, mind you, because Mehmed had beat our boy Chuck here by a solid four decades). A lot of changes had been happening to make these guns more effective: longer barrels allowed for more power and accuracy, wheeled carriages made them more mobile, trunnions made elevation control easier and some limited degree of caliber standardization reduced windage and simplified supply (though standardization at this point remains quite limited).

The various Italian states, exactly none of whom were excited to see Charles attempting to claim the Kingdom of Naples, could have figured that the many castles and fortified cities of northern Italy were likely to slow Charles down, giving them plenty of time to finish up their own holidays before this obnoxious French tourist showed up. On the 19th of October, 1494, Charles showed up to besiege the fortress at Mordano – a fortress which might well have been expected to hold him up for weeks or even months; on October 20th, 1494, Charles sacked Mordano and massacred the inhabitants, after having blasted a breach with his guns. Florence promptly surrendered and Charles marched to Naples, taking it in 1495 (it surrendered too). Francesco Guicciardini phrased it thusly (trans. via Lee, Waging War, 228),

    They [Charles’ artillery] were planted against the Walls of a Town with such speed, the Space between the Shots was so little, and the Balls flew so quick, and were impelled with such Force, that as much Execution was done in a few Hours, as formerly, in Italy, in the like Number of Days.

The impacts of the sudden apparent obsolescence of European castles were considerable. The period from 1450 to 1550 sees a remarkable degree of state-consolidation in Europe (broadly construed) castles, and the power they gave the local nobility to resist the crown, had been one of the drivers of European fragmentation, though we should be careful not to overstate the gunpowder impact here: there are other reasons for a burst of state consolidation at this juncture. Of course that creates a run-away effect of its own, as states that consolidate have the resources to employ larger and more effective siege trains.

Now this strong reaction doesn’t happen everywhere or really anywhere outside of Europe. Part of that has to do with the way that castles were built. Because castles were designed to resist escalade, the walls needed to be built as high as possible, since that was the best way to resist attacks by ladders or towers. But of course, given a fixed amount of building resources, building high also means building thin (and European masonry techniques enabled tall-and-thin construction with walls essentially being constructed with a thick layer of fill material sandwiched between courses of stone). But “tall and thin”, while good against ladders, was a huge liability against cannon.

By contrast, city walls in China were often constructed using a rammed earth core. In essence, earth was piled up in courses and packed very tightly, and then sheathed in stone. This was a labor-intensive building style (but large cities and lots of state capacity meant that labor was available), and it meant the walls had to be made thick in order to be made tall since even rammed earth can only be piled up at an angle substantially less than vertical. But against cannon, the result was walls which were already massively thick, impossible to topple over and the earth-fill, unlike European stone-fill, could absorb some of the energy of the impact without cracking or shattering. Even if the stone shell was broken, the earth wouldn’t tumble out (because it was rammed), but would instead self-seal small gaps. And no attacker could hope that a few lucky hits to the base of a wall built like this would cause it to topple over, given how wide it is at the base. Consequently, European castle walls were vulnerable to cannon in a way that contemporary walls in many other places, such as China, were not. Again, path dependence in fortification matters, because of that antagonistic co-evolution.

In the event, in Italy, Charles’ Italian Vacation started to go badly almost immediately after Naples was taken. A united front against him, the League of Venice, formed in 1495 and fought Charles to a bloody draw at Fornovo in July, 1495. In the long-term, French involvement would draw in the Habsburgs, whose involvement would prevent the French from making permanent gains in a series of wars in Italy lasting well into the 1550s.

But more relevant for our topic was the tremendous shock of that first campaign and the sudden failure of defenses which had long been considered strong. The reader can, I’d argue, detect the continued light tremors of that shock as late as Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532, but perhaps written in some form by 1513). Meanwhile, Italian fortress designers were already at work retrofitting old castles and fortifications (and building new ones) to more effectively resist artillery. Their secret weapon? Geometry.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.

July 11, 2023

The obesity crisis … fuelled by iatrogenic public health warnings about certain food groups

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Here’s The Armchair General with another example of what he calls COGOs – Crisis of Government Origin:

So, after the decades-long crusade against saturated fats, we have a population that has been repeatedly told that fat will kill us. So, many people eschewed fats in favour of salt and sugar. Which, apparently, are also bad for us.

But without saturated fats, remember, people are not going to feel sated. So, what is likely to happen? Well, just what did happen — never feeling full, people feel hungry throughout the day so eat continually through the day: a behaviour known as “snacking” …

    Nutritionists believe many people are obese not because they binge on fatty main meals but because they indulge in constant grazing throughout the day without even realising it.

    This pattern, dubbed “auto-eating”, involves resorting to snacks and treats at the slightest indication of hunger.

Or, rather, people always feel hungry because they have been told to avoid saturated fats. And they snack on chocolate bars and biscuits and small things that provide a pleasant sugary boost.

Combine this with an increasingly sedentary population — both at home and at work — and other comforts (such as central heating which leads to fewer calories being expended on maintaining body temperature), and…

BOOM! You have an obesity problem.

And now — nearly seventy years after some arrogant doctors used some extremely dodgy studies to enhance their reputations, we now know that what we were told about the harms associated with saturated fats was all absolute bollocks.

And so, once again, we can demonstrate another Crisis of Government Origin (COGO), ably assisted by the arrogant fuckers of the medical profession.

Unfortunately, the government legislation is already in place, and it will take at least three years for the fuck-nuggets in politics to catch up — if they ever do. After all, they are going to have to undo decades of medical advice, government food advice, leaflets, bus adverts, nutritionist training, and social conditioning.

Just another reason why governments should stay the hell out of our private lives. Such up — and fuck off.

July 10, 2023

“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”

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

The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:

There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).

Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:

    The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3

Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.

Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.

These include (but are not limited to):

  • the energy crisis;
  • the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
  • the housing crisis;
  • the NHS staffing crisis;
  • the police shortage crisis;
  • the obesity crisis;
  • the education crisis;
  • the pandemic crisis;
  • the productivity crisis;
  • the activist “charity” crisis;
  • the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
  • the rape gang crisis;
  • the intersectional and gender crisis;
  • just about any other “crisis” you can think of.

To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.

I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.

The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.

Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:

    The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.

Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.

The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.

    1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

    2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!

    3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.

    4. Snork.

June 20, 2023

“Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it”

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

Belated (from me, not from them) section from this weekend’s update from the editors at The Line:

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

Though you may find this hard to believe, based on what’s above, we were paying attention to some other things this week. The Ottawa vortex of ridiculousness continued at its usual clip. The government continues to try and find a defensible position on Paul Bernardo’s prison transfer to a medium-security prison. Alas for Mr. Trudeau, he’s been hit by a double-whammy of bad luck. Bernardo is an emotional trigger point with probably no rival across Canada. And the PM’s point man on this file is the hapless (!) Marco Mendicino, minister of Public Safety.

Let’s be clear: your Line editors are far too Vulcan-like to possess strong feelings about the transfer of Bernardo. We are of the right age to have grown up during the era of the Bernardo rapes, murders and eventual trial. He was the boogeyman of our youth. That being said, the important thing is that he dies miserable and alone behind bars. We aren’t particularly invested in which particular prison this happens. If there was a sensible reason for him to be moved to the Quebec facility, hey, whatever. He can rot in any suitable prison as far as we’re concerned.

The issue here, and it’s ridiculous that we have to spell this out, isn’t the transfer itself. Nor are we calling upon Trudeau or the federal government to become intimately involved in decision-making for prisoners, even high-profile ones. The only thing that turned this into a huge story was the latest peek it gave us into the Trudeau government. We have been confronted with — surprise! — more incompetence and dysfunction.

Mendicino’s staff had been repeatedly told about the pending transfer; no one told the boss. The PMO had been told, too. No one told that boss, either. Why tell the boss? So that they don’t get caught flatfooted by a scandal. This is basic issues management and internal communications, and we’re being shown, yet again, that the government is terrible at this. And, absurdly, Mendicino apparently has some of the best and brightest providing the adult supervision he so clearly needs: veteran political staffers were sent to his office after he beclowned himself during the gun-control fiasco a few months ago.

And this is the problem. We don’t care which cell holds Bernardo as he slides closer to hell. We do care about yet another data point in a pattern that has emerged with this government: they aren’t on top of their files, their offices aren’t well run, ministers aren’t properly briefed, and there seems to be zero accountability anywhere in this process. It was left to the Ottawa Parliamentary Press Gallery to hunt down Mendicino like ravenous cheetahs on a wayward gazelle after Mendicino had promised to brief them, and then no-showed. He also promised to brief them again later on Thursday, and failed to show up that time, too.

We know, we know. It’s hard to believe he’d lie. Marco Mendicino? An incompetent bullshitter? Say it ain’t so.

Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it. The government is obviously hell bent on getting to the summer break without sacking the minister, because to sack him, despite his manifest and repeated failings, would be to admit said failings, and this government will never do that. If they can get to the break, they can shuffle him off to the sweet oblivion of an obscure ministry, or even the back benches later on this summer. This is just the latest example of what Line editor Gerson has observed about these guys: tactically smart, but strategically dumb.

And, ahem, call us hopelessly naïve, but maybe the politics isn’t the point here? Canadians ought to have someone in the job of Public Safety minister — kind of an important role, you’ll agree — who is competent and well-supported by excellent staff. Instead we get this shitshow and frantic politicking to avoid handing the opposition a one-day media-cycle victory. It’s a bad look on the government. But it’s nothing we didn’t already know, we guess. They aren’t here to serve Canadians. They’re here to save themselves.

June 19, 2023

Patterns of incompetence

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Palladium, Harold Robertson says that complex systems that we all depend on will not have the resilience to survive our society-wide failure of competence:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

H/T to Theophilus Chilton for the link.

May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

April 27, 2023

Spending more on defence requires more than just turning on the financial taps

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé explains why just pouring more money into the Department of National Defence won’t automatically improve our defence capabilities:

Canadian defence spending is back in the news, thanks to an open letter urging the government to spend two per cent of GDP on the military and a leaked document suggesting Canada won’t hit that NATO target. Like ending the monarchy, defence spending is one of those issues that gets lots of attention once or twice a year, only to fade away before any serious discussion takes place. It’s unlikely that this time will be any different.

[…]

Even if the government wanted to greatly increase defence spending, though, it would have trouble spending that money effectively in the short term. While more money is needed over the long term, the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have to first build up their capacity to spend a much larger budget. As they do so, however, our historical tendency to reduce defence expenditures after pivotal moments should always be kept in mind.

The DND and CAF are already straining to implement the capital equipment and infrastructure programs that were announced in the 2017 defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged. This reflects the fact that department’s capacity to manage procurements has to be built back up after decades of anemic capital spending. There aren’t enough people to move the programs that are currently planned, let alone new ones that could be added. Additional money could be funneled to existing projects, but that wouldn’t be enough to cause an increase to two per cent of GDP in the coming years. The capabilities Canada is currently buying will probably be far more expensive to maintain in the future than the government realizes, which strongly suggests that we do need to gradually get to that number, but this reinforces the need for caution and for managing expectations. If ministers insist that new money be attached to still more new capabilities, DND/CAF will not only have trouble acquiring them, but will be unable to afford them.

One could argue that DND/CAF could get around its capacity challenges by simply buying more equipment “off the shelf”. Instead of getting more people to tackle complex procurements and infrastructure projects, the defence department should focus on simpler acquisitions that require less management. It is important to note, though, that “off the shelf” procurements aren’t an obvious solution either — DND and the CAF don’t specify requirements for the hell of it. Many project requirements reflect the need to integrate new capabilities into the existing force, which is no small feat when mixing new and old technologies and operating from installations across a massive country. Projects that gravitate toward “off the shelf” solutions, moreover, can be challenged by competitors who contend that they can develop a new capability that better meets Canada’s needs. Bombardier‘s response to the government’s plan to buy Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft to fulfil the Canadian Multi-mission Aircraft (CMMA) project is a recent example.

Canada also tends to favour platforms that can perform various missions, which further complicates “off the shelf” procurements, since the equipment sitting on the shelf may not do everything the CAF needs it to do. Unless we want the CAF to be less capable, the way to address this issue is to acquire more platforms that do specific things. The problem is that the CAF would need more people to acquire, operate, and maintain these additional fleets, still more money to sustain this extra equipment, and yet more infrastructure to store it. This approach promises to exacerbate the very problems it’s supposed to solve.

April 10, 2023

It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:

Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery

Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.

This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.

And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.

[…]

The mission began in October.

It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.

The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.

This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.

Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.

But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.

And yet.

What the hell is going on?

I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.

April 5, 2023

Justin Trudeau chooses the Argentinian model over the Canadian model

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney considers the proposition that “Canada is broken”:

To the growing list of articles grappling with the issue of whether Canada is broken — and how it’s broken, if it is — we can add this one, by the Globe and Mail‘s Tony Keller. I can say with all sincerity that Keller’s is one of the better, more thoughtful examples in this expanding ouevre. Keller takes the issue seriously, which is more than can be said of some Canadian thought leaders, whose response to the question is often akin to the Bruce Ismay character from Titanic after being told the ship is doomed.

(Spoiler: it sank.)

But back to the Globe article. Specifically, Keller writes about how once upon a time, just over a century ago, Canada and Argentina seemed to be on about the same trajectory toward prosperity and stability. If anything, Argentina may have had the edge. Those with much grasp of 20th-century history will recall that that isn’t exactly how things panned out. I hope readers will indulge me a long quote from Keller’s piece, which summarizes the key points:

    By the last third of the 20th century, [Argentina] had performed a rare feat: it had gone backward, from one of the most developed countries to what the International Monetary Fund now classifies as a developing country. Argentina’s economic output is today far below Canada’s, and consequently the average Argentinian’s income is far below that of the average Canadian.

    Argentina was not flattened by a meteor or depopulated by a plague. It was not ground into rubble by warring armies. What happened to Argentina were bad choices, bad policies and bad government.

    It made no difference that these were often politically popular. If anything, it made things worse since the bad decisions – from protectionism to resources wasted on misguided industrial policies to meddling in markets to control prices – were all the more difficult to unwind. Over time the mistakes added up, or rather subtracted down. It was like compound interest in reverse.

And this, Keller warns, might be Canada’s future. As for the claim made by Pierre Poilievre that “Canada is broken”, Keller says this: “It’s not quite right, but it isn’t entirely wrong.”

I disagree with Keller on that, but I suspect that’s because we define “broken” differently. We at The Line have tried to make this point before, and it’s worth repeating here: we think a lot of the pushback against the suggestion that Canada might be broken is because Canada is still prosperous, comfy, generally safe, and all the rest. Many, old enough to live in paid-off homes that are suddenly worth a fortune, may be enjoying the best years of their lives, at least financially speaking. Suggesting that this is “broken” sometimes seems absurd.

But it’s not: it’s possible we are broken but enjoying a lag period, spared from feeling the full effects of the breakdown by our accumulated wealth and social capital. The engines have stopped, so to speak, but we still have enough momentum to keep sailing for a bit. Put more bluntly, “broken” isn’t a synonym for “destroyed”. A country can still be prosperous and stable and also be broken — especially if it was prosperous and stable for long enough before it broke. The question then becomes how long the prosperity and stability will last. Canada is probably rich enough to get away with being broken for a good long while. What’s already in the pantry will keep us fed and happy for years to come.

But not indefinitely.

March 1, 2023

If the Freedom Convoy “actually was what it has often been portrayed as on social media — a horde of thousands of literal Nazis and Confederates set on violently overthrowing our democratically elected government — then [we’d] be living in the Confederate Republic of Nazi Canada by now”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains how going through Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report in detail leads to some uncomfortable realizations about Canadian goverment and policing — at all three levels — failed to meet minimal expectations of competency and capacity:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The convoy crisis — and I’m mostly speaking here about the events in Ottawa, though the situation at the border crossings fit the same general pattern — forced Canadian police and political leaders to respond quickly to evolving circumstances. And Rouleau’s report is just a relentlessly brutal catalogue of the ways they failed.

Is it really necessary at this point to recap the failure of the Ottawa police? We at The Line have long maintained that the complete failure of the Ottawa police to plan for and control the protest not only allowed the convoy to entrench itself, but also established the psychological paradigm that would define the crisis for weeks: the convoyers held the initiative (not to mention the capital) and the Canadian state was befuddled and adrift. From that, a national crisis was born. Rouleau is just devastating. “The OPS [Ottawa Police Service]’s planning challenges,” he notes on page 56 of the first volume, “were compounded by a general breakdown of command and control.” Super.

He’s even more brutal on page 185 of the second volume: “The influx of Freedom Convoy vehicles and the disruptive behaviour by some protesters threw the OPS operational command at the NCRCC [a command centre] into a state of dysfunction. OPS Inspector Lucas described the atmosphere at the NCRCC as chaotic and explained that he and his team had neither the capacity to process the incoming information nor the resources to respond to the needs it was facing. In the late afternoon of January 29, the OPP’s [Ontario Provincial Police] representative at the NCRCC, Inspector Dawn Ferguson, reported to OPP Superintendent Abrams that OPS members in the NCRCC were panicked and were swearing and yelling orders at each other and at partner agencies.”

Huh.

Moving up a level of government, much has already been written about the cowardice of the Ford government. If any agency performed semi-well, it was the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP was the force that was generating most of the critical intelligence used (or ignored) during the crisis. It was quick to realize that command-and-control had collapsed in Ottawa (see above), and to begin working with the RCMP on a plan — eventually a series of plans — to restore order. You can’t read POEC and conclude the OPP performed perfectly. Far from it. It was probably the best we had, though, but because Ford took a gander at the mess in Ottawa and decided to mosey on off to the cottage, it couldn’t do much.

Huh.

And that leaves us with the feds. I have maintained since last year that the federal government hasn’t received nearly enough attention in our understanding of what the hell went wrong last year. This has caused a fair degree of pushback, especially from Liberal supporters who read any reference to the “federal government” as “our beloved prime minister”. But no — while I don’t think the prime minister or the federal cabinet did particularly well during the crisis, the real federal failures were in the officials that supported the PM and his ministers.

Among the many other failures, the inability of the various government and police organizations to organize and properly share the information they were handling is perhaps the most disturbing:

If you want to see it yourself, check out pages 38 and 39 of the third volume. For those in a hurry, though, it turns out that even within the government, the flow of information was so bad that the clerk of the privy council, and the prime minister, noted that staff were learning about the convoy not via internal reports, but social media. The federal government had, as Juneau and Rigby have noted, “intelligence gaps” that “hampered the government’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the situation, and to reconcile conflicting information such as contradictory reports about the size of the convoy”. The federal government didn’t have the software to process and analyze online posts, even public ones.

And then there was this (my emphasis added):

    [National Security and Intelligence Advisor] Thomas also described an information-sharing gap between law enforcement and government. Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence, Michael MacDonald recalled a significant delay in receiving updates from the RCMP, due to the RCMP’s obligation to consult with each intelligence agency that has provided the RCMP with information prior to sharing that information further (known as the “third party rule”). The NSIA’s office did not receive situation reports, project reports, or other forms of information, such as Project Hendon reports, that the RCMP obtained from other law enforcement agencies. Prior to the events of the convoy, the NSIA was not aware of Project Hendon. …

    NSIA Thomas further stated that it was sometimes difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement agencies. She recognized that government must not interfere in operational matters, but thought that there was nonetheless useful information that could have been provided to decision makers without encroaching upon police independence. However, senior officials were uncertain how to obtain that information, and were concerned about “crossing the line” both in requesting information and in discussing solutions.

… huh.

And that doesn’t even cover our now-outgoing national commissioner of the RCMP being so clueless she decided to just not mention germane information during a critical meeting because … well, we never really got a good explanation for that one. Oh well. Enjoy your retirement, Commissioner Lucki!

February 9, 2023

QotD: Collecting taxes, Medieval-style

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I want to begin with an observation, obvious but frequently ignored: states are complex things. The apparatus by which a state gathers revenue, raises armies (with that revenue), administers justice and tries to organize society – that apparatus requires people. Not just any people: they need to be people of the educated, literate sort to be able to record taxes, read the laws and transmit (written) royal orders and decrees.

(Note: for a more detailed primer on what this kind of apparatus can look like, check out Wayne Lee’s (@MilHist_Lee) talk “Reaping the Rewards: How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History” here. He’s got some specific points he’s driving at, but the first half of the talk is a broad overview of the problems you face as a suddenly successful king. Also, the whole thing is fascinating.)

In a pre-modern society, this task – assembling and organizing the literate bureaucrats you need to run a state – is very difficult. Literacy is often very low, so the number of individuals with the necessary skills is minuscule. Training new literate bureaucrats is expensive, as is paying the ones you have, creating a catch-22 where the king has no money because he has no tax collectors and he has no tax collectors because he has no money. Looking at how states form is thus often a question of looking at how this low-administration equilibrium is broken. The administrators you need might be found in civic elites who are persuaded to do the job in exchange for power, or in a co-opted religious hierarchy of educated priests, for instance.

Vassalage represents another response to the problem, which is the attempt to – as much as possible – do without. Let’s specify terms: I am using “vassalage” here because it is specific in a way that the more commonly used “feudalism” is not. I am not (yet) referring to how peasants (in Westeros the “smallfolk”) interact with lords (which is better termed “manorialism” than as part of feudalism anyway), but rather how military aristocrats (knights, lords, etc) interact with each other.

So let us say you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once. First, you pay off your military retainers for their service with something you have that is valuable (land). Second, by extracting certain promises (called “homage”) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into smaller and smaller chunks until you get them in chunks small enough to be administered directly, with only a very, very minimal bureaucratic apparatus. Your new vassals, of course, may do the same with their new land, further fragmenting the political system.

This is the system in Westeros, albeit after generations of inheritance (such that families, rather than individuals, serve as the chief political unit). The Westerosi term for a vassal is a “bannerman”. Greater military aristocrats with larger holding are lords, while lesser ones are landed knights. Landed knights often hold significant lands and a keep (fortified manner house), which would make them something more akin to European castellans or barons than, say, a 14th century English Knight Banneret (who is unlikely to have been given permission to fortify his home, known as a license to crenellate). What is missing from this system are the vast majority of knights, who would not have had any kind of fortified dwelling or castle, but would have instead been maintained as part of the household of some more senior member of the aristocracy. A handful of landless knights show up in Game of Thrones, but they should be by far the majority and make up most of the armies.

There’s one final missing ingredient here, which is castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops. This is important, because it makes lieges as dependent on their vassals as vassals are on their lieges.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.

December 17, 2022

Canada’s consciously anemic foreign and military policies

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why Canada consistently fails to “punch above their weight” in foreign and military matters and that it’s not at all accidental:

Canadian politicians have an inputs problem. Maybe that’s actually the wrong way to describe it — the problem is with the outputs. But it’s the inputs they love talking about.

If that all sounds a little vague, maybe this sounds familiar: “Hey there, citizen. Alarmed about Troubling Issue X? Well, don’t worry. We’re pledging $300 million over the next six years to Troubling Issue X. Oh, and Annoying Irritant Y? We’re announcing a task force to report back on that.”

Does Troubling Issue X get solved? Does Annoying Irritant Y get less annoying and irritating? Eh. We probably don’t collect enough stats to even know. The purpose of the announcement isn’t to solve the problem. It’s to announce something and hope people stop paying attention.

Canadian politicians — especially the current federal government — are notorious for announcing the same “new thing” in as many ways and in as many different contexts as they can. They get several hundred dollars of positive press coverage for every actual dollar spent on whatever the announced spending is supposed to be devoted toward. If they can recycle announcements from months past into a new set of announcements, you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll do it. Announcing spending is, one must assume, what gets people to cast their votes for the party announcing the spending.

A lot of what looks like policy failure in Canadian foreign and military affairs only looks like a failure when you forget that accomplishing something wasn’t the point. Being photographed and videotaped saying you’ll accomplish something was the point. And the announcement itself accomplishes that!

This was true even before the Trudeau government started handing out bushel baskets of money to various Canadian newspapers, TV networks, magazines, and other legacy media entities. What was once merely praise is now bought sychophancy from the (literally) paid media.

On the military side of things, the Canadian Armed Forces are an organization the government grudgingly funds, but only enough to look good for the self-same media:

It’s not that Canada accomplishes nothing on the world stage. We accomplish things. Sometimes we even play an outsized role — Canada did, for instance, perform well and above expectations in Kandahar. The odd exception aside, though, when it comes to foreign policy generally and especially with defence policy, successive Canadian governments have set a very clear target: we will do, technically, more than nothing. We won’t often do much more than that. But we’ll do enough to not get kicked out of the club of allied nations.

Why do we want to be in the club? Not because we feel any sense of duty or obligation to lead and take on any real burden. But because being in the club makes us safer, and it would, after all, be embarrassing to get kicked out.

It’s important to remember that Canada is, by any standard, a rich country. We could be an actual force for good and stability on the world stage if we wanted to. We could build a bigger fleet and patrol more places, more often — we’d be welcome! We could have a bigger army and lead more peacekeeping missions, or contribute more to NATO. A bigger air force, likewise, could contribute more to our allies, especially in Europe in these unsettled times. In a parallel universe where we did these things, we’d then be able to say with a straight face that the purpose of Canada’s navy was contributing to the safety and security of the seas, the purpose of our army was to assist allies and provide peacekeepers to help end international crises, and the purpose of our air force was to project power and bring support to threatened allies.

In the world we actually live in, though, the purpose of the navy is to technically have a navy that technically does things, the purpose of the army is to technically have an army that technically does things, and the purpose of the air force … you see where this is going, right?

Our navy does things! It shows up places, and patrols areas. But only as much as necessary to technically tick that box. The army is in much the same condition; with a growing number of domestic commitments sapping its strength and budget, even its ability to assist with disasters at home is largely maxed out, but we send a few hundred soldiers here and there, thereby allowing ourselves to proclaim that we’ve … sent soldiers somewhere. The air force, as was just reported this week, can’t even really do even that much this year. The exhausted force is skipping the very modest — a half-dozen fighter jets — annual mission to Europe. The air force is just too burnt out to sustain even that tiny mission.

This is a big and growing problem. Canada, again, is rich enough to make a difference in global security affairs, if we chose to make different choices with how we spend our money. We have made the opposite choice. We field just enough of a military to be able to make just enough difference to avoid being accused of being total deadbeats, and no more.

Can it fight? Eh, maybe a bit. Can it make a difference? Depends how you define “difference”, I guess. Does it make the world and our allies safer? In a way? Can it keep Canadians safe at home? Sort of.

This isn’t a failure of our policy. This is our policy. We show up with as little as possible for as brief a time as possible, but gosh, do we ever talk about the showing up. 

December 1, 2022

Crisis? Which crisis?

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney makes the case that was NATO (and western governments in general) needs is something called “deliverology”:

I couldn’t have asked for a more topical example of exactly what I’m talking about here: the lull between realization and reaction. There were no problems with “expectations” at the top of the federal government in February [during the Freedom Convoy 2022 protests]. Everyone in a position of authority was seized with the urgency of the situation and the need for rapid action. There wasn’t any denial, doubt or incomprehension, which are the usual enemies when I write about our expectations being a problem. 

February was an example of a different issue: realizing there was a crisis but not really knowing what to do about it, or whose job it was to do it, and wasting a lot of precious time trying to figure it all out. When days and even hours count, governments can’t spend weeks or months figuring out what to do. But that’s what happened during the convoys, and during COVID, and other incidents I could rattle off. Does anyone think it won’t happen again next time, whatever that threat may be?

And some version of that concern came up over and over in Halifax [at the Halifax International Security Forum]. And not just among Canadians. The world is changing very quickly and even when we recognize a problem, we aren’t moving fast enough to keep up. So on top of our expectations, we’ve got another challenge: response times. They’re just too damned long.

I hope the readers will forgive me for being a little vague in this next section; some of the conversations I’m thinking of here were in off-the-record sessions. Rather than trying to splice together any specific quote or anecdote, I’ll just wrap it all up under the theme of “There are things we should be doing now that we weren’t, and things we should have been doing a long time ago that we only started on way too late.”

An obvious example? The rush to get Europe off of Russian fossil fuels and on to either locally generated renewables or energy imports from allies and friendly nations. (If only there was a “business case” for Canada doing more. Sigh.) Another fascinating example that came up was air defences. Two decades of post-Cold-War-style thinking among the allies has led to widespread neglect among the NATO countries of air-defence weapons. Why bother? The Taliban didn’t have an air force, right? 

Most countries have fighter jets and inventories of air-to-air missiles suitable for their planes. However, across the alliance, there are very few ground-based air-defence systems suited to shooting down not just attacking aircraft, but incoming cruise missiles and drones. 

Drones pose a particular challenge. They fly slow and low and are highly manoeuvrable, plus they are so cheap that they can be a true asymmetrical weapon: you’ll go broke real quick firing million-dollar missiles at a drone that costs your enemy $50,000 or so. And your enemy may send a few hundred at once in a swarm that simply overwhelms your defences. It’s not that drones are unbeatable. The opposite is true: drones are easily destroyed, if you have the right defences available. 

We don’t, though. Oops.

The NATO powers actually had a preview of this element of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia during the 2020 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where drones were used to devastating effect. Every military affairs watcher I know sat up a bit straighter after watching what the Azeris did to Armenia, with shocking speed. Swarms of drones first killed Armenia’s air defences and then went to work on Armenian ground forces. The U.S. and NATO allies have been studying that conflict, and considering how to adapt our own strategies, for both offence and defence. But right now, nine months into the Ukraine war and two years after the conflict in the Caucasus, there still aren’t enough NATO systems available even for our own needs, let alone to share with Ukraine. Russia keeps hammering away at critical Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and the Ukrainians keep begging for help, but we have nothing to send. To be clear, a few systems have been sent to Ukraine, which include not just the weapons but the radars and computers necessary to detect and engage targets. But they can only be delivered as fast as they can be built. There is no real production pipeline here, and certainly no pre-stocked inventories in NATO armouries. 

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

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

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

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