I’ve been looking carefully for any news coverage about how our Canadian sailors and various military personnel are doing on their humanitarian mission down in the Gulf. But I’ve found hardly anything. I’ve searched through the photo archives in the news wire sites, and found hardly anything—thousands of photos of stylish movie stars in Toronto, some that are so slightly different than the one before that I had to look twice or three times to find the difference; and the odd (great, un-Harper-like!) picture of an ever-so-distinguished looking Prime Minister Martin, our fearless leader, meeting with communist dictators from China. But I think I only ever found one of the Canadian Navy men and women right at their arrival, and it appeared to have been taken from someone’s cell phone camera—it was of such poor quality that I decided not to bother even saving it. (I have finally found a few token photos, now that our team is on their way home).
Finally today I read something, but it wasn’t encouraging. The story is in the Halifax Daily News—but while the reporter on the story is an award-winning seasoned professional journalist, his story is frankly a little cryptic to me. So I’m left guessing. He seems to be saying that the Canadian military equipment is inadequate to meet the needs of emergencies such as this; there isn’t enough of the right manpower-moving equipment and vessels; and the personal attitude among the Canadians is more that of unionized CBC office workers from Toronto—than that of lean mean military fighting men and women who “lead the world” on missions exactly like this, according to our esteemed Prime Minister Paul (“we lead the world”) Martin.
And I’d love to know why our ships had to anchor 40 kilometers (40!) from shore, which required the Americans to use their vessels to make the 2-hour trip to get the men ashore every day. How would we have moved the sailors ashore without the Americans’ help, in, say, Vancouver?
It seems —again I can only guess—that the Canadians’ “aid” was more trouble than it was worth. It was draining resources away from the American military and workers. Our military was too….. “needy”?
[…] To be fair, lots of people who went ashore from HMCS Ville de Quebec, HMCS Toronto and HMCS Athabaskan did plenty of good work in the area Katrina hammered two weeks ago. They cleaned up a church, a seniors’ home, a sports and recreation centre and helped out at an emergency food distribution centre. And the Halifax-based coast guard buoy tender Sir William Alexander will surely be useful as it starts assisting the Americans to put their navigational markers back in place.
But the U.S. Navy — which was in charge of organizing the Canadian work parties — seemed ill-prepared to assign the Canadians major tasks.
“I get pretty pissed off when I don’t have something to do,” said one frustrated Canadian sailor. “Maybe they don’t trust us.”
It also seems, at times, that the Canadians are more worried about making sure their sailors use hand-sanitizer and eat a proper lunch, than actually getting down to the work of cleaning up hurricane damage. Toronto even bought 200 Camelbak water carriers — at $40 a pop — to keep its sailors hydrated, even though cases of bottled water are available everywhere they go.
[… ] While the official line is the Yanks are happy as heck for the help from their favourite neighbour, things aren’t always so rosy in the real world. Some of the U.S. crews responsible for running the slow-moving landing craft that take more than two hours to get Canadians ashore grumbled the Canucks were difficult to manage. Some were downright surly.
“It’s like herding a bunch of f—-ing cats,” said one American sailor.
Canadian brass say ships were the only way to bring supplies and muscle to this region without placing additional burden on the already taxed infrastructure.
But that argument’s a tad weak when you see how much the Americans have done for the Canadians.
They feed the visiting sailors lunch, bus them around and ferry them back and forth to the warships anchored about 40 kilometres from shore.
To his credit, the task group’s commander said the operation would have run better if he’d had a large amphibious ship that could carry its own landing craft and trucks to get around in once sailors get to land, rather than relying on the Americans. That’s the ship the navy has been talking about acquiring all year.
“I need to be able to move people and equipment quickly to shore.” said Commodore Dean McFadden.
It probably wasn’t intentional, but two massive U.S. Navy hovercraft that skim over the water at 90 kilometres an hour kicked a wall of sand in the faces of hundreds of Canadian sailors waiting by the shore Thursday night for the slow ride back to their ships.
“This really sucks,” said one sailor as he tried to rub the grit from his eyes.
“You just had to laugh,” said another.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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