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Canadian Treason: The Liberals

Canadian defence spending in 1960 was four per cent of gross domestic product, quadruple what it is now.  The Liberals in Ottawa have slashed Canada’s military spending over the years to the point where Canada now spends less than any other NATO country except for Luxembourg.

Several people—none of them liberals—have noticed that Luxembourg isn’t as big as Canada.

Several others—notably conservatives and Americans—have noticed that there is a global war on terror going on.

I can’t imagine why those on the liberal-left wish to risk Canada and Canadian families like this.  But they do.  They make conscious decisions to not bother spending money on Canada’s military and when they spend any at all, they spend it stupidly, and like typical liberal-left lovers of big government, mostly on hiring more bureaucrats.

The Canadian Liberal government employs thousands and thousands of bureaucrats to run the Ministry of Defense. National Defence Headquarters, an oxymoron, employees 11,500 bureaucrats. The department also employs over 21,000 other civilians to do sundry administrative work.

There’s only 52,000 active servicemen in Canada’s military in total, but even they are having a hard time doing any actual “military” work, since it’s often next to impossible to actually get them to the field for lack of transport equipment.  Well that and the fact that the Liberals dither and take polls instead of acting to defend the likes of Rwandans, of which 800,000 were killed in the mid 90’s genocide while the U.N., including Liberal-led Canada and the Clinton White House, did nothing; the Sudanese people who are in the midst of a genocide while Canada continues to dither and await action from their beloved United Nations; Iraq which is currently struggling for freedom and democracy thanks to the brave and properly-funded—and properly commanded—Americans; and global natural disaster sites such as Haiti, at which Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Pettigrew has visited in his blue suit taking notes on his Blackberry for days on end much like he did in the Sudan.

Perhaps bureaucrats are translating his notes into both official languages now, and that’s why proud and anxious Canadian military men and women—and Canadian citizens—are still waiting to save thousands of lives which will most certainly be lost while the Liberals dither some more.

Money that should be spent on national defence goes instead to bureaucrats inside and outside the defense department; and of course on more and more and still more national social programs—with more added every single year.  Naturally, they serve only to buy more liberal-left votes; reduce individual incentive and responsibility; and create and maintain not national security and the future of Canada as a nation, but individual and family and even corporate reliance on government—liberal-left governments—the nanny-state—for a lifetime.

Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin and all of the liberal-left pretend Canada is a “peacekeeping leader”.  That’s a lie.  Bangladesh and Nigeria both deploy larger forces than Canada to U.N. operations.  Canada used to be a peacekeeping nation, and Canadians should get a grip on the new reality.

Just as the Liberals misread Canadians on the health care file and so many others, they don’t even recognize and abide by Canadian public opinion on national defense and security.  In a 2002 Department of Defense survey of Canadians (and God knows they have the staff to conduct such polls):

94% believe Canadian Forces is an important institution
93% believe we need a modern equipped forces, an increase of 12% since 1998
92% have a positive impression of Canadian Forces people
80% believe the Canadian Forces is not properly equipped for missions at home and abroad
87% believe the Canadian Forces is a symbol of pride.

(source: annual report of the Chief of Defence Staff 2002-2003)

Given the Liberals’ ridiculous priority on massive and stupid social programs piled upon other social programs and the resulting necessity to slash defense budgets, Canada can’t even afford to properly equip its paltry military such as it is, and Canada cannot now even defend Canada, much less anybody else in the world.

Canada’s military is a global joke.  And that’s exactly as the liberal-left would have it.  They’d rather it whittle away until, as the now famous U.S. counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke has suggested, the Canadian military has reached such a weakened state that the government should consider scrapping one or all of its services altogether.  Other researchers in Canada have come to the same conclusion.  The head of Queen’s University Defense Management Studies program, Doug Bland, suggested in a report in December that by the end of the decade, Canada’s air force, as well as either the army or navy, could very well be forced to cease to exist unless the Liberals immediately put additional billions into the military, and even then, a turnaround won’t be possible until the year 2010.

But the Liberals have already relegated billions more scarce tax dollars to unnecessary social programs since being re-elected (barely) in June 2004, including a new universal childcare program that practically nobody even asked for, costing billions of tax dollars. They will, it seems, put their own quest for power and Fabian socialism ahead of ensuring the defense of our nation and advancing peace, democracy and freedom the world over.  They simply explain it away, they think, by reminding us that Canada’s military servicemen are very proud and well-trained—as if that placates near-dead Sudanese.  I don’t doubt they’re well-trained.  But like any bad joke, one can always predict the ending and it’s never funny.

Canada’s military helicopters repeatedly fall out of the sky—literally.  They’re forty-one (41) years old.  As soon as the Liberals were elected in the middle of the 90’s, they cancelled (at a cost of a half billion dollars) a $5-billion contract to purchase a fleet of top-of-the-line high-tech helicopters that the Conservatives had arranged prior to their being defeated.

Lately Canada has come to grips with yet another death of a noble brave serviceman. Lieutenant Chris Saunders, a husband and father of two little children, was killed not in a peacekeeping or freedom-promoting endeavor such as the war in Iraq, but simply because a decrepit old piece of junk diesel-powered submarine started burning for no apparent reason when they were trying to bring it to Canada from the U.K., where the Liberals bought it—second-hand from the U.K. who thought they were junk and sold them to Canada for a pittance.  Several other servicemen were critically injured as they tried to save themselves.

A story in the National Post quotes an expert in international intelligence and security issues, who unwittingly explains by example that even when Canadian Liberal politicians make decisions about military matters, they make stupid decisions.  He says when it comes to the Canadian military’s role in peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations, “submarines are wholly useless” in a post-Sept. 11 world.

“Submarines are essentially useless in anybody’s definition of a war on terror,” Professor Wesley Wark, of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, said.

Prof. Wark, who also served as a consultant to the Privy Council Office of Canada on intelligence policy said, “We don’t need them but we have them…. We’re kind of trapped by the circumstances of what, in retrospect, looks like a bad decision to buy this equipment.”

While there has been much talk in military circles about using subs for covert counterterrorism operations, the talk amounts to “a kind of salesmanship,” he said.

“…but we don’t have that kind of money, we’re not that kind of military power…. So, we have to make hard choices, and in that context of hard choices, submarines don’t make any sense for us.”

When Canadian troops marched off the big, impressive transport aircraft in Afghanistan to fight global terrorism after 9/11 while Canadians watched on TV with rare national pride, that big impressive transport aircraft had not a proud Canadian flag on its tail, it had a proud American flag.  Canada, it seems, had to hitch a ride from the Americans to get its 2,000 soldiers and equipment to Afghanistan because Canada didn’t have transport aircraft sufficient to get its paltry troops to the scene.  Pride turns to shame and embarrassment quickly on the world stage, as only those who truly love their country would know.  Canada’s propeller-driven Hercules transport planes are older than the Sea King helicopters that repeatedly fall out of the sky.

It’s an act of betrayal.  The Liberals are betraying their prime responsibility—to defend Canada and its families and its borders.  Canada under the Liberals is also failing to live up to its global responsibility as a nation of wealth and industry that supposedly supports global freedom and democracy and those in need.

Buying pieces of junk and jeopardizing our servicemen isn’t adequate for my Canada’s military—that’s not my vision of Canada; and failure to maintain a reliable, modern and powerful military to defend Canada and freedom throughout the world is an act of deliberate betrayal—it is in fact, by definition, wholly treasonous.

By Joel Johannesen

This editorial is posted at ProudToBeCanadian.ca.  Here is the exact link to the editorial:
http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/threads/showflat.php?Number=1508

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