Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Royal Canadian Navy sinking fast

It's utterly tragic what is happening in the RCN.

Big Steve sees the Navy as a prop for photo-ops and little else.

The vastly over-hyped new build program that launched so many photo-ops and press releases a couple of years ago has yet to launch a single ship. In fact, it has yet to cut the first steel to start building a single ship.

That seems to be the strategy of Commander-in-Chief Big Steve; wow 'em at the photo op and hope they forget the details.

In terms of operational capabilities, it galls me no end that those beautiful frigates we built at Saint John Shipbuilding became police dingys in America's interminable "war on drugs." Sorry, but we didn't build those warships for the war on drugs.

We built them to defend Canada.

So twenty-five years later Canada is so bereft of sea-going capacity that Big Steve had to charter Russian ships for his most recent photo-ops in the Arctic, a fact slyly omitted from most of the front page coverage of that historic and heroic discovery of the Franklin Expedition ships.

That's beyond pathetic.

As a pacifist, I'm somewhat conflicted about having my government build warships. But if you carefully weigh the pros against the cons, there's much to be said about the new build program, especially as a driver of skills training and economic development.

However, if the main purpose of the program was to provide the PM with patriotic photo-ops and the opportunity for lots of jingoistic rhetoric, it's a complete fraud.

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