How Canada stands up to Trump

Canadians generally and Canadian media in particular have an ingrained antipathy toward Donny J. We are, after all, a sophisticated, educated, and morally superior nation, and Trump is...well, just so darned yucky and gross.

Today, Jaime Watt's column in the Sunday Star is titled "Trump is running against democracy." Who can even imagine such a thing! Trump is so yucky and gross he is running against the very democratic ideals that make civilization possible.

Star columnist Vinay Menon, meanwhile, advises his (presumably Canadian) readership to "seek out the remarkable healing power of Biden," although evidence that Biden has "healed" much of anything in almost a half century in politics is threadbare at best.

While these A-list Canadian pundits are polishing our smug and sanctimonious superiority complex, the Royal Canadian Navy was, for the fourth time in four months, sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait. While Canada is blessed with an abundance of coastlines, none of them are anywhere near China, so it's not as if we're over there "defending our interests."

No, what we're doing is "standing with our allies" in a signal to the commies that we're a vital part of the coalition of "liberal democracies" ever anxious to keep the Yellow Peril in check. The leader of the "liberal democracies," also known variously as "the free world," the Nations of Virtue, or simply Uncle Sam's Club, is of course America's Donald J Trump.

One could question just how sound America's claim is on either liberalism or democracy, but aside from the ubiquitous Trump bashing, these questions don't come up. It's as if our pundits believe that America was that "shining city on a hill,"right up until January 20, 2017, when the light of freedom was suddenly snuffed. If we all wish hard enough, perhaps it may flicker back to life after November 3rd, when we can once again huddle under Uncle Sam's skirts without embarrassment.

In the meantime, our allies UK and US, sail through the Taiwan Strait on a regular basis, and it is imperative that we "stand with our allies," the same "liberal democracies" currently busying themselves with destroying Julian Assange in revenge for exposing their war crimes.

Here's the problem; talk is cheap. It costs nothing to write anti-Trump op-eds. On the other hand, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to sail a Halifax-class RCN frigate through the Taiwan Strait. And our frigate fleet is getting long in the tooth. We need to upgrade the fleet if we are to continue standing with our allies.

To that end, Canada is forging ahead with plans to build 15 state-of-the-art frigates at a cost of 45 billions. The lead contractor is US military supplier Lockheed Martin. For all our Trump-bashing and anti-American posturing, it is clear that, virtue-signalling aside, Canada's ruling elite remains as desperate as ever to ingratiate themselves with the Big Dog, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Royal Canadian Navy announces this month's victory in War on Drugs

Here it is.

Six hundred kilos of cocaine will never blight the playgrounds of Seattle and Vancouver. Not quite as glorious a triumph as last month, when the RCN was chuffed to announce its role in the seizure of 5200 kilos of cocaine.

My understanding is that all this drug interdiction work has no significant impact on the availability of drugs. At best, it works as a price-support mechanism. Is this a reasonable allocation of Canada's limited financial resources?

Here's a suggestion. Let's bring HMCS Whitehorse and the rest of the fleet back to Canada. Instead of chasing phantom drug ships, let them crack down on freighters dumping toxic sludge in English Bay.

A tale of two navies

Two navies. Two headlines on the same day.

Chinese navy helps hundreds of foreign nationals evacuate war-torn Yemen. According to the story, Canada was among the nations requesting assistance in evacuating their nationals from that country.

But wait, doesn't Canada have its own navy?

Yes, but they're otherwise preoccupied.

Canadian navy helps intercept cocaine near Costa Rica. It's a matter of priorities, and the brain trust in Ottawa obviously isn't going to let a few "Canadians" of dubious authenticity distract them from the War on Drugs.

After all, any supposed Canadians in Yemen are more than likely just "Canadians of convenience" who expect Canada to bail them out of every jam just because they managed to get their hands on a Canadian passport. Let the Chinese navy save them if they must.

The Royal Canadian Navy has bigger fish to fry.

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.