Canadian troops to Mali?

Looks like Harper needs to knock a few heads together to make sure his cabinet goofballs are singing from the same page in the hymnal.

Foreign Minister Baird has gone out of his way for months to make it clearer than clear that under no circumstances will Canada commit troops to any Mali resuscitation effort.

So along comes Defense Minister Peter "Pinocchio" MacKay, and suddenly everything Baird has assured us was off the table is back on the table.

Yup. We could be "training" those Mali troops.

Because of the great job we've done training Afghan troops.

Yup.

We're a small country, but we punch way above our weight. Especially when it comes to training.

Yessiree, Canada is the troop-trainer of choice.

In fact, if you scroll down to the last few paragraphs, you learn that we've already been training Mali's army for years!

And in the very last paragraph you learn why anybody in Ottawa can even find Mali on a map.

It's because of the 20 Canadian mining companies operating there!

Canada ready for war in Mali

Mali? Why not? Now that we've cut and run in Afghanistan maybe we're due for an easier target.

Here's what Canada's newspaper of record has to say.

Canada must respond to Mali's call to arms. In a tidy opinion piece Campbell Clark makes the case for our "responsibility" to participate in the pending AFRICOM-engineered invasion of Mali. After all, we were pumping 100 million a year into that country right up until the moment the house of cards collapsed, and therefore we owe it to ourselves to throw good money after bad.

Nowhere in Mr. Clark's article is there any hint of a connection between the glorious campaign to free the people of Libya and what has happened in Mali since, which is a curious oversight. The reality is that, high-minded rhetoric about freedom and democracy aside, the mess in Mali is the direct result of our meddling in Libya.

Only the future will tell what the results of our meddling in Mali will be.

Canadian mining conglomerates breathe easy as Captain Sango sobers up and returns Mali to civilian rule

The dream is over.

Captain Sango's dream of leading his impoverished African republic into a new era.

Sango and his band of fellow travelers seized the levers of power in Mali a week ago after a night of heavy drinking.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Cooler heads have prevailed and Captain Sango has turned the presidential office over to Dioncounda Traore, the speaker of parliament.

That's good news for the Canadian mining companies that account for a big chunk of Mali's GDP.

It's also good news for the Canadian government, which has made Mali a pet foreign aid project.

Canadian profits should be safe and sound for the time being.

Canada embarrassed by Mali coup

In the past year alone Canada has spent well over a hundred million dollars  on "foreign aid" for Mali.

That makes Mali one of the foremost recipients for Canadian foreign aid. And most of that money has been spent "training" Malian armed forces.

Those would be the Malian armed forces who just finished ransacking the Presidential palace. The Malian armed forces who just overthrew a democratically elected government.

Is that what we've been training them to do?

I would think not, but you have to look at other examples of Canadians training armed forces.

Haiti.

Afghanistan.

It's not exactly a great record, is it?

Mali is at once different and the same. Canada's huge investment in Mali's armed forces has way more to do with Canadian mining multi-nationals working in the country than it has to do with anything else.

We have more mining activity in Mali than we do in Afghanistan and Haiti combined.

Just makes sense that we would train their armed forces to protect our mining operations.

But apparently those training missions have been an epic fail.