The Enduring Myth of Invasion or Your tax Dollars Busy at Work

    By now everyone is familiar with the story of the bomb aboard the Yemeni cargo jet that was ably escorted through Canadian airspace to JFK airport in New York by our CF-18s. Canada's small role in this peculiar case of terrorism (apparently the bomb's intended target was a synagogue in Chicago) was just that - a small footnote in a story that will soon be forgotten by most, further proof that in the struggle with terrorism, we actually seem to be doing pretty well (shoe, underwear, and ink cartridge bombers notwithstanding).

   This minor event has, however, had the good fortune of occurring at the same time that Ottawa is debating the wisdom in spending at least $16 billion on 65 fighter jets to replace our 79 aging CF-18s. For those not following, the Conservative government has decided to go ahead and purchase these planes without going through a bid/tender process - that is, these planes are sole-sourced. The opposition parties have, rightly in my mind, been asking whether this is the most effective way to spend $16 billion - why was the bid process skipped when even the Department of National Defense fully anticipated having one? Are we getting the best value for our dollar?

   So what does the one have to do with the other? Well not much really - any airplane at all could have escorted the cargo jet, and there was really very little risk of anything happening over Canadian airspace (remember, the pilots weren't terrorists - there was a bomb aboard a plane). Of course this is not how the current government is portraying the event. Apparently following the old adage to never let a good crisis go to waste, Dmitri Soudas, the Prime Minister's director of communications, said in an email:

“Whether it is the CF-18s or the F-35s, Canada's air force needs the right equipment to protect Canadian airspace, Michael Ignatieff's Liberals and their coalition partners would rather use kites to defend Canada than fighter jets,”

 This is, obviously, absurd. Nobody is, as far as I can tell, arguing that we don't need to purchase new jets - but rather that we should be getting the best value possible, and sole-sourcing the purchase is unlikely to achieve this. In other words, this is ridiculous partisan sniping. The sort of thing that litters the online comments sections of our daily newspapers. Here's the thing though, this didn't come from some anonymous crank online, this came from the Prime Minister's Office. That's an important distinction to make. The PMO is not an appendage of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), it is a governmental department - much like the Ministry of Transport, Department of National Defence or the Department of Finance. In other words, it is paid for by you, the tax payer, and not through donations to the CPC. This sort of partisan chicanery should not be emanating from the PMO, and in the past, it didn't. It is only under this current government that the PMO has become so politicized (it also has seen its budget balloon to over $10m a year, this is not a coincidence). The current government is, in other words, getting their advertising (both positive and negative) for free - it's being done on your dime. I think this is an outrageous misappropriation of funds and should be highlighted whenever possible.

     The other aspect of Soudas' quote that sticks out is how we need these top of the line fighter jets to "defend Canada", as evidenced apparently by a bomb intended for Chicago and a couple of Russian jets recently flying near Canadian airspace. Do you know when was Canada last invaded? That would be the Fenian Raids of the 1860s. The Fenians were Irish Americans whose goal was to invade Canada and hold it hostage in order to force Britain to grant Ireland independence. Needless to say, the Fenian Raids were not successful. Canada, therefore, has had a long history of not being invaded by foreign forces. That hasn't stopped us from doing all sorts of nasty things in the name of national defence.  The first time the War Measures Act was invoked was in 1915 when Robert Borden used it to justify rounding up and deporting or jailing Germans, Ukranians, and various Slavic Canadians under the guise of national defence.  Remember, this was around the time that we changed the name of Berlin Ontario to Kitchener, and started calling sauerkraut "liberty cabbage", so maybe we weren't thinking so clearly.  The next time we felt the need to use the WMA was during WWII, when we used it to justify rounding up thousands of Japanese Canadians, throwing them in prison camps, and selling off their property for pennies on the dollar - all because we thought their ethnicity made them a threat to Canadian safety. It would seem that whenever we're told that we're doing something to protect/defend Canada, the reality is that we're about to do something less than savoury (not that I'm comparing wasting obscene amounts of money on cool fighter jets with suspending civil liberties of ethnic Canadians, just that this sort of "it's a scary world out there" rhetoric generally serves to obscure less than noble intentions).

    These planes aren't for "defence", they're to fulfill our international obligations with the UN and NATO. There's nothing wrong with these reasons. In fact they're perfectly cromulent reasons to have fighter jets. For some reason though, our politicians refuse to say so, instead we get this sort of rhetoric  - the kind that is designed to make Canadians fear for their safety. When the reality is, that if we were actually to be invaded, it would be by the Americans...and 65 fighter jets wouldn't quite cut it.