EDITORIAL: Keep our Snowbirds airworthy
Under the Trudeau government the Canadian state focused less on external military operational capacity and more on the use of the military for domestic problems.
One was the Trudeau fear of insurrection in Quebec post the FLQ crisis, the other was the idea that the military should also be used for domestic emergencies, like clearling snow from Toronto streets or clean up after storms.
The Trudeau government also looked at the military as an opportunity to offer jobs to Maritimers whose local fishing industry was in decline. Along with the policy of promoting the depopulation of the Maritimes by promoting fishers to take up work elsewhere in Canada, the military offered trades training to the unemployed.
Combined with the Liberals ideology that the military was for peace keeping, and their disdane for NATO (though unlike the NDP they never admitted to wanting to leave NATO, they merely provided the absolute minimum required to maintain membership) military equipment purchased was for domestic use.
After WWII the dismantling of the merchant marine directly impacted on Canada's ability to maintain its ship building ability.
Under the Mulroney government the final destruction of Canada's indigenous ship and aircraft building industry was sealed with the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. What the Liberals had wrecked with indifference, the Conservatives now finally killed with its sucking up to the U.S.
Under the Chretien Liberals, a new policy was introduced, one that bespoke the Liberals frugality with taxpayers money, post-Mulroney's spending spree, the government would only buy used military equipment at bargain basement prices, and would continue to maintain old outdated equipment past their expiry date.
There are no such thing as accidents. The failure of the Submarine fleet, the aging helicopter fleets, the dangerous outdated fleet of Tudor aircraft for Canada's Snowbirds, all this is the direct result not only of the Canadian Governments failure to fund the military but the result of the death of Canada's own homegrown ship and aircraft industries. The Liberals had no use for an indigenous Military Industrial complex, satisfied being a branch plant supplier to the US for its war operations.
The Liberals focused their policies on domestic peace keeping, increasing the capabilities of the military and police to monitor the Left, Labour, the Anti-War movement and Quebec nationalists.
Under the Conservatives, both Mulroney and now the Harpocrites, the military industrial complex that did exist in Canada was further reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for the benefit of the Americans.
Today the military is being funded to buy new equipment, from the U.S. And that includes secondary manufacturing and maintance, something Canada once was famous for, is now being contracted out.
The failure to subsidizde the Canadian Military Industrial complex was a political choice of the Liberals, they had little use for the Military, except to quell another Quebec crisis. For the Conservatives its a political choice as well, to integrate the Canadian Military Industrial complex into the American one. Meaning that our military will be supplied by the American Military Industrial complex.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
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