- Reaction score
- 838
- Points
- 1,060
Just found this on the net, this Staples guy is a real piece of work: =
[ Article ] :threat:
Apparently this was on the tube the other day, but the date of the article is October 8,2004.
CREDIT: Canadian Press
HMCS Chicoutimi
Ottawa Charged!
Special â Å“Court Martialâ ? edition of Global Sunday
CREDIT: Canadian Press
HMCS Chicoutimi
Danielle Smith: Good evening, I'm Danielle Smith in Calgary and this is Global Sunday, but not just any Global Sunday.
For many people in this country the death of Navy Lieutenant Chris Saunders and the serious injuries of two other sailors was just the last straw in what they see as a seemingly endless parade of broken promises and politically motivated delays by the governing Liberals. What we want to do tonight is examine whether Ottawa's ideological distaste for the military has worsened from simple neglect to criminal negligence causing death.
Casualties in a combat zone are understandable. But when a first world nation running surpluses in the billions is to cheap to properly fund its military or spends years dithering over the direction for the Armed Forces. Mistakes are bound to happen but people shouldn't be dieing because of politics and bad planning.
So tonight we're holding a mock court martial on the following charge:
The Federal government has been derelict in its duty to properly equip our troops.
Smith: Over the next half hour you'll see the arguments for and against. At the end of the program we'll ask you to render a verdict on our website, guilty or not guilty? We'll introduce our expert witnesses in a moment but first as Jacques Bourbeau explains the disaster aboard the HMCS Chicoutimi was just the latest accident waiting to happen to our men and women in uniform.
Jacques Bourbeau: Floundering in the North Atlantic without power the plight of the HMCS Chicoutimi underscored once again the depressing reality of Canada's military. A military that no matter where you look all you can see are cracks.
Gordon O'Connor, Conservative Defence Critic: Mr. Speaker during the last election the Prime Minister dismissed the need for substantial investment in defence. This ongoing attitude towards the military is seen in the mismanagement and underfunding of a range of defence capabilities. The most recent example is the sad state of our submarine fleet, which has unresolved fleet wide problems.
[Unidentified Cabinet Member]: The premise of the question Mr. Speaker ignores entirely that since this prime minister came into office he's committed to spending some seven billion dollars on improving the equipment to our armed services. Updating some of the best equipment we can possibly have Mr. Speaker.
Bourbeau: The effects of years of underfunding and almost no strategic direction from the government can be seen in all three branches of the military. For example the Navy is still flying Sea King helicopters, which spend much more time in repair hangars than they do in the air. A replacement is finally on the way, but it will be years before the last Sea King is retired.
The Navy's supply ships and destroyers are thirty-five years old with no replacements in sight. And the electronics on board the Aurora long-range patrol aircraft are obsolete. They're now being updated and the Navy is hoping to squeeze another twenty years of life out of these planes.
Now up in the sky the air force fleet is also showing its age. The CF18s are undergoing a billion dollar upgrade to their electronics and weapons systems. And the Hercules, the transport workhorse of the air force are nearing the end of their life. And keeping them flying is tough. For example last week nineteen of our fleet of thirty-two Hercules were unable to fly. But it's the Army that is showing the most strain. In recent it has been engaged in more and increasingly difficult peacekeeping missions. But there's not enough soldiers and they're so burnt out that the Army has had to declare and operational pause saying in effect it needs a rest.
On the equipment side the Army has been getting some reinforcements The Striker Mobile Gun System and the Coyote Reconnaissance Vehicle, but it still has its share of outdated equipment like the Iltis Jeep. Surveying the overall state of the military a variety of groups have been sounding warning bells. The most recent came less than a year ago when a group of experts predicted Canada's Armed Forces were on the verge of collapse.
Doug Bland, Queen's University: The researchers concluded that Canada is very close to having little or no credible, capable military capabilities for the next several years as a result of the continued underfunding of capital and personnel establishments by successive governments over many years.
Bourbeau: But there is one branch of Canada's military that is state of the art, the air force's 412 squadron recently acquired two executive model challenger jets, and their role? Well they're for the exclusive use of cabinet ministers. In Ottawa this is Global's Jacques Bourbous reporting.
- - -
Smith: Thank you Jacques. On the surface the case against the government seems open and shut. But appearances can be deceiving. Let's introduce our expert panel of witnesses. In Montreal Jay Plante a retired Canadian submarine commander now a consultant in the Ottawa area. In the capital from the Polaris Institute a policy think-tank for among other things military affairs Stephen Staples. With me from the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary is professor David Bercuson. Also, from the Strategic Study Centre and now a host of a new program called the...on the Eye channel called the "Underground Royal Commission Investigates," Mercedes Stephenson. Welcome to everyone.
David Bercuson: Hi.
Stephen Staples: Hi
Mercedes Stephenson: Hi.
Smith: All right the court martial now begins. You've all heard the charge and we'll start with Professor Bercuson, is Ottawa guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to support our troops?
David Bercuson: Absolutely. Uh first of all they're guilty because the last time they looked at defence policy in this country was ten years ago when the world situation was very different than it is today. They haven't revamped defence policy in the last ten years, which means that they're basically acting uh day-to-day um on a very ad hoc basis anytime there's an international crisis. The second thing that's done is that they have cut back on budgetary expenditures for the military, which is fine it was a political decision to do that, Canadian people supported it, but what they didn't do is they didn't cut back on the tasks that they've allocated to the military. In fact they've been using the military far more often in the last six years than they used it in the period of the Cold War so you've got no defence policy, you do not have adequate funding for the tasks that the government is setting for the military and so what we've got is burnout on the part of the military personnel who are just totally burned out by the number of missions that they've been sent on and you've got an equipment crisis that's absolutely looming in several areas and in one of course being the submarines.
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm. All right, Stephen can anything be said in the government's defence?
Stephen Staples: On the charge of funding? Not guilty. Currently we are spending more than thirteen billion dollars on the Armed Forces combined. That has been going up since 1999. it's been steadily increasing and there's some big increases look like they're coming down the line. We have to remember that Canada's defence spending is number six in terms of real dollars spent in terms of our...in comparison with our NATO allies so a substantial amount of funding is going into the military. Now on the charge of policy, picking up on David's point, they are guilty that the policy has not been updated since the....really since the end of the Cold War. While many countries are updating their policy in a post Sept. 11th context, our policy is still mired in Cold War thinking and that's why we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on submarines that were designed to fight a Cold War uh but really serve uh very little purpose if any purpose at all in terms of the defence of North America or supporting our peacekeeping operations.
Smith: Jay you used to be the captain of a submarine, do you agree that there is no purpose for us having submarines anymore?
Jay Plante: Not at all. I do not agree with that statement entirely Danielle. Submarines have a role in our...in our Navy. It's the pillar of our medium sized Navy, the size of Canada. We are a maritime nation. And is Canada serious about exercising sovereignty on the surface, above our waters and below? If we are serious about sovereignty, then submarines are an essential components of our maritime forces. And we have very small Armed Forces. And to go over some of the points David has made a few minutes ago, it's even worse that there's a widespread disease in the fleet right now, they've got no money to keep those ships at sea. We have twelve frigates, four destroyers, four submarines. They cannot buy spares the O and M budgets are so restricted. They cannot buy spares for those ships...
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm.
Plante: ...they cannot buy fuel to deploy them. That is that status of our fleet today regrettably.
Smith: Okay Mercedes, I want to ask you the same question about submarines as well, what we keep hearing in the media in defence of having a submarine fleet is that we can use them to arrest salmon poachers or to go after deep sea polluters or to do...intercept smugglers, to me those like routine Coast guard duties, that doesn't sound like something we should be buying huge expensive military equipment for to be able to police, am I mistaken on that?
Mercedes Stephenson: Well I think that the reasons that you're pointing out are not the best reasons to have submarines but I'm not sure that's the reason why we have them. We are a country with a tremendous coastline on three sides and we need the capability to defend that coastline. We don't have icebreakers that can go through the Arctic right now and patrol up there. We need something that's able to patrol the coast in and unseen manner. And increasingly with global warming with the melting of the northwest passage there's going to be increased shipping traffic through there, we need some sort of means of surveillance and if it's, you know, stealthy surveillance that's even better because that will become an issue, it will become a security issue for Canada um not necessarily in terms of a sort of catastrophic attack on Canada or that we need subs that are going to go out and fight like the German U-boats again, you know, World War II is not going to happen, but I think there certainly is a role for subs in a modern Navy, particularly in Canada. There's the old adage, that there's a Navy in every country waters, it's either your own or somebody else's.
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm. Stephen what can you tell us about the subs that we do have? I keep reading that they're...they've got rust, they've got corrosion, they've got dents, they've got cracks. We have a case on HMCS Chicoutimi where somebody has now died because of a fire did we buy a bunch of lemons?
Plante: Are you asking...
Staples: Well they're lemons and I'm beginning to wonder whether they're actually deathtraps because theses submarines had a long history, well-documented history of problems with this program when the British built them, uh, to find Soviet Union submarines, um, these hunter-killer subs that they designed. They eventually ended up putting them in mothballs and putting them on the international market, looking around for someone to take them off their hands because they had spent so much money on them and there wasn't any real utility, they essential abandoned them and went to an all nuclear fleet. They put them on the international market, various countries came around had a look at them, the Australians came, gave the tires a kick and said "uh, we don't think so, we're going to go do something else." But yet the Canadian Navy came and looked at them, they saw something that no one else did and they put together a very power lobby on prime minister Chretien at the time to tried to convince him to buy these submarines arguing essentially that the deal was to good to be true and I....and sadly I think we're finding out that that is in fact the case, it was to good to be true.
Smith: Jay now I know you disagree with this point, I'm going to give you a chance to answer that when we get back.
Plante: Well...
Smith: The trial continues though when Canada's number one current affairs talk show Global Sunday returns in two minutes.
____________________________________________
Poor Plante,I think he was about to say " Are you asking that pencil necked asshole who never served a day aboard a submarine what's wrong with them?" I wish I had the rest of the transcript .....
[ Article ] :threat:
Apparently this was on the tube the other day, but the date of the article is October 8,2004.
CREDIT: Canadian Press
HMCS Chicoutimi
Ottawa Charged!
Special â Å“Court Martialâ ? edition of Global Sunday
CREDIT: Canadian Press
HMCS Chicoutimi
Danielle Smith: Good evening, I'm Danielle Smith in Calgary and this is Global Sunday, but not just any Global Sunday.
For many people in this country the death of Navy Lieutenant Chris Saunders and the serious injuries of two other sailors was just the last straw in what they see as a seemingly endless parade of broken promises and politically motivated delays by the governing Liberals. What we want to do tonight is examine whether Ottawa's ideological distaste for the military has worsened from simple neglect to criminal negligence causing death.
Casualties in a combat zone are understandable. But when a first world nation running surpluses in the billions is to cheap to properly fund its military or spends years dithering over the direction for the Armed Forces. Mistakes are bound to happen but people shouldn't be dieing because of politics and bad planning.
So tonight we're holding a mock court martial on the following charge:
The Federal government has been derelict in its duty to properly equip our troops.
Smith: Over the next half hour you'll see the arguments for and against. At the end of the program we'll ask you to render a verdict on our website, guilty or not guilty? We'll introduce our expert witnesses in a moment but first as Jacques Bourbeau explains the disaster aboard the HMCS Chicoutimi was just the latest accident waiting to happen to our men and women in uniform.
Jacques Bourbeau: Floundering in the North Atlantic without power the plight of the HMCS Chicoutimi underscored once again the depressing reality of Canada's military. A military that no matter where you look all you can see are cracks.
Gordon O'Connor, Conservative Defence Critic: Mr. Speaker during the last election the Prime Minister dismissed the need for substantial investment in defence. This ongoing attitude towards the military is seen in the mismanagement and underfunding of a range of defence capabilities. The most recent example is the sad state of our submarine fleet, which has unresolved fleet wide problems.
[Unidentified Cabinet Member]: The premise of the question Mr. Speaker ignores entirely that since this prime minister came into office he's committed to spending some seven billion dollars on improving the equipment to our armed services. Updating some of the best equipment we can possibly have Mr. Speaker.
Bourbeau: The effects of years of underfunding and almost no strategic direction from the government can be seen in all three branches of the military. For example the Navy is still flying Sea King helicopters, which spend much more time in repair hangars than they do in the air. A replacement is finally on the way, but it will be years before the last Sea King is retired.
The Navy's supply ships and destroyers are thirty-five years old with no replacements in sight. And the electronics on board the Aurora long-range patrol aircraft are obsolete. They're now being updated and the Navy is hoping to squeeze another twenty years of life out of these planes.
Now up in the sky the air force fleet is also showing its age. The CF18s are undergoing a billion dollar upgrade to their electronics and weapons systems. And the Hercules, the transport workhorse of the air force are nearing the end of their life. And keeping them flying is tough. For example last week nineteen of our fleet of thirty-two Hercules were unable to fly. But it's the Army that is showing the most strain. In recent it has been engaged in more and increasingly difficult peacekeeping missions. But there's not enough soldiers and they're so burnt out that the Army has had to declare and operational pause saying in effect it needs a rest.
On the equipment side the Army has been getting some reinforcements The Striker Mobile Gun System and the Coyote Reconnaissance Vehicle, but it still has its share of outdated equipment like the Iltis Jeep. Surveying the overall state of the military a variety of groups have been sounding warning bells. The most recent came less than a year ago when a group of experts predicted Canada's Armed Forces were on the verge of collapse.
Doug Bland, Queen's University: The researchers concluded that Canada is very close to having little or no credible, capable military capabilities for the next several years as a result of the continued underfunding of capital and personnel establishments by successive governments over many years.
Bourbeau: But there is one branch of Canada's military that is state of the art, the air force's 412 squadron recently acquired two executive model challenger jets, and their role? Well they're for the exclusive use of cabinet ministers. In Ottawa this is Global's Jacques Bourbous reporting.
- - -
Smith: Thank you Jacques. On the surface the case against the government seems open and shut. But appearances can be deceiving. Let's introduce our expert panel of witnesses. In Montreal Jay Plante a retired Canadian submarine commander now a consultant in the Ottawa area. In the capital from the Polaris Institute a policy think-tank for among other things military affairs Stephen Staples. With me from the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary is professor David Bercuson. Also, from the Strategic Study Centre and now a host of a new program called the...on the Eye channel called the "Underground Royal Commission Investigates," Mercedes Stephenson. Welcome to everyone.
David Bercuson: Hi.
Stephen Staples: Hi
Mercedes Stephenson: Hi.
Smith: All right the court martial now begins. You've all heard the charge and we'll start with Professor Bercuson, is Ottawa guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to support our troops?
David Bercuson: Absolutely. Uh first of all they're guilty because the last time they looked at defence policy in this country was ten years ago when the world situation was very different than it is today. They haven't revamped defence policy in the last ten years, which means that they're basically acting uh day-to-day um on a very ad hoc basis anytime there's an international crisis. The second thing that's done is that they have cut back on budgetary expenditures for the military, which is fine it was a political decision to do that, Canadian people supported it, but what they didn't do is they didn't cut back on the tasks that they've allocated to the military. In fact they've been using the military far more often in the last six years than they used it in the period of the Cold War so you've got no defence policy, you do not have adequate funding for the tasks that the government is setting for the military and so what we've got is burnout on the part of the military personnel who are just totally burned out by the number of missions that they've been sent on and you've got an equipment crisis that's absolutely looming in several areas and in one of course being the submarines.
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm. All right, Stephen can anything be said in the government's defence?
Stephen Staples: On the charge of funding? Not guilty. Currently we are spending more than thirteen billion dollars on the Armed Forces combined. That has been going up since 1999. it's been steadily increasing and there's some big increases look like they're coming down the line. We have to remember that Canada's defence spending is number six in terms of real dollars spent in terms of our...in comparison with our NATO allies so a substantial amount of funding is going into the military. Now on the charge of policy, picking up on David's point, they are guilty that the policy has not been updated since the....really since the end of the Cold War. While many countries are updating their policy in a post Sept. 11th context, our policy is still mired in Cold War thinking and that's why we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on submarines that were designed to fight a Cold War uh but really serve uh very little purpose if any purpose at all in terms of the defence of North America or supporting our peacekeeping operations.
Smith: Jay you used to be the captain of a submarine, do you agree that there is no purpose for us having submarines anymore?
Jay Plante: Not at all. I do not agree with that statement entirely Danielle. Submarines have a role in our...in our Navy. It's the pillar of our medium sized Navy, the size of Canada. We are a maritime nation. And is Canada serious about exercising sovereignty on the surface, above our waters and below? If we are serious about sovereignty, then submarines are an essential components of our maritime forces. And we have very small Armed Forces. And to go over some of the points David has made a few minutes ago, it's even worse that there's a widespread disease in the fleet right now, they've got no money to keep those ships at sea. We have twelve frigates, four destroyers, four submarines. They cannot buy spares the O and M budgets are so restricted. They cannot buy spares for those ships...
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm.
Plante: ...they cannot buy fuel to deploy them. That is that status of our fleet today regrettably.
Smith: Okay Mercedes, I want to ask you the same question about submarines as well, what we keep hearing in the media in defence of having a submarine fleet is that we can use them to arrest salmon poachers or to go after deep sea polluters or to do...intercept smugglers, to me those like routine Coast guard duties, that doesn't sound like something we should be buying huge expensive military equipment for to be able to police, am I mistaken on that?
Mercedes Stephenson: Well I think that the reasons that you're pointing out are not the best reasons to have submarines but I'm not sure that's the reason why we have them. We are a country with a tremendous coastline on three sides and we need the capability to defend that coastline. We don't have icebreakers that can go through the Arctic right now and patrol up there. We need something that's able to patrol the coast in and unseen manner. And increasingly with global warming with the melting of the northwest passage there's going to be increased shipping traffic through there, we need some sort of means of surveillance and if it's, you know, stealthy surveillance that's even better because that will become an issue, it will become a security issue for Canada um not necessarily in terms of a sort of catastrophic attack on Canada or that we need subs that are going to go out and fight like the German U-boats again, you know, World War II is not going to happen, but I think there certainly is a role for subs in a modern Navy, particularly in Canada. There's the old adage, that there's a Navy in every country waters, it's either your own or somebody else's.
Smith: Hmmm. Hmmm. Stephen what can you tell us about the subs that we do have? I keep reading that they're...they've got rust, they've got corrosion, they've got dents, they've got cracks. We have a case on HMCS Chicoutimi where somebody has now died because of a fire did we buy a bunch of lemons?
Plante: Are you asking...
Staples: Well they're lemons and I'm beginning to wonder whether they're actually deathtraps because theses submarines had a long history, well-documented history of problems with this program when the British built them, uh, to find Soviet Union submarines, um, these hunter-killer subs that they designed. They eventually ended up putting them in mothballs and putting them on the international market, looking around for someone to take them off their hands because they had spent so much money on them and there wasn't any real utility, they essential abandoned them and went to an all nuclear fleet. They put them on the international market, various countries came around had a look at them, the Australians came, gave the tires a kick and said "uh, we don't think so, we're going to go do something else." But yet the Canadian Navy came and looked at them, they saw something that no one else did and they put together a very power lobby on prime minister Chretien at the time to tried to convince him to buy these submarines arguing essentially that the deal was to good to be true and I....and sadly I think we're finding out that that is in fact the case, it was to good to be true.
Smith: Jay now I know you disagree with this point, I'm going to give you a chance to answer that when we get back.
Plante: Well...
Smith: The trial continues though when Canada's number one current affairs talk show Global Sunday returns in two minutes.
____________________________________________
Poor Plante,I think he was about to say " Are you asking that pencil necked asshole who never served a day aboard a submarine what's wrong with them?" I wish I had the rest of the transcript .....
