The new government in Ottawa made enough resolutions during the election to keep it busy for its entire term, let alone the new year. In the unlikely event that attempts are made to honour every promise made during the campaign they will have to be resolute indeed. Undoing the misdeeds of the previous regime might have been enough to satisfy a public too often ignored altogether when not subjected to foreign policy fear mongering that is better suited to America than Canada. But the party now in power is young and fresh and optimistic and not bound by the dictates of its leader, like the last one.
One promise is to recall the F18 jets currently conducting air strikes against ISIS. The conservatives advocated ‘staying the course’ even though few if any details about the mission or its progress were ever publicly released by it. The Department of National Defence website reported nothing except the number of sorties made by Canadian aircraft. The fat little weasel who ran the DND declared everything about the deployment top secret in the interests of national security. "Trust the government," they implied: big brother knew best. Even the true cost of the operation was conveniently stamped classified, but estimates place it around $500,000,000.
Trudeau doesn’t go far enough in my opinion; I’d scrap the whole operation. Our contribution to the coalition amounts to about 2 percent of the total effort. That's negligible even if the new opposition and some in the media carry on as if a change in policy would jeopardize the coalition mission, show Canada in a bad light and somehow allow ISIS to conquer the world.
That entire region has been fragmented by different ethnicities, religions, values, customs, cultures and assigned borders since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following WW1. All of the various factions have been at odds with one another ever since with none there are ready for change yet. It is hypocrisy to pretend that human rights issues are the motives behind the west’s military interference. Since the 1973 oil crisis the main concern has remained maintaining the uninterrupted flow of oil from their wells to the gas tanks of the world. Canada however, has the third largest oil reserves on the planet and needn't worry about supply.
Still, the last government insisted that we had to join the fray to protect us from foreign terrorism. No one likes bombings - including those in the Middle East - and nothing is more likely to provoke terrorism here than our interference there. Such foreign adventures are among the reasons why America is now so well loved around the world. A lot of the trouble there now is the result of the U.S.A.’s ill-advised invasion and consequent destabilization of Iraq. Let them resolve it or leave it to the area’s well-armed locals to fix.
Canada is not a military power and we shouldn’t pretend we are. We can provide an example of real humanitarian aid simply by allowing a place of refuge here for those inclined, away from the destruction and the squalor of camps over there.
One promise is to recall the F18 jets currently conducting air strikes against ISIS. The conservatives advocated ‘staying the course’ even though few if any details about the mission or its progress were ever publicly released by it. The Department of National Defence website reported nothing except the number of sorties made by Canadian aircraft. The fat little weasel who ran the DND declared everything about the deployment top secret in the interests of national security. "Trust the government," they implied: big brother knew best. Even the true cost of the operation was conveniently stamped classified, but estimates place it around $500,000,000.
Trudeau doesn’t go far enough in my opinion; I’d scrap the whole operation. Our contribution to the coalition amounts to about 2 percent of the total effort. That's negligible even if the new opposition and some in the media carry on as if a change in policy would jeopardize the coalition mission, show Canada in a bad light and somehow allow ISIS to conquer the world.
That entire region has been fragmented by different ethnicities, religions, values, customs, cultures and assigned borders since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following WW1. All of the various factions have been at odds with one another ever since with none there are ready for change yet. It is hypocrisy to pretend that human rights issues are the motives behind the west’s military interference. Since the 1973 oil crisis the main concern has remained maintaining the uninterrupted flow of oil from their wells to the gas tanks of the world. Canada however, has the third largest oil reserves on the planet and needn't worry about supply.
Still, the last government insisted that we had to join the fray to protect us from foreign terrorism. No one likes bombings - including those in the Middle East - and nothing is more likely to provoke terrorism here than our interference there. Such foreign adventures are among the reasons why America is now so well loved around the world. A lot of the trouble there now is the result of the U.S.A.’s ill-advised invasion and consequent destabilization of Iraq. Let them resolve it or leave it to the area’s well-armed locals to fix.
Canada is not a military power and we shouldn’t pretend we are. We can provide an example of real humanitarian aid simply by allowing a place of refuge here for those inclined, away from the destruction and the squalor of camps over there.
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