Where caution goes too far

This is more of a rant than my typical more academic approach.


At some point politicians and citizens need to be able to say enough is enough and stand up to their government and demand an election.

For me this happened years ago when Harper decided to "save" $0.10 per Canadian, but scraping the Charter challenge fund, which helped regular Canadians afford the cost of taking legislation to court for violating the constitution.  Trudeau considered this absolutely vital to making the Constitution a safeguard for the people.  But the Liberals and the opposition squabbled little over this and it was destroyed without much of a fight.

From my Bleeding Heart: The Census and Discrimination

When the Harper government announced its intent to make 54 of the 62 questions on the long census form voluntary, Harper and Tony Clement claimed that it was to protect people’s privacy from invasive questions.  I, like many businesses, academics, politicians, government agencies, and rationally minded citizens, felt that explanation seemed… lacking, which made me suspicious of Harper’s actual motivations.

One month later, while the controversy over the census rages on, the CPC announces that they intend to “review” the government’s hiring policy in regards to affirmative action. 

So Harper has modified the census so that it will be harder to determine if there is racially based discrimination in the job market, then he seeks to remove a program designed to combat the same problem.

The only way privacy makes sense as an explanation for the changes to the census is if it refers to the government’s “right” to enact legislation in private, without “interference” by the opposition, media, and non-white Canadians.

Census: the Long and Short of It

Harper has reduced the long census from 63 to 8 because he claims that the rest of the questions are overly intrusive on our individual right to privacy.  Lets have a look at the new census and then the questions that have been left out.  Please be aware that I have paraphrased them to keep this post as short as possible.

F-35s... Why?

I know this topic is being talked about to death... but I saw the bandwagon and said, "me too!"

So, a few weeks ago Harper stated his commitment to reducing the deficit by half by 2013.  His first major action after that: $16B for 65 state of the art F-35s.  $9B for the planes and an estimated (though not confirmed) $7B for maintenance.  To put that into perspective that's four times the amount that was set aside for the economic action recovery plan.

The CPC has said that the cost is necessary to replace the aging fleet of CF18s that are currently in use.  All of the remaining 79 of which are finishing a $2.6B upgrade to a wide variety of their systems.

So if we're upgrading the existing planes why do we also need new ones?

The CPC's reasons were that we had already invested $168M into the development of the plane (as have many of our allies) and that we need to keep pace with our allies in terms of military capability.  Also, the airframes on the CF-18s are getting old and do need to be replaced, but that can also be done at a fraction of the cost.

The first reason is filled with so much stupid that its not worth making a serious argument against it.  It's like buying a ticket to a hockey game then buying the entire team to justify the ticket's expense.  At best $168M gives us the option to choose to purchase then jets.

Which allies are we trying to keep up with?  It seems that the cost of the F-35 is a major problem for all of the countries that have invested in the program except us.  The US and many of the other countries involved in the project have cut the size of their orders, and the Dutch have withdrawn from the program altogether.

The original cost of the F-35 was slated at $55M each, which had ballooned to an estimated $115M as of May of this year.  Now in July we've agreed to pay $138M per plane... I think Harper needs to work on his bargaining skills.  We're purchasing from the first production run, which typically is rife with minor technical errors; if we had waited until the fourth run, we could have paid half.

During a financial meltdown it seems like a better use of tax money would have been to stabilize and expand the economy.  As mentioned before the F-35 expenditure is four times greater than the stimulus fund.  But maybe we need the jets more than we need to repair and upgrade our infrastructure, help struggling businesses and families, and oh yeah prevent further expansion of the deficit.

As I read through the Toronto Star I was amused that the very next article following one about the F-35s was about the dire condition of our existing infrastructure.  Apparently the cost to bring Ontario's roads need about $160M to maintain them at a minimum safe standard.  But hey, its not like infrastructure has anything to do with the economy, right?

To conclude, I was annoyed with this decision in light of the recent commitment to reduce the deficit by a half in three years.  But I guess if you make it as big as possible this year, halving it will be all the easier.