MILITARY INDUSTRIAL BOONDOGGLE
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | March 29, 2021
Today in my defence policy course my students and I shall be spending some time discussing defence procurement. As luck would have it, as I was munching on my morning bread and marmalade, a highly relevant article swam into view in the op-ed page of my local rag, The Ottawa Citizen, after which I then discovered a new US report on a similar topic.
The Citizen article concerns Canada’s shockingly badly managed naval shipbuilding program. Written by a former Assistant Deputy Minister of Defence, Alan Williams, the article declares that ‘Canada’s Warship Program is Sinking Fast.’ In this Williams reports that Canada’s plan to build 15 new surface combatants originally had
an estimated cost of $26 billion, with deliveries to begin in the early 2020s. Today, the forecasted costs to build these ships is far beyond that. Deliveries are to start in the early 2030s, a decade later than scheduled … [The Parliamentary Budget Office] estimates that it will cost $77.3 billion … to maintain these ships over their expected total life-cycle would amount to an additional $208 billion, for a total life-cycle cost of $286 billion. In comparison, the funds available in DND’s [Department of National Defence] budget over the next 30 years to acquire and maintain its capital goods for the army, navy and air force combined is only $240 billion. This program alone would bankrupt the department’s capital and maintenance accounts for the next 30 years.
Despite this, DND insists that, ‘It will neither entertain a new design nor undertake a new procurement process.’ Williams adds that the United States is building very similar ships for about one-third of the price of the Canadian ones, and also that DND rejected an offer by the Italian company Fincantieri to build the ships in Canada ‘at a fixed cost of $30 billion’, less than half what DND is now paying. ‘As currently planned, these ships will likely never be built. They are simply unaffordable,’ concludes Williams.
But could the government cancel such a project after throwing so much money at it? That’s where the US report comes in. Published by the American Enterprise Institute, and entitled The 2020s Tri-Service Modernization Crunch, the report mentions how the shift in priorities during the War on Terror led the USA to cancel a whole series of projects originally designed for fighting wars of a different type. You can see the details in this chart, showing cancelled projects from 2002 to 2012 alone.
The ‘Sunk Cost’ column shows how much the US government had already spent on the project by the time it was cancelled. For instance, the Future Combat System, designed to revolutionize the US army by equipping it with networked vehicles, cost a staggering $22 billion before it was scrubbed. In total, in just one decade 2002-2012, projects were cancelled that had cost $81 billion. That’s $81 billion of taxpayers’ money that produced absolutely nothing! Nadda. Think about that for a second.
Waste on this scale is quite staggering. You’d think people would be outraged. But for whatever reason, it seems like nobody cares very much. It’s as if it’s just assumed that this is the cost of doing business.
Meanwhile, some people are doing very well out of it, namely defence industries. They, no doubt, would tell us all that the money isn’t wasted, because it all helps to stimulate the economy. ‘Money spent on defence boosts growth’ they tell us. But does it? I decide to check, and discovered this little table that summarizes economists’ research into the multiplier effect of defence spending.
For those of you without economics training, the multiplier effect is a measurement of how much the economy grows as a result of expenditure. The idea is that if the state spends some money on x, then that produces spending on y, which in turn produces spending on z, so that for every buck you spend, you stimulate the economy as a whole by several bucks. So what’s the multiplier of defence spending? The table tells us.
As you can see, research on the matter suggests strongly that for every dollar spend on defence, you get less than a dollar’s growth in the economy, with most studies showing a multiplier of around 0.6.
So, defence spending isn’t so great for the economy after all. I can’t say that I’m surprised. Yet somehow, we allow huge sums of money to be squandered on unnecessary and grotesquely overpriced military projects. I don’t know about you, but it suggests to me that there’s something seriously wrong with our democracy.
PS. An article published yesterday in Sputnik News tells us that the Russian Navy is planning to test its new Zircon hypersonic missile at the start of the summer. Coming on top of the deployment of Russia’s Avangard intercontinental hypersonic glide missile, this puts Russia well ahead of the rest of the world in the realm of hypersonic technology. Russia’s defence spending is about three times that of Canada in raw dollar terms (about $65 v. $22 billion). Yet, it’s in a completely different league. We can’t build a few ships. They can develop hypersonic missiles. All of which makes me think that raw numbers of defence spending don’t tell us everything. Just as important is how effectively the money is spent. From that perspective, we don’t seem to be doing so well.
Canadian Gov’t’s Move to Hire Influencers to Tout its Work is a ‘Form of Propaganda’: Journalist
Sputnik – 27.03.2021
A website called Blacklock’s Reporter revealed on Thursday that Canada’s Department of Health wants to hire celebrities and digital influencers “to say nice things” about its work on social media. According to Canadian independent journalist Leigh Stewart, this spin operation shows that the Liberal government lacks honesty and transparency.
Sputnik: The news about the government’s online endorsement campaign appeared after several controversial stories involving Minister of Health Patty Hajdu, some of them pandemic-related, surfaced online. What do you think about it as a journalist, and as a taxpayer?
Leigh Stewart: It doesn’t surprise me that the government would be willing to pay people to give them praise, or promote what they are dishing out. It’s a form of propaganda. It reminds me what they did in 2019: paid influencers to promote the election (Trudeau’s election) until they scrapped it when people realised the social media influencers that were chosen had a Trudeau bias. We never did get that money back.
Sputnik: According to another news outlet – The Post Millennial, the influencers will not be required to tell their audience that the Trudeau government will be paying them – something which is illegal, according to the Canadian government’s own website. It’s also unclear how much money the bloggers will be receiving. Do you think Canadians deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent on celebrity endorsements?
Leigh Stewart: The government has never been transparent. If this current government was honest, they wouldn’t need to pay celebrities to praise them, that would come naturally. Canadians should definitely know where their tax dollars are going, it’s a mockery to the hard working Canadians to not be informed, personally I think it equates to theft.
Sputnik: It’s likely that a lot of that “positive content” about the government will be COVID-related. Do you think the handling of pandemic-related issues by the Department of Health during the past year has been adequate and effective?
Leigh Stewart: Health Canada needs all the help they can get, seeking praise for their decisions surrounding the coronavirus. Nothing they have put in place, whether it be lockdowns, wearing masks, has worked. We are in the same place we were a year ago and not much has changed. I think the lockdowns are doing more harm than good, with the help of big tech and corporations, especially for small business. Anyone who speaks out against the current government and their solutions backed with zero evidence is silenced, or presented with a summons to court. I think their goal is to abolish the middle class. Get a majority of people on government assistance (Canada has the highest unemployment in the G7) and inflate prices so eventually, people cannot afford to live.
Canadians don’t need a babysitter to tell them what to do, last time I checked we had a freedom of choice. If you don’t want to wear a mask, go ahead. If you want to keep your small business open, go ahead. There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people making the choices that they feel are best for them.
Sputnik: Ontario premier Doug Ford said that the authorities will be watching the daily case numbers, as the COVID infection rate has increased in your province. All of that may sound as if the authorities are preparing for another lockdown, while the previous one has not been fully lifted. Do you think people would readily accept the new restrictions?
Leigh Stewart: I think a lot of people are getting fed up. In the beginning it was only 15 days to flatten the curve and here we are, a year later, only now the narrative has changed. It’s now about waiting for a vaccine. Which health officials say you will still have to wear a mask, even if you receive one. The Premier of Ontario Doug Ford is relying on medical health professionals to tell him what to do, when I’m not convinced they actually do know what they are doing. Locking down again hurts small business and even Ford has admitted that himself.
Father of trans teen kept in jail after speaking to press about resisting hormone injections for his child
RT | March 21, 2021
A Canadian man, involved in a legal battle over his right to object to hormone treatment for his teenage trans child, has reportedly been jailed and denied bail for violating a gag order banning him from discussing the story.
Robert Hoogland was denied bail by the Vancouver Supreme Court on Friday and will remain in the North Fraser remand prison, according to news website the Post Millennial. He was arrested this week for contempt of court, due to his continued violation of an order restricting his speech regarding his transgender child. Hoogland fought a lengthy battle, defending his right to have a say in whether life-changing hormone therapy may be offered to a minor without parental consent.
The signature case in Canada’s British Columbia (BC) started several years ago. At the age of 12, ‘Maxine’ (not the child’s real name), who was assigned female gender at birth, struggled to find her place in life, including her gender identity. Her school counselor suggested she may be transgender, referring her to a doctor and telling the school to treat her like a boy.
By the age of 14 the teen was identifying as a male trapped in a female body and was eager to start hormone therapy. The mother was supportive of the decision, but Hoogland – who was separated from the rest of the family but shared custody over the child – felt things were rushed. He said he would be OK with a transition if his child were older and more prepared to make an informed decision about a life-altering procedure. The consent form he refused to sign said hormones could result in various health complications, including elevated risk of heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, and even infertility.
This happened in 2018 and led to a series of court proceedings to decide whether Maxine could be the ultimate arbiter on the matter. That was the position of the gender clinic at BC Children’s Hospital, based on the Infants Act. The law says a “mature minor” may give consent to receiving healthcare.
Critics believe the law allows ideologically driven trans activists to lean on confused children and convince them into making a transition that would not necessarily be beneficial to them, while barring their legal guardians from having a say on the issue.
In Hoogland’s case, Canadian courts repeatedly sided with the hospital and allowed hormone therapy to proceed. Moreover, the father was significantly restricted in how he could speak about the case. He was ordered to always use Maxine’s chosen name, gender, and pronouns, and was banned from trying to convince his child to stop the therapy. A judge even stated that his interviews with the media, in which Hoogland referred to Maxine as his daughter and said things like “her DNA will not change through all these experiments that they do,” may be considered “family violence.”
A 2020 review of the conflict at the BC Court of Appeal opined against such framing, acknowledging there was no evidence that Hoogland (who is called ‘CD’ in court papers and ‘Clark’ in some earlier media reports) was intentionally abusive, and saying the conflict was about “a complex family relationship stemming from a profound disagreement about important issues of parental roles and medical treatment.” His plea to block the transition, however, was rejected.
The April 2019 gag order, which barred Hoogland from sharing information about Maxine’s “sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical health, medical status or therapies” with the general public, also remained in place. The dad, who believes his family’s story should be properly discussed, disobeyed, and in early March an arrest warrant was issued against him at the request of the BC Attorney General. He surrendered to the authorities on March 16.
The denial of bail puts Hoogland between a rock and a hard place. One of the things he was reportedly admonished for by the judge was failing to take down a crowdfunding page, on which he explains his situation – in apparent breach of the gag order – and asks for donations to cover legal fees. He had been instructed to comply by April 12, when proceedings on his contempt of court case are scheduled to begin, but says he cannot do it from jail.
Canada has taken ‘no actions’ to incriminate Israel over shooting Canadian journalist
Press TV – March 13, 2021
A Canadian rights advocacy organization has revealed that the country’s government declined to hold to account the Israeli regime for the 2015 shooting of a Canadian journalist photographer in the occupied West Bank, denouncing Ottawa’s inaction as “shocking” and calling on the government to impose sanctions against Tel Aviv over the crime.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) made the revelation in a series of tweets late on Friday, saying that the government in Ottawa, as confirmed by Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, had taken “no actions” to protest the shooting of Rehab Nazzal by an Israeli sniper in December 2015.
The Canadian-Palestinian journalist was photographing a protest rally in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah at that time when she was shot in the leg by the Israeli sniper.
The rights organization said they had confirmation from Freeland that “no actions have been taken” by Canada “to protest this incident,” and added that, “This callous inaction is shocking and must be corrected.”
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East highlighted the official confirmation by attaching a letter from Freeland in response to Nazzal’s lawyer, Dimitri Lascaris, who had demanded that the Canadian government hold the Israeli sniper accountable.
“CJPME calls on the Canadian government to take immediate action to investigate the shooting of Rehab Nazzal, and to impose sanctions against the Israeli authorities responsible for this crime,” the advocacy organization said in one of its tweets.
“If Canada won’t even reprimand Israel when it shoots a Canadian citizen, how little value does Canada give to the lives of those under Israel’s occupation?” it added.
Moreover, the rights organization included in another tweet a statement from Nazzal’s daughter, Rana, who had censured as “racist” Canada’s response to her mother’s case.
“Six years ago, my mom was shot by an Israeli sniper. She photographed a soldier aiming at her, saw medics running and looked down to see blood,” Rana said. “Freeland’s callous response is in perfect line with Canada’s racist policy of pretending to not see Israeli violence, even as blood spills.”
The Canadian government has in some certain cases adopted a pro-Israeli approach to the issue of Palestine, which has been taken to task by rights groups and activists in the North American country.
In December last year, human rights activists in Canada called for an end to the recruitment of Canadian citizens by the Israeli military after reports indicated that hundreds of Canadian citizens had joined the occupying regime’s military in the recent years.
The activists maintained that the measure by the Israeli army is in violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which prohibits the recruitment of Canadian citizens by foreigners.
In another controversial case in 2019, the Canadian government was forced under pressure from the country’s rights groups to revoke the charity status of a Jewish organization over funding Israeli military projects and settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Under Canadian law, registered charities are prohibited from donating funds to “foreign armed forces.”
About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.
Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem al-Quds as its capital.
IMPERIAL WASTE
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | March 3, 2021
Imperialism is big gigantic waste of money. Let’s start with that.
A couple of news items caught my attention this week that illustrate this point, but before getting on to them, we first need to make a bit of a detour and try to determine imperialism’s roots.
It’s harder than it might seem. For instance, historians have a real problem explaining late nineteenth century imperialism, in which European powers conquered large parts of the globe, most notably in Africa. All sorts of explanations have been generated, but few stand up to a lot of scrutiny.
Particularly implausible are the theories of socialist thinkers, the most famous of which is Lenin’s Imperialism: The Last State of Capitalism. The socialists’ idea was that capitalism generates lots of surplus capital that it can’t get rid of because it is suppressing the wages of its own workers and so denying itself investment opportunities at home. Instead, capitalism exports its surplus, for which it needs colonies – thus imperialism.
The problem was that, like a lot of Lenin’s stuff, the theory was total hogwash. First, capitalist economies had no shortage of investment opportunities at home; and second, they didn’t need colonies to invest abroad. The British, for instance, invested far, far more in Latin America, which they never conquered, than in Africa, which they did.
Furthermore, imperialism was, generally speaking, loss-making. Colonies had to be defended and administered, but they tended to be economically undeveloped, and so didn’t generate much revenue. There was a reason why the Brits were so happy to let the Canadians become self-governing – they were fed up having to pay for a frozen piece of wasteland that only produced some fur and lumber.
So, imperialism doesn’t make a lot of sense from the point of view of the national interest, broadly defined. But it does make sense to certain minority interests within an imperial society. There are medals and promotions to be won by the military; there are contracts for the military industrial complex; and there’s also money to be made by all sorts of other entrepreneurs willing to hang on the imperialists’ coattails. If these people and groups have outsized political influence – through control of the media, financial support to politicians, or whatever – they can distort politicians’ and even the entire population’s understanding of the national interest. And thus the nation gets dragged into foreign endeavours that enrich and empower a few but do nothing at all for the people as a whole.
Which brings me on to this week’s new stories, both of which involve staggering waste of government money on military and imperial adventures.
The first story concerns the Canadian navy’s program to build a new generation of warships. This was originally budgeted as costing $14 billion. Now the parliamentary budget officer has announced that the cost has leapt to a mind-blowing $77 billion, and that the total could go up even more if the project experiences further delays (which, let’s face it, is quite likely).
Going over-budget is hardly unusual in the world of defence procurement, but a leap from $14 to $77 billion is more than a bit off the charts. Imagine what you could do with $77 billion. Apart from putting it back in taxpayer’s pockets, think of what you could do for healthcare, education, or the condition of the country’s indigenous people, many of whom don’t even have access to drinkable water. And then think of what benefits you’re going to get from $77 billion worth of warships. Or rather, think of how you would suffer if you didn’t have those ships. Would anyone invade Canada? Would the world collapse into chaos? Would any of you not directly involved in building or manning them even notice??? No, no, and no.
This is a scandalous and appalling waste of the nation’s wealth. Yet it’s passed almost unnoticed. We live in a world of pandemic economics, in which money appears to grow on trees, budget deficits have ballooned to simply incomprehensible proportions, and the loss of $70-odd billion just slips by without causing so much as a blink of an eye. Clearly, something isn’t right.
And then there’s story number two. This is the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a person whose work I have mentioned many times before. SIGAR audits the money spent by the United States in Afghanistan, and it’s a litany of waste and corruption on a scale that … well, I’ve already used the word mindblowing, so I won’t say that it blows the mind, but you get the point, it involves a lot, a real, real lot, of money flushed down the toilet of Afghanistan for no obvious benefit.
Anyway, SIGAR’s latest report, which came to me in an email, says the following:
–This report is the result of a congressional request of SIGAR to summarize all capital assets in Afghanistan paid for by U.S. agencies that SIGAR has found in its prior work to be unused, not used for their intended purposes, deteriorated or destroyed.
— The capital assets reviewed for this report were funded by DOD, USAID, OPIC, and the State Department to build schools, prisons, a hotel, hospitals, roads, bridges, and Afghan military facilities.
— Of the nearly $7.8 billion in capital assets reviewed in its prior reports, SIGAR identified about $2.4 billion in assets that were unused or abandoned, had not been used for their intended purposes, had deteriorated, or were destroyed.
— By contrast, SIGAR found that more than $1.2 billion out of the $7.8 billion in assets were being used as intended, and only $343.2 million out of the $7.8 billion in assets were maintained in good condition.
— Most of the capital assets not used properly or in disrepair or abandoned are directly related to U.S. agencies not considering whether the Afghans wanted or needed the facilities, or whether the Afghan government had the financial ability and technical means to sustain them.
— This waste of taxpayer dollars occurred despite multiple laws stating that U.S. agencies should not construct or procure capital assets until they can show that the benefiting country has the financial and technical resources, and capability to use and maintain those assets effectively.
Quote:
— “SIGAR’s work reveals a pattern of U.S. agencies pouring too much money, too quickly, into a country too small to absorb it,” said Special Inspector General John F. Sopko. “The fact that so many capital assets wound up not used, deteriorated or abandoned should have been a major cause of concern for the agencies financing these projects. The lesson of all of this is two-fold. If the United States is going to pay for reconstruction or development in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world, first make certain the recipient wants it, needs it and can sustain it. Secondly, make certain before you spend the money there is proper oversight to prevent this type of waste.”
I’m a great fan of SIGAR, but there’s something about his work that really frustrates me. He’s been saying this stuff for years, but nothing ever changes. The money keeps flowing, and keeps getting squandered. There should be ‘proper oversight’ SIGAR says, but surely by now he’s got to have woken up to the fact that it’s not going to happen. It’s like all he can say is, ‘do all this stuff better’, but can never bring himself to say, ‘Stop doing it! It’s a gigantic boondoogle.’
To be fair, that’s not an auditor’s job, and I guess that he can’t go beyond his legal remit. But you see what I’m saying. This isn’t something you can solve by introducing better processes. It’s rotten to the core.
Unfortunately, it continues, and continues, and continues. And so it is that our profligate military and imperial adventures impoverish us all, while bringing us absolutely diddly squat in return for our money. Back in the day, I was taught that the essence of democracy is accountability. Judging by this, we’re not democracies at all.
But I’ll give the final word to two-times winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, General Smedley Butler. ‘War is a racket’, he said.
How very true.
Canada’s mandatory Covid-19 hotel stays are not ‘internment camps’ but they are costly forced detention
By Eva Bartlett | RT | February 10, 2021
Since at least October 2020, some Canadians have been concerned about rumours of Covid-19 “internment camps.” In reality, there may be no barbed wire or gun turrets, but a number of travellers have experienced detention firsthand.
Last October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about this. His reply didn’t address the specific claim at hand, instead he spoke generally of “noise and harmful misinformation on the Internet,” and bizarrely urged people to resist “people who would sow chaos within our communities and our democracy.” (I shudder to think which foreign interference he imagined.)
Earlier that month, Ontario member of provincial parliament (MPP) Randy Hillier had asked the province’s legislature about potential “internment camps,” referring to a federal government call for expressions of interest regarding “quarantine/isolation camps throughout every province and every territory in Canada.”
These camps fall under Canada’s Quarantine Act (2005), which specifies that the country can“designate any place in Canada as a quarantine facility.”
So fears of “being confined as a prisoner,” the standard definition of “internment,” can be laid to rest, right?
Well, while a temporary, mandatory, expensive hotel stay certainly isn’t the same as being kept in an internment camp, it is the 2021 plan for travellers flying to Canada, even if they “test negative” for Covid-19.
And many are rightly complaining that it is unlawful and goes against Canadians’ rights, including that those whisked away to secret locations are not given the right to legal counsel, much less right to contact families/friends.
At the end of January 2021, Canada decided to suspend flights to/from Mexico and Caribbean countries, and, effective February 3, implemented the three night stay-at-your-own-expense (or do jail time) hotel quarantine policy for travellers entering Canada with “positive tests” (or the “wrong” negative one). These rules were extended to travellers flying from the US, Central and South America as well.
Trudeau, on January 29, said the cost was expected to be more than Can$2000 (US$1575).
Further, as noted in the government’s news release on these measures, a violation of the quarantine instructions “is also an offence under the Quarantine Act and could lead to serious penalties, including six months in prison and/or $750,000 in fines.”
Whereas until recently it was enough to provide a negative coronavirus test, now travellers to Canada must provide specifically a “negative COVID-19 molecular (PCR) test” or do hotel time at their own expense until receiving such a result.
These new measures have already been trialled on passengers who have recently flown to Canada.
In one instance on January 30, a panicked mother (Rebekah McDonald) spoke of her son being taken away to a quarantine facility, saying, “They won’t let me talk to him. They won’t let me see him. They won’t tell me where he’s going.”
As it later turned out, while the son had complied and done a Covid-19 test (two, actually, the antigen and the PCR), he only had the paperwork for the former, and unbeknownst to him, Canada demanded the latter.
He and others likewise sent to hotel prison could be forgiven for missing the January 7, 2021 Transport Canada update specifying that antigen tests would not be accepted. Just two months prior, Government Canada listed antigen tests as a test for Covid-19.
In Ontario some days later, a passenger (Steve Duesing) also arriving with a negative test was shuttled to an approved quarantine hotel, apparently itself isolated from the public, with a “detention centre feel to it,” to wait for the Government Canada approved test results.
More recently, another passenger (Neil McCullough) subject to Canada’s arbitrary and draconian new rules spent 11 days in hotel isolation, because paperwork for his test didn’t list the clinic’s address.
In the latter case, there was an additional element of totalitarianism: according to McCullough, he and the woman in the next room he tried to speak with were allegedly both informed by the security guard that their quarantine period “would restart” if they didn’t stop talking about their experiences.
Rules for thee, but not…
The government paints its measures as precautions to limit the “spread” of Covid-19, but when numerous government officials themselves have repeatedly violated the regulations, it is clear that they don’t believe in the need for such rules.
This is not about “public safety,” but is about control of the populace.
Patty Hadju, Canada’s minister of health, is quoted as valiantly saying:
“No one should be travelling right now. Each of us has a part in keeping our communities safe, and that means avoiding non-essential travel, which can put you, your loved ones, and your community at risk.”
However, let’s recall that Hadju three times in April 2020 flew “between Ottawa and her home in Thunder Bay,” at a time when she advocated that “now is not the time for gatherings with family and friends. Connect with others with a phone call or video chat instead.”
And actually, she did more of the same in the following months, amounting to at least 11 flights.
The PM himself violated “the rules” over Easter last year, when he took his family, staff and a motorcade across provincial lines to the summer residence (after telling Canadians to suck it up and stay home).
Time will tell if the PM, health minister, and cohorts in positions of authority also violate these newest measures.
Legal action against Trudeau government
The Government Canada page on the new mandate notes that travellers will need to do the PCR test on arrival to Canada (in addition to having already just done it in order to arrive in Canada in the first place). So, according to this logic (and I use that term lightly), even if one has jumped through the absurd 2020 hoops and adapted to the early 2021 hoops, they’ll still need to do expensive hotel time upon arrival in Canada.
In any case, since the PCR test being pushed by Government Canada has long been shown to be unreliable and generate false positives, it thus becomes quite plausible that Canada’s preference of that test is because it will generate more “cases” and thus rack up fear of the pandemic.
An aside: The $2000+ for the three-night stay at government-approved hotels goes towards, Government Canada says, the test, the stay, and “all associated costs for food, cleaning and security.”
And although stays at hotels near airports are never cheap, in this case the food seems to be bordering on prison fare. A photo of Duesing’s Radisson meal shows a skimpy sandwich in a styrofoam container.
On February 3, the Justice Centre For Constitutional Freedoms published an update that it is “preparing to file legal action imminently,” regarding Government Canada’s mandatory hotel quarantine, noting they had “received hundreds of emails” since Canada announced the new travel measures.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association views these measures as an affront against civilians’ rights:
“The quarantine rules will almost certainly impact those who travel to care for ill relatives or attend funerals, those who travel to receive specialized medical care, and those who have health conditions that will make isolating in a hotel a particularly challenging and potentially dangerous proposition.”
In a follow-up video on February 3, McDonald reflected on the lack of accountability for her son’s detention, with no means to speak to anyone to ask for information or help.
Likewise, McCullough was met with vagueness during his unlawful detention of 11 days.
“When I asked the health nurse who I could call, they just answered, ‘the department of health’ … I had no rights. No one to call, no one was accountable, no option to do anything but go along.”
While Canada’s forced quarantine at travellers’ expense program has been temporarily paused, it is allegedly scheduled to rebegin in the weeks after February 14.
So yes, while these stories of being forcibly locked away with no access to lawyers are happening in hotels and not internment camps, the people being locked up aren’t citizens living under the shining democracy of Trudeau’s fantasy world.
Canadians are right to be worried about what comes next, including potentially outsourcing the 11 federally run (non-hotel) quarantine sites to a “third party service provider.”
As with the government’s other totalitarian Covid-19 policies, Canadians have no say in the matter, as their lives become increasingly controlled, and destroyed, by these policies.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
Canada to fund opposition in Belarus and names Russia and China its main enemies
By Lucas Leiroz | February 10, 2021
Canada is changing its geopolitical intentions. Apparently, this country, which has always been passive in the face of American decisions, wants to take more aggressive positions on the international stage. The Canadian government recently announced that it will finance opponents against Lukashenko in Belarus and now the Canadian intelligence director has made a note regarding Moscow and Beijing as “the biggest threats to Canada”. Ottawa visibly wants to take more incisive actions in the international scenario, perhaps because it doubts Washington’s ability to guarantee its interests at the moment. However, the country has no material conditions to carry out its plans and may be taking positions which are complicated to maintain in the long term.
Canadian positioning on the international arena has always been previously determined by its largest partner, the US. Washington has historically held a leadership role in bilateral relations, and this has always been accepted peacefully by Ottawa’s officials. Certainly, nothing will change in this regard and a rupture of interests between Americans and Canadians seems very unlikely in the near future. However, due to a number of issues, it is possible to say that Washington has become increasingly unable to maintain a foreign policy as broad as in the past, which has motivated Canada to make some decisions that in the past would have been taken first by the US.
Examples of this type of more aggressive attitude on the part of Canada can be seen in some recent events. Earlier this week, Canadian Foreign Minister Marc Garneau announced in a note the donation of 2.25 million Canadian dollars to political opponents of Lukashenko in Belarus. The money will go to all organizations working to “promote democracy” in Belarus. The note also observes that the country had already sent 600,000 Canadian dollars to help opposition organizations, in particular women and representatives of the “independent media”. In fact, oppositionists receiving foreign funding tend to increase their activities, which tends to generate more violence on the streets and social instability in the country. By promoting open funding for these organizations, Ottawa creates a strong diplomatic crisis, not only with Belarus, but also with Russia, which maintains good ties with Lukashenko and condemns Western interventionism.
Another fact worth mentioning is a recent statement by the Canadian intelligence director on Russia and China. During a conference, David Vigneault, director of the Canadian secret service (CSIS), singled out Moscow and particularly Beijing as the states most involved in “human and cyber threats” against Ottawa. The Chinese role in the alleged “cyber-attacks” suffered by Canada was emphasized, with China being considered the main threat to Canadian national security – although no evidence of the existence of such cyber-attacks has been presented. This speech, however, does not come about by chance. Previously, in November 2020, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) had previously claimed in a report that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are Canada’s biggest threats to cybersecurity. China and Russia vehemently deny that they pose any kind of threat to Western countries, responding that such claims are devoid of any evidence, being nothing more than justifications for geopolitical maneuvers and international sanctions.
Biden’s election represented a resurgence of old American foreign policy, with a focus on preserving global hegemony. The Trump administration, marked by a huge geopolitical decline, had caused great discontent among Washington’s international allies because it had supposedly “decreased security” in these countries in the face of their common geopolitical rivals. However, even though the West celebrated Biden’s victory, there is still a collective distrust of the new president’s real ability to comply with his bold geopolitical plans. In other words, Biden undoubtedly wants to regain American global dominance, but it may be too hard for any American government to do so.
A recovery of American hegemony benefits Canada because, being a country that is geographically close and historically allied to the US, this guarantees security and stability. However, amid the decline of recent years and uncertainty about the future, the Canadian government may have to make its own decisions and seek a balance between a constantly changing world and an advanced process of geopolitical multipolarisation. What Justin Trudeau seems to want to do in his country is not very different from what Macron has been doing in France and Merkel in Germany: he is looking for a Westernist alternative to the American decline. To this end, these politicians anticipate decisions that historically were up to Washington.
If Biden keeps his promises, Canada will be in an extremely comfortable position due to its ties to the US. If Biden fails, Ottawa will have to seek European support. But in any case, getting ahead on some issues can be a serious strategic mistake for Canadians. Canada’s material apparatus, military capabilities and international influence are exceedingly small compared to the countries that Ottawa has chosen as its main enemies. The cyber-attacks that Canadian intelligence agencies accuse Russia and China of carrying out are unlikely to be real, however, it is undeniable that Moscow and Beijing have sufficient power to carry out such attacks and will not hesitate to do so if necessary.
If Canada really intends to guarantee its survival in a world of constant change, choosing much more powerful enemies and financing riots in the zone of influence of other powers seems to be a terrible strategy, even more considering that Canada also has its areas of instability and its foci of tensions, with separatist movements that are gradually growing, such as Quebec and Alberta, and that can at any moment evolve into deeper unrest if they receive foreign money from countries interested in responding to Ottawa’s affront.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
#TheGreatReopening – #SolutionsWatch
Corbett • 01/27/2021
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Yes, #TheGreatReopening is happening as we speak. No, it will not be televised (or even YouTubed). Find out the details as James highlights the resistance movements that are rising up around the world on this week’s edition of #SolutionsWatch.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES
The Uprising Has Begun (New World Next Week)
30,000 Italian Restaurants Defy Lockdown Rules / Hugo talks #lockdown
100’s Of Polish Business’s To DEFY Lockdown / Hugo Talks #lockdown
“BURN IT DOWN!” – Anti-Lockdown RIOTS Lead To Covid Testing Facility Being TORCHED In Netherlands!
Ontario barbershop reopens despite provincial lockdown using loophole
Unmasked COVID protesters try, fail to place Canadian mayor under citizen’s arrest
What You Need to Know About Making a Citizen’s Arrest
Taking a Stand: Sheriffs, Local Officials, and Rule of Law VS. Covid Dictators
Left, Khaps, Gender, Caste: The solidarities propping up the farmers’ protest
Freedom Airway – #SolutionsWatch
Fact check: PCR testing and viral genetic sequencing serve different purposes
How the FBI Created Domestic Terrorism: 80 Years of Psychological Warfare Revealed
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 25, 2021
Since it has become increasingly evident that a vast extension of the Patriot Act will soon be unveiled that threatens to re-define “the war on terror” to include essentially anyone who disagrees with the governing neoliberal agenda, it is probably a good time to evaluate how and why terrorism – domestic or otherwise – has tended to arise over the past century.
If, in the course of conducting this evaluation, we find that terrorism is truly a “naturally occurring phenomenon”, then perhaps we might conclude alongside many eminent figures of the intelligence community and Big Tech, that new pre-emptive legislation targeting the rise of a new conservative-minded domestic terrorist movement is somehow necessary. Maybe the censoring of free speech, and the surveillance of millions of Americans by the Five Eyes is a necessary evil for the sake of the greater good.
However, if it is revealed that the thing we call “terrorism”, is something other than a naturally occurring, self-organized phenomenon, but rather something which only exists due to vast support from western political agencies, then a very different conclusion must be arrived at which may be disturbing for some.
But how to proceed?
Before it was revealed that ISIS was being supported by a network of Anglo-American intelligence agencies and their allies in a failed effort to overthrow Bashar al Assad, an exhaustive 2012 study was conducted by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. This study provides a convenient entry point to our inquiry.
In this course of its investigation, researchers at Fordham discovered that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 138 terrorist incidents recorded in the USA between 2001-2012 involved FBI informants who played leading roles in planning out, supplying weapons, instructions and even recruiting Islamic terrorists to carry out terrorist acts on U.S. soil. Reporting on the Fordham study, The Nation reported on this scandal stating:
“Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants—who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own—have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”
Of course, this trend preceded 9/11 itself as we see in the case of FBI informant Emad Salem (formerly associated with the Egyptian Military) who recorded hundreds of hours of conversation between himself and his FBI handlers which were reported publicly by the New York Times on October 28, 1993. Why is this important? Because Emad Salem was the figure who rented the van, hotel rooms, provided bomb-making instruction, tested out explosives on behalf of Mohammed Salamah and 15 other terrorists who carried out the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing which injured 1000 and killed 6 people.
Even though several large-scale military war game scenarios were conducted between October 2000 and July 2001 featuring planes flying into both the World Trade Center buildings and Pentagon, the incoming Neocon administration were somehow caught with their pants down when the events of 9/11 finally took place (conveniently at a moment that NORAD had suffered a total breakdown of their continental warning and response systems). When all flights were grounded over the coming several days, Cheney and his PNAC cohorts ensured that the only flights permitted to leave the USA was crammed with high level Saudi royals- including the Bin Laden family.
Why was this done?
As the declassified 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission report went far to demonstrate, the Saudis- largely coordinated by Prince Bandar Bin Sultan (Saudi Ambassador to the USA from 1983-2005 and Bush family insider) had provided the foundation for a cover story that was carefully scripted to justify the 9/11 incident.
Whether the plot was hatched by CIA-Saudi sponsored terrorists as some assume, or whether it was a controlled demolition as hundreds of architects and engineers have testified to (or whether it was a combination of both stories), one thing is certain: The official narrative is a lie and no matter how you try to explain it, two airplanes cannot cause the collapse of three WTC buildings.
Another thing is certain: Biden was happy.
Not only did Joe Biden act as one of the most aggressive voices for the invasion of Iraq in the days following 9/11, but he even bragged publicly that John Ashcroft’s 2001 Patriot Act was modelled nearly verbatim on his own failed 1994 Omnibus domestic surveillance legislation drafted in response to the first 9/11 attack and 1994 Oklahoma City bombing.
Another important outcome of 9/11 involved the re-organization of the FBI with a focus on domestic terrorist surveillance, prevention, disruption and entrapment.
In 2001, MI5’s Chief came to the USA where then-FBI director Robert Mueller was assigned the task of carrying out this new remix of U.S. intelligence that involved re-activating many of the worst characteristics of the FBI’s earlier COINTEL PRO operations that were made public during the 1974 Church Committee hearings.
A Christian Science Monitor report from May 19, 2004 cited the changes in the following terms:
“They have done a number of things to move them in the direction of an MI5,” says a person close to the changes. “They’ve created agents who are trained to have an intelligence function. They’re monitoring organizations within the U.S. that pose threats to national security … not with an eye toward prosecuting, but toward collecting and analyzing that information.”
An incredible report by investigative Journalist Edward Spannaus included a short list of some of the most extreme cases of FBI entrapment between 2001-2013 in the USA:
“One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called “Newburgh Four” in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: “The government’s informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States.”
The Federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here,” and criticized the Bureau for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”
In Portland, Ore., it was disclosed during the trial of the “Christmas Tree bomber” earlier this year, that the FBI had actually produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant, depicting men with covered faces shooting guns and setting off bombs using a cell phone as a detonator. The FBI operative also traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated an actual bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the planned attack.
In Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative supplied a target with fake explosives for a 1,000-pound bomb, which the FBI’s victim then attempted to detonate outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.
In Irvine, Calif., in 2007, an FBI informant was so blatant in attempting to entrap members of the local Islamic Center into violent jihadi actions, that the mosque went to court and got a restraining order against the informant.
In Pittsburgh, Khalifa Ali al-Akili became so suspicious of two “jihadi” FBI informants who were trying to recruit him to buy a gun and to go to Pakistan for training, that he contacted both the London Guardian and the Washington-based National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, and told them that he feared the FBI was trying to entrap him. The National Coalition scheduled a press conference for March 16, 2012, at which al-Akili was to speak and identify the informants, but the day before the scheduled press conference, the FBI arrested al-Akili, charging him not with terrorism, but with illegal possession of a firearm.
The chief informant trying to entrap al-Akili turned out to be Shaden Hussain, a longtime FBI informant who had set up two earlier terrorism cases: the above-cited Newburgh, N.Y., case for which he was paid $100,000, and another in Albany, N.Y., for which his payments are not known.”
Not Only the USA
This post 9/11 practice was not isolated to the USA, as a Canadian appeals court overruled guilty sentences handed down to an idiotic couple who were caught by the RCMP before their July 2016 jihadi plot to bomb a public venue on Canada Day could occur. Why did the appeals judge overrule their sentence? Because it became clear that every single member of the operation which radicalized the young couple, trained them to make bombs and even scripted their attack were RCMP informants!
Earlier cases of controlled domestic terrorist movements in Canada saw CSIS (Canada’s Security and Intelligence Service) erase thousands of hours of wiretaps of Sikh terrorists that detonated bombs in 1984 which lead to 329 dead in the worst act of aviation terrorism until 9/11. Despite this destruction of evidence, CSIS was absolved of its sins in 2005 by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). It was also this same organization that was revealed to have co-founded the white supremacist Heritage Front in 1988, and continued to finance it with tax payer funds using CSIS agent Grant Bristol as the conduit and Heritage Front controller until at least 1994.
Anglo-Canadian intelligence controls of domestic terrorism actually go as far back as the bomb-loving Front de Liberation Quebec (FLQ) of the 1960s that set dozens of mailbox bombs across the province. Not only did the RCMP Security Services get caught red handed managing FLQ cells, spreading FLQ graffiti on buildings and even supplying explosives to the group itself, but the FLQ’s “intellectual leader” (Pierre Vallieres) was also the Editor-in-Chief of the very same magazine (Cite Libre) which was run for a decade by none other than Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau!
When major press agencies blew the whistle on the federal intelligence agencies behind the FLQ which justified months of Martial Law in Quebec in 1970, Trudeau’s right hand man (and fellow Cite Libre writer) Michael Pitfield created a new organization called the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1983 as a branch of the Privy Council Office in order to continue psychological operations going under a new name.
If anyone wishes to look through the voluminous RCMP/CSIS files accumulated on Pierre Trudeau’s strange connections with the FLQ and broader Fabian Society networks during the Cold War, they would be out of luck as historians were informed in 2019 that the entire Trudeau record archive were secretly destroyed by CSIS in 1989 simply because they “weren’t interesting”.
It is important to keep in mind that the RCMP’s techniques were not specifically Canadian, but were innovated by the FBI’s Counter-intelligence Program (COINTEL PRO) which J. Edgar Hoover launched in 1956 in order to subvert “dangerous civil rights groups” then emerging under the leadership of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr. From the program’s inception until its nominal death in 1975, not only did the FBI infiltrate every anti-establishment grouping from the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), NAACP to the Black nationalist movements throughout the 1960s, but ensured that its informants played leading roles in instilling internal conflict, radicalized groups towards violence and even set up leaders like Fred Hampton for assassination.
The strange case of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers who enjoyed vast institutional support and protection after their time running domestic terrorism as leaders of the Weather Underground is something that should also be investigated. The fact that both domestic terrorists not only became affluent Soros-tied education reformers, and early sponsors of Barack Obama’s political career is more than just a tiny anomaly which can simply be dismissed. (1)
Where did Hoover’s FBI generate COINTEL PRO tactics?
To answer this question, we need to look further back to British Intelligence’s Camp X, established in December 1941 in Canada with the mandate to train American and Canadian spies under the control of spymaster William Stephenson (station chief for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in New York).
The motive for Camp X had two interconnected components:
1) Prepare the groundwork for a deeper integration of U.S.-British Intelligence in preparation for the purge of patriotic U.S. intelligence officers allied to FDR’s vision of the post-war age, and
2) Train U.S. spies in the art of “secret warfare” which included counterfeiting, psychological warfare, propaganda, counter insurgency, assassination, and infiltration of target groups.
The integration of “full spectrum” alternative warfare tactics such as MK Ultra (modelled and steered by Britain’s earlier Tavis stock clinic), media propaganda (see: Project Mockingbird) and cultural war (see: the rise of modern art and atonalism promoted by the Congress For Cultural Freedom) were but a few of the tactics that were integrated during this process, and which continue virulently to this day.
Under Stephenson’s direction and staffed with Canadian RCMP operatives, the first generation of OSS spymasters were trained; including leading figures of the FBI’s Division 5 who went onto reformulate their WWII Camp X training in the form of assassination operations such as Permindex (operated by Camp X’s Major General Louis Mortimer Bloomfield).
In Conclusion
While I could have said more about the origins of America’s Secret Police which arose under Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, or the earlier deployment of domestic terrorism by Freemasonic lodges affiliated with Albert Pike (founder of the Ku Klux Klan) in an effort to undo Lincoln’s vision for industrial restoration of the South, these stories will have to be left for another time.
For now, it is enough to state that the “war on terror” set into motion by the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001, is now expanding to target a broad spectrum of the American population who would be morally resistant to the sorts of anti-human policies demanded by Great Reset Technocrats. This dishonest effort must be exposed and rejected before those actual controllers of terrorism attain their objectives: The destruction of nation states, the imposition of a new ethical paradigm premised on depopulation and entropy.
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Iran is (probably) collecting tolls, and why Asia stopped buying oil from the US
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From the Archives
The Great Recycling Scam
By Dr. Vernon Coleman – 21st Century Wire – September 2, 2022
Recycling was introduced, worldwide, as a tool to teach citizens to become compliant.
Forcing citizens to sort their rubbish into up to nine separate bags or boxes every week had absolutely nothing to do with ‘saving the planet’ and everything to do with teaching citizens (through a mixture of fines and shame) to behave ‘responsibly’ i.e. to do as they were told without looking too closely at the rationale of what they were being told to do.
The recycling never had anything to do with protecting the planet, of course. Most of the rubbish sorted, washed and collected in the UK was taken abroad, by lorry or ship or train, and burnt or dumped. It was, quite simply, impractical and not cost effective to recycle the material that had been collected. And, of course, collecting the sorted rubbish involved massive costs in terms of cash and pollution.
Today, the recycling business has reached an apogee of lunacy. Councils introduce ever more complex rules and fees. They refuse to take away much of the waste that is collected. And those wanting to take their rubbish to a ‘recycling’ centre will probably have to make an appointment and answer a host of questions.
It is no surprise that fly-tipping has become a major problem. The biggest causes of plastic in the sea are dumped fishing gear and plastic waste (much of it officially designated as recycled) which has been dumped by ships.
The good news, however, is that in Britain, recycling rates are falling. More and more people have become aware that the whole recycling movement was just another piece of manipulative trickery.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- The Case for Less Unity in Europe
- Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure – but Russians remain excluded
- Albania takes anti-riot crackdown cue from France
- The interest of the House of Rothschild in Ukraine
- Pentagon fires top military planner
- Three tankers hit mines on unauthorized Hormuz route: IRGC Navy
- Iran is (probably) collecting tolls, and why Asia stopped buying oil from the US
- Regional security runs through Tehran
- Voters Don’t Want the Old GOP
- Former US officials who resigned over Gaza urge 2028 presidential candidates to reject architects of Biden-era policy
- If Americans Knew
- The Two Faces of Gadi Eisenkot, Who Could Be Israel’s PM
- US Sending an Additional Patriot System to Israel To Prepare for Potential Attacks on Iran
- Pentagon Estimates the US Has Spent Over $47 Billion on Iran War, But True Cost Is Much Higher
- ‘Who Will Bomb Me Next?’: Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on Israel’s Election
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Majority Of Jewish Schools In The UK Teaching Kids To “Love Israel”
- Eisenkot or Netanyahu: No matter who forms government, democracy is dead
- Six Palestinians Killed In Gaza In 24 Hours
- Israel’s election: The battle between change and anti-Palestinian sentiment
- Voters Don’t Want the Old GOP
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
