balloon

Friday February 17, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 17, 2023

Trudeau to deploy navy vessels to Haiti for intelligence gathering

March 16, 2018

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a slate of new supports for Haiti in the Bahamas on Thursday including humanitarian aid and some naval vessels to help with surveillance.

But he stopped short of proposing the kind of military force its de facto prime minister is asking for, as experts urge him to put the brakes on growing discussions of foreign intervention.

Trudeau told a meeting of 20 Caribbean Community leaders that Canada will provide $12.3 million in new humanitarian assistance for the crisis-torn country and $10 million for the International Office on Migration to support migrants in the region.

“Our fundamental objective is to ease the suffering and empower Haitians to chart their own future,” he said.

January 11, 2023

“We need to continue to work and put the Haitian people at the centre of everything we do.”

Trudeau also promised to send Royal Canadian Navy vessels “in the coming weeks” to gather intelligence and maintain a presence off the Haitian coast, following surveillance flyovers earlier this year and an existing plan to send more armoured vehicles.

Ottawa will redeploy HMCS Glace Bay and Moncton from West Africa, said a senior government official who spoke on background pending an official release from the Defence Department. The official would not say whether Canadian military members would simply observe or be empowered to intervene.

And Canada is sanctioning two more Haitians, ex-interim president Jocelerme Privert and former political aide Salim Succar, adding to a list of 15 elites already barred from economic dealings in Canada because of alleged ties to the gangs that have taken over Haiti. Trudeau said he is pushing allies to step up and do the same.

February 23, 2017

Trudeau said he had a “constructive” conversation with de facto Haitian leader Ariel Henry this morning, who is acting as the country’s prime minister but was not elected to the role. National security adviser Jody Thomas was in the room and taking notes, as were Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the UN, and Sebastien Carriere, its ambassador to Haiti.

Henry took power after the 2021 assassination of former president Jovenel Moise.

During brief remarks open to media, he insisted to Trudeau, speaking in French, that he urgently wants the country to work toward transparent elections despite the deteriorating security situation.

Gang activity has ground Haiti’s economy to a halt and hastened a resurgence of cholera. A United Nations report last week detailed “indiscriminate shootings, executions and rapes.” Police have failed to contain the widespread violence.

Henry wants an external security force to quell the chaos, and the United States and United Nations have signalled their support for one, with Washington suggesting Canada could play a leading role. (CTV) 

 

Friday February 9, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 9, 2023

Why wasn’t the suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down over Canada?

November 29, 2022

Critics say the U.S. and Canada had ample time to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it drifted across North America for a week, although it’s unlikely Canadian jets could have done the job.

“This was an outrageous intrusion,” Conservative defence critic James Bezan told CTVNews.ca. “If we were tracking this from the time it entered Alaskan airspace, the question is, why didn’t Norad take action sooner?”

Two hundred feet tall, manoeuvrable and with a payload of sensors the size of three school buses, the alleged surveillance balloon initially approached North America near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on Jan 28. According to officials, it crossed into Canadian airspace on Jan. 30, travelling above the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan before re-entering the U.S. on Jan 31.

November 19, 2015

The presence of the balloon was made public on Feb. 1 as it flew above Montana, home to one of three U.S. nuclear missile silo sites. On the afternoon of Feb. 4, an American F-22 fighter jet finally brought it down with an air-to-air Sidewinder missile over the Atlantic Ocean near South Carolina. U.S. President Joe Biden has said he wanted it shot down sooner, but was advised to wait until it was above water to minimize potential damage and injuries from debris.

In the U.S., Republican leaders have criticized the Biden administration for not downing the balloon as it traversed remote waters, vast tundra and sparsely-populated wilderness.

June 17, 2017

“It defies belief to suggest there was nowhere between the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and the coast of Carolina where this balloon could have been shot down right away without endangering Americans or Canadians,” U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a Feb. 5 statement.

“What if it had been weaponized?” Bezan, a Manitoba member of Parliament, added. “I think they had an opportunity to take it down over the Pacific… Why wouldn’t we have shot it down there before it even got to any populated regions?”

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Norad commander Gen. Glen D. VanHerck offered his rationale.

“It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical military threat to North America, this is under my Norad hat,” VanHerck, who heads the joint Canada-U.S. air defence group, said. “And therefore, I could not take immediate action because it was not demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent.”

September 16, 2017

Bezan says the government has kept Canadians in the dark about the incident, who are relying instead on information from the U.S.

“I’m disappointed that the minister of defence, Anita Anand, and the prime minister have been both tight-lipped on this,” the opposition lawmaker told CTVNews.ca. “Why didn’t the Government of Canada tell Canadians what was in Canadian airspace, especially when Canadians could see it? Why did it wait until it was in Montana before this became public information?”

Charron from the University of Manitoba also wants to know more about how the incident was handled. (CTV News) 

 

Thursday May 28, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday May 28, 2022

All parties fall short on housing crisis

December 1, 2021

When it comes to tackling the crisis of housing affordability in Ontario, pretty much everyone agrees on what must be done: build a lot more houses.

The trouble is, none of the parties asking for your vote on June 2 have a convincing plan to achieve the ambitious goals they’ve set out.

We got our hopes up earlier this year when a task force appointed by the Ford government produced an admirably clear and compact report on how to tackle the issue of supply lagging behind demand.

The panel put its finger on a key reason for the problem: the fact that municipalities typically put most of their land off-limits for anything but single-family homes.

So in too many communities, you can’t build duplexes or small apartment buildings, the so-called “missing middle” that would make cities denser by allowing a lot more units to be built.

But that would mean leaning heavily on municipalities whose councils usually speak for existing homeowners — the ones who want to preserve the “neighbourhood character” of their cities by keeping things just as they are. It’s called “exclusionary zoning.”

April 2, 2020

It was no big surprise, therefore, that when the Ford government produced a housing plan in March it conspicuously failed to address this issue head-on.

The plan made no mention of the ambitious goal the task force set out: building 1.5 million new housing units over the next decade. And it had nothing to say about exclusionary zoning.

At least the municipal affairs minister was frank about why he didn’t follow through with the task force’s key recommendation: he didn’t want to upset towns and cities. “They’re just not there yet,” he said.

He may be right. But we need to get there given how serious the national housing crisis is. Canada has the lowest average housing supply per capita among G7 nations, with 424 units per 1,000 people. That’s behind the United States and the United Kingdom. France, by comparison, leads the G7 at 540 units per 1,000. The pandemic, which allowed households to accrue record savings and saw unprecedented stimulus measures, stoked the country’s hot housing market and pushed it into utterly unaffordable territory.

August 26, 2021

Voters who want to make up their minds based at least partly on which party would best tackle the crisis of housing affordability will find more to chew on in the platforms put forward by the New Democrats, Liberals and Greens. But, on this same crucial point, the opposition parties also fall short.

On the positive side, both the NDP and Liberals include the goal of building 1.5 million new homes over the next 10 years. But that won’t be achievable unless cities allow denser housing across much more of their area; the time is long gone when just building endless suburbs on empty land could be justified.

The opposition parties actually have quite a bit to say about exclusionary zoning. They clearly recognize that it’s a problem. But when it comes to actually acting on this, they’re awfully vague.

The NDP’s housing platform promises to end exclusionary zoning. How? It says it would “work with municipalities to reform land-use planning rules.” The Liberals say almost the same. They would “work with municipalities to expand zoning options.”

July 13, 2016

Clearly, none of the parties want to anger municipalities or residents who already own single-family homes in low-rise, low density neighbourhoods. It’s understandable politically, but it puts a big question mark over whether they’d be able to meet their big targets for new homebuilding.

There’s much more to housing policy, of course. The opposition parties promise to build a lot more affordable housing for those completely shut out of the market. And there’s a big difference in what they would do for renters.

The Liberals would reinstitute rent control for units built after 2018 (the PC government excluded them). The NDP would go much further and bring in rent control for all units, even if a tenant voluntarily moves.

But the key to loosening up the housing market is more houses. And right now none of the parties are really stepping up. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Saturday November 9, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 9, 2019

Doug Ford government tries for a reboot with its latest fiscal plan

Premier Doug Ford’s government is listening and Finance Minister Rod Phillips really wants you to know that.

November 1, 2019

“We listened to Ontarians,” said Phillips in a news conference after delivering the government’s budget update on Wednesday afternoon.

“We listened to what they thought was working well in the plan that we had, and we listened to the concerns that they had,” Phillips added.

“So you can expect this is a government that has listened and is going to continue to listen, and make sure that we make adjustments as we go along.”

The fiscal tally of all that listening is found in the pages of Phillips’s fall economic statement. The document accounts for the government’s recent backtracks, updating the budget from the $163.4 billion spending plan tabled in April by Vic Fedeli, whom Ford dumped as finance minister two months later.

August 21, 2019

The fall economic statement is part of the Ford government’s attempts to portray itself as new and improved, striking a new tone, turning over a new leaf. The budget update tries to do this by highlighting the spending cuts on which the government reversed course and recasting them as spending increases.

Technically, it’s true the PCs are increasing program spending by $1.3 billion from the April budget. In reality, this is simply putting some spending cuts that didn’t happen back on the government’s books.

Does a reversal of a spending cut equal a spending increase? NDP leader Andrea Horwath doesn’t think so.  

May 23, 2019

The fiscal update reflects merely “a softening of their previous cuts, a backtracking on some of their cuts, a delaying of some of their cuts, but really the cuts are still coming,” Horwath said Wednesday on CBC’s Power and Politics.

The new finance minister hasn’t fundamentally changed the budget that the old finance minister put in place, and acknowledged as much in his news conference.

“This isn’t about grand gestures,” said Phillips. “It’s about incremental important changes that make life easier for people.”

The update shows — just as the April budget did — that nearly every ministry is undergoing spending cuts this year from 2018-19 levels. Nominal increases in spending on health and education are not increases in real-dollar terms when population growth and inflation are considered. (CBC)

 

 

Friday April 13, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 13, 2018

‘We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy’: Russia responds to Trump

November 3, 2017

In the wake of President Trump’s tweet taunting Russia while promising a missile attack on Moscow’s ally Syria, Russian politicians and officials are jumping at a chance to show they are the more mature and serious party. Here’s how Russian officials from the president on down have responded to Trump.

President Vladimir Putin did not address the tweets directly while greeting new foreign ambassadors to Moscow at the Kremlin. But he reiterated his frequent call for global stability — which can only be accomplished, in the Kremlin’s view, by giving Russia a prominent role in a “multipolar” rather than U.S.-led world order.

“Indeed, the state of things in the world cannot but provoke concern. The situation in the world is increasingly chaotic. Nevertheless, we hope that common sense will prevail in the end and that international relations will become more constructive — that the whole global system will become more stable and predictable.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the tweets in comments to Russian journalists. While he dismissed Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, he left unmentioned that Russia’s own diplomats in London are no stranger to it.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quickly took to Facebook, wondering whether an American strike would only be a pretext for erasing all evidence of a chemical-weapons attack that Russia has described as staged.

“Smart missiles should fly in the direction of terrorists and not a legal government that has been fighting for several years against international terrorism on its territory.… Or is the whole idea to quickly wipe away the traces of a provocation by striking them with smart missiles, so that international inspectors would have nothing left to find in terms of evidence?” (Source: Washington Post) 

Published in the Waterloo Region Record

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