strategy

Wednesday March 23, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday March 23, 2022

What the Liberal-NDP deal could mean for ‘aggressive options’ on defence spending

September 23, 2021

The prospects for a significant increase in Canadian defence spending in the coming federal budget looked a little less likely as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set to head to Europe after announcing a stunning political deal with the New Democrats.

The Liberal government had been hinting that it was looking at aggressive options for injecting more money into the Canadian military in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Canada has been under heavy pressure to meet the NATO military alliance’s target, set in 2006, of spending at least two per cent of its national gross domestic product on defence, as a growing number of allies have since promised to do.

Trudeau was largely noncommittal on Tuesday as he announced the new confidence and supply agreement with the NDP, which will see the fourth-place party support the Liberal minority government through to 2025 in exchange for new investments in other areas.

Those include the creation of a dental-care program for lower-income Canadians, national pharmacare, affordable housing and phasing out subsides for fossil fuels, among others.

Wednesday January 12, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday January 12, 2022

Canada offers to support U.S. measures to deter Russia in confrontation with Ukraine

June 13, 2017

Canada has told the U.S. that it’s willing to help with possible deterrence measures against Russia — which could include sanctions — to head off a crisis in Ukraine, CBC News has learned.

Canada made the offer during a meeting between Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Dec. 31, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

The source said the message was received well by Blinken. 

Bilateral talks between Russia and the U.S. over the nearly eight-year-long war in Ukraine took place in Geneva Monday. Nearly 100,000 Russian troops are stationed near Ukraine’s eastern border, prompting concerns from other countries that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin intends to invade Ukraine.

Wednesday March 3, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday March 3, 2021

Biden retreats from vow to make pariah of Saudis

October 25, 2018

As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to make a pariah out of Saudi Arabia over the 2018 killing of dissident Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi. But when it came time to actually punish Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Biden’s perception of America’s strategic interests prevailed.

The Biden administration made clear Friday it would forgo sanctions or any other major penalty against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Khashoggi killing, even after a U.S. intelligence report concluded the prince ordered it.

The decision highlights how the real-time decisions of diplomacy often collide with the righteousness of the moral high ground. And nowhere is this conundrum more stark than in the United States’ complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia — the world’s oil giant, a U.S. arms customer and a counterbalance to Iran in the Middle East.

“It is undeniable that Saudi Arabia is a hugely influential country in the Arab world,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday when asked about Biden’s retreat from his promise to isolate the Saudis over the killing. 

Ultimately, Biden administration officials said, U.S. interests in maintaining relations with Saudi Arabia forbid making a pariah of a young prince who may go on to rule the kingdom for decades. That stands in stark contrast to Biden’s campaign promise to make the kingdom “pay the price” for human rights abuses and “make them in fact the pariah that they are.”

“We’ve talked about this in terms of a recalibration. It’s not a rupture,” Price said of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. 

October 12, 2018

But what the Biden administration is calling a “recalibration” of former President Donald Trump’s warm relationship with Saudi royals looks a lot like the normal U.S. stand before Trump: chiding on human rights abuses in the kingdom, but not allowing those concerns to interfere with relations with Saudi Arabia. 

In recent days, Biden officials have responded to intense criticism of the administration’s failure to sanction the prince by pointing to U.S. measures targeting his lower-ranking associates. 

Those include steps against the prince’s “Tiger squad,” which allegedly has sought out dissidents abroad, and sanctions and visa restrictions upon Saudi officials who directly participated in Khashoggi’s slaying and dismemberment.

The language itself has softened, with Biden officials referring to Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner rather than pariah.

Watching it all, Trump suggested over the weekend that Biden’s stand on Saudi Arabia’s prince wasn’t so different from his after all. Khashoggi’s killing by Mohammed bin Salman’s security and intelligence officials was bad, Trump told Fox News, “but we have to look at it as an overall” situation. Biden seems to be “viewing it maybe in a similar fashion, very interesting, actually.”

August 8, 2018

Mohammed bin Salman, 35, has consolidated power in Saudi Arabia since his father, Salman, now 85 and ailing, became king in 2015. The prince soon after launched a war in neighboring Yemen that has deepened hunger and poverty in that country; opened an economic blockade of Qatar that only recently ended; and invited the leader of another Arab country, Lebanon, for a visit and without warning detained him.

The prince has silenced civil society at home, imprisoning writers, clerics, businesspeople and women’s rights advocates, detaining and allegedly torturing fellow royals, and allegedly forming a squad charged with abducting or luring exiles back to the kingdom to face further punishment. 

Khashoggi had fled Saudi Arabia and was deepening his criticism of the prince in columns written for The Washington Post. When Khashoggi scheduled an Oct. 2, 2018, appointment at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up paperwork needed for his wedding, Saudi security and intelligence officials were waiting for him there. So was Saudi security’s forensics chief, known for his techniques for rapid dissections. Khashoggi’s remains have never been found. (AP) 

 

Friday June 5, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 5, 2020

We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the architect of its light-touch approach to the coronavirus has acknowledged that the country has had too many deaths from Covid-19 and should have done more to curb the spread of the virus.

May 6, 2020

Anders Tegnell, who has previously criticised other countries’ strict lockdowns as not sustainable in the long run, told Swedish Radio on Wednesday that there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done” in Sweden.

Asked whether too many people in Sweden had died, he replied: “Yes, absolutely,” adding that the country would “have to consider in the future whether there was a way of preventing” such a high toll.

Sweden’s death rate per capita was the highest in the world over the seven days to 2 June, figures suggest. This week the government bowed to mounting opposition pressure and promised to set up a commission to look into its Covid-19 strategy.

“If we were to encounter the same disease again knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would settle on doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Tegnell said. It would be “good to know exactly what to shut down to curb the spread of infection better”, he added.

In an interview with the Dagens Nyheter daily, Tegnell subsequently said he still believed “the basic strategy has worked well. I do not see what we would have done completely differently … Based on the knowledge we had then, we feel we made the appropriate decisions.”

According to the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com, the number of Covid-19 deaths per capita in Sweden was the highest in the world in a rolling seven-day average to 2 June. The country’s rate of 5.29 deaths per million inhabitants a day was well above the UK’s 4.48.

The Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, told the Aftonbladet daily that the country’s overall approach “has been right”, but it had failed to protect care homes where half of all Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred. Social affairs minister Lena Hallengren told Reuters the government had been “at all times prepared to introduce wider, further measures recommended by the expert authority”.

Life in a Pandemic

Relying on its citizens’ sense of civic duty, Sweden closed schools for all over-16s and banned gatherings of more than 50, but only asked – rather than ordered – people to avoid non-essential travel and not to go out if they were elderly or ill. Shops, restaurants and gyms have remained open.

Although there are signs that public opinion is starting to shift, polls have shown a considerable majority of Swedes support and have generally complied with the government’s less coercive strategy, which is in stark contrast to the mandatory lockdowns imposed by many countries, including Sweden’s Nordic neighbours.

But the policy, which Tegnell has said was aimed not at achieving herd immunity but at slowing the spread of the virus enough for health services to cope, has been increasingly and heavily criticised by many Swedish experts as the country’s death toll has increased.

Sweden’s 4,468 fatalities from Covid-19 represent a death toll of 449 per million inhabitants, compared with 45 in Norway, 100 in Denmark and 58 in Finland. Its per-million tally remains lower than the corresponding figures of 555, 581 and 593 in Italy, Spain and the UK respectively. (The Guardian)

 

Friday August 19, 2016

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator Ð Friday August 19, 2016 Ottawa pledges deradicalization hire despite skepticism at anti-terror effectiveness Following the fatal police shooting of would-be suicide bomber Aaron Driver, CanadaÕs Public Safety Minister says the Liberals will Òup our gameÓ in the fight against terrorism by imminently hiring a deradicalization adviser. ÒWhat the incident in Strathroy demonstrates is that this is important,Ó Ralph Goodale told reporters on Wednesday. He said the new adviser will be hired within weeks and could succeed in counter-terrorism challenges where police and intelligence services are falling short. Mr. Driver, 24, from Strathroy, Ont., was killed last week. Federal authorities had red-flagged him as an aspiring terrorist, but nothing could make him reconsider his sworn allegiance to the Islamic State. Despite a degree of monitoring, he had managed to put together an improvised bomb and a video in which he promised to shed Canadian blood for the terror group. The creation of a deradicalization adviser, who will run a $10-million-a-year office, fulfills a 2015 campaign promise by the Liberals. At the time, the party criticized the then-Conservative government for its law-and-order approach to fighting terrorism. Details are under wraps, but observers are keen to see how the approach will take shape, especially since the global track record of such initiatives is mixed. ÒThere are all kinds of these programs all over the world. EveryoneÕs got one,Ó said Phil Gurski, a former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. And yet, he added, no one has really figured out the best approach. CSIS recently canvassed outside experts for feedback on which governmentsÕ deradicalization Ð or Òcountering violent extremismÓ (CVE) Ð programs are working best. Many replied that none are known to be working particularly well. ÒSome expressed skepticism as to the relevance of CVE initiatives, highlighting

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday August 19, 2016

Ottawa pledges deradicalization hire despite skepticism at anti-terror effectiveness

Following the fatal police shooting of would-be suicide bomber Aaron Driver, Canada’s Public Safety Minister says the Liberals will “up our game” in the fight against terrorism by imminently hiring a deradicalization adviser.

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator - Tuesday November 17, 2015 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada will "do its part" in the military fight against ISIS, but remains committed to withdrawing warplanes from the mission. During a news conference at the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Trudeau said Friday's attacks in Paris will not prompt the government to reverse course on a plan to pull out Canada's fighter jets. Instead, Canada will step up training of local troops, he said. "I know that Canada will continue to, and be seen to be continuing to, do its part in the fight against this terrorist scourge," he said. The Liberal platform during the campaign for the recent federal election committed to end the combat mission and "refocus" on training local forces in Iraq. Trudeau said that commitment remains, but he has not set a timetable for when Canada will withdraw from the U.S.-led air combat mission. "We made a clear commitment in the campaign to stop the bombing mission by Canadian jets and replace it with a role for Canada that is still a serious military role, but leaned more towards training of local troops to be able to bring the fight directly to ISIL," he said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). "That's the commitment we made very clearly throughout the campaign and we have a mandate to do that." On Sunday, two of Canada's fighter jets were involved in a strike against an ISIS fighting position in Iraq, according to the Department of National Defence. The G20 leaders released a joint statement at the G20 summit, calling the attacks in Paris "an unacceptable affront to all humanity" and reaffirming solidarity in the fight against terrorism as a major priority. The statement says counterterror actions must be part of a comprehensive approach that includes fighting radicalization and recruitment, hampering terrorist movements and preventing terrorists from exploiting the internet. "The direct or ind

November 17, 2015

“What the incident in Strathroy demonstrates is that this is important,” Ralph Goodale told reporters on Wednesday. He said the new adviser will be hired within weeks and could succeed in counter-terrorism challenges where police and intelligence services are falling short.

Mr. Driver, 24, from Strathroy, Ont., was killed last week. Federal authorities had red-flagged him as an aspiring terrorist, but nothing could make him reconsider his sworn allegiance to the Islamic State. Despite a degree of monitoring, he had managed to put together an improvised bomb and a video in which he promised to shed Canadian blood for the terror group.

The creation of a deradicalization adviser, who will run a $10-million-a-year office, fulfills a 2015 campaign promise by the Liberals. At the time, the party criticized the then-Conservative government for its law-and-order approach to fighting terrorism.

Details are under wraps, but observers are keen to see how the approach will take shape, especially since the global track record of such initiatives is mixed. “There are all kinds of these programs all over the world. Everyone’s got one,” said Phil Gurski, a former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. And yet, he added, no one has really figured out the best approach.

CSIS recently canvassed outside experts for feedback on which governments’ deradicalization – or “countering violent extremism” (CVE) – programs are working best. Many replied that none are known to be working particularly well.

“Some expressed skepticism as to the relevance of CVE initiatives, highlighting the lack of supporting empirical evidence thus far to measure their effectiveness,” says a CSIS discussion paper recently published online. Other experts told CSIS such programs are only valuable “provided that their implementation is not led by governments … [because] governments are not credible messengers.”

Speaking to reporters after a speech to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police on Wednesday, Mr. Goodale said he is mulling over who among two or three short-listed candidates will lead the government’s newest office. “We will be making the selection shortly,” he said. “That person will be directing a very important effort to up our game in Canada in terms of recognizing and understanding the process of radicalization.”

The minister said the new adviser will focus on how to nip extremism in the bud, as well as on how to unlock the psyches of hardened extremists. Mr. Driver was for years an active cheerleader of the Islamic State on Twitter. Last year, police compelled him to appear in court to swear a specialized peace bond that exists for terrorism suspects. (Source: Globe & Mail)