Blogs of Note

Canada didn't go to war I read the cover article in this Saturday's Toronto Star, and was pretty pissed. It's not often that I get motivated to write a response to an article in the newspapers. But I found the article anti-US, very much misleading - which was done purposely. The article is about Canada's industrial participation in the US military machine, and hence our industry support of the war in Iraq. The article starts out by trying to convince the reader that what is to follow is a serious article that uses data to support a point of view - what it actually does however, is uses data to purposely mislead the reader. Let's start with figures - as the article uses a lot of them. The subtitle on the front page article is, "Star analyzes deals from 1997-2002 Defence contracts with U.S. top $1.8B." The article then says that there is billions hidden under sub-contracts as well. It goes on to present data in a table that says Canada has an estimated $1-1.5B in contracts with the US military annually. It doesn't try to reconcile the numbers above. Firstly, the numbers above are Canadian dollars, not US (an important point for later). Secondly, let's take a closer look at the $1-1.5B annual contracts. That implies over the period from 1997-2002, Canada got at most, about $7.5B in contracts. So, $7.5B - $1.8B = $5.7B. Over 5 years, this is $1.14B ... which is the billions per year hidden under sub-contracts? Choice of words people! The article went on to say that the US has a $165B (US) in annual defence spending on contracts (2002 figure). Of this, Canada got about what? $1.5B? That's a whopping 0.6% of the US defence contracts! We should really be worried! Let's dig a little deeper, like the article does, but hammer home points that the article refuses to. The bulk of the contracts handed to Canadian firms are not actually Canadian firms. They're actually US giants with a Canadian presence. Most of the profits from the 0.6% spending now seems to flow right back into the US! Now I'm really worried! The article contends that we're helping the US wage war by helping their military machine. Hmmm ... in a nice table of the $1.8B, the article provides a breakdown of where that spending was. It turns out that $0.2B in the last five years was used for ammunition and weapons. The rest of the money? Well, vehicle parts, services, furnishings, clothing, food, etc. So, where do we really draw the line? We educate some US soldiers. Some of them are members of our family. Some of them train with our soldiers. Some of them protect our country. If we don't really want to support the US war machine, we should stop just about every export to the US, as we help to feed the people that vote for the idiots who send off troops to bomb bastards with no excuse even if they really, really had it coming. The article brings home an important point - will our political leaders have the strength and independence to say no to joining a US war, when our defence industry pressures us because of lucrative (0.6% mind you) US military contracts? Well, Jean said no. But that's not the conclusion the Star's writers wanted. It just doesn't appeal to more US bashing, or sell newspapers.