Chris Taylor attended a breakfast meeting at the Albany Club. Featured speaker : Minister of National Defense Gordon O’Connor.
The bulk of the speech covered CF funding restoration and progress in Afghanistan. No specific figures for CF funding were elaborated, unfortunately, except the usual business of the CF being under-budgeted since the Mulroney era and requiring multiple years of consistent restorative funding. No argument there. He did unload some interest factlets about Afghanistan, such as the increase in female representatives within provincial and federal legislatures (from zero to one-quarter, I believe), and the dramatic increase in postgraduate students (from 400-500,000 males to 3 million persons, a quarter of which are women). Minister O’Connor also took pains to note that the CF has seen so much recent fighting because they are defending all reconstruction teams in a heavily Taliban-influenced Pashtun area. Not just the CF’s own PRTs, but reconstruction teams from the UN, NATO, and other countries.
More at the link.
Another member at The Torch, Damian Brooks advises – “the kerfuffle in the House of Commons and on CTV the other day about the super-pricey Excalibur artillery round? Not as big a deal as Dawn Black and the journos thought it was.”
“such as the increase in female representatives within provincial and federal legislatures (from zero to one-quarter, I believe)”
That’s a higher percentage of female legislators than we elect in Canada. Is that reasonable? Or completely out of whack with the rest of Afghanistan? I’ve also read that nearly 100% of the microcredit we’ve exteneded to Afghanistan has been to women. Again, is this reasonable and equitable? Fair questions…
And another thing Bob, over 90 per cent of the Taliban we have eliminated in Afghanistan have been male.