Matt Gurney: Only dead Canadians will shock us out of our appalling complacency
We don’t even fund our search-and-rescue units properly. That’s the least controversial thing the military does.
The disaster in B.C. right now provides a fascinating example of this very problem. After landslides wiped out sections of highway, stranding hundreds of motorists and cutting off isolated communities from food and medicine, the RCAF’s 442 Squadron, based in Comox, B.C., sprang into action. You’ve probably seen footage of bright yellow helicopters rescuing civilians — those are the 442’s Cormorant helicopters. Canada, the world’s second-largest landmass, has … 14 of those. (A 15th crashed a few years ago.) This works out to about one Cormorant for every 714,000 square kilometres of land area.
One thing you can be absolutely certain of. No matter how many aircraft we lack in Canada…..one will always be found whenever the surf is up in Tofino.
“Only dead Canadians will shock us out of our appalling complacency”
I doubt even that will work, Mr. Gurney.
Canadians will show up at their own hangings with rope and pom-poms. Fat chance they would be concerned about the deaths of strangers.
“Only dead Canadians…”. Unlikely. Trudeau et al will just use dead Canadians to further their climate change arguments and legislation.
Well as long as personnel follow the latest gender equity policies and use the proper pronouns.
And wear masks, get the gunk pumped into their system, and apologize for being white.
Sorry, but claiming “This works out to about one Cormorant for every 714,000 square kilometres of land area.” is absurd. 99% of Canada is uninhabited. Tundra, empty space, unused, devoid of humans…
If you want to argue for a larger military, that’s one thing… but to compare Canada to France by area undermines your entire article.
PS: The airports are still open, so why focus on helicopters?
“The airports are still open, so why focus on helicopters?”
Because people don’t usually get in life threatening situations at the airport that would require the use of a search and rescue helicopter? Just hazarding a guess…
It’s not like we have a hundred and fifty thousand miles of coastline
BC with 5 plus million people with no army base. As a sub-Canadian I’m glad to know that real Canadians east of MB are looked after in the event of a major disaster. Why are we apart of this pathetic country?
Don’t worry, BC will soon have an army base. It just won’t be our army.
How many mRNA shots have you gotten?
Of course, the Canadian government of the day closed down the base in Chilliwack, in 1997, having downsized it a lot previously. Thank you Jean Chrétien and others.
A lot of BC is rather a real physical wilderness, and has never been top-of-mind in Ottawa, except for John A. McDonald, who did not want to be American.
People who are unprepared do occasionally die on “innocent/stupid” camping/hiking vacations out here, annually, and North Shore (now Stanley Park too with tents?) residents (or their neighbours) who do not take good care of garbage get visits from black bears, foxes etc.
You would think that having some army folks stationed out here might be a good idea for times such as this, given that all access to the BC interior is inaccessible!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFB_Chilliwack
P.S. The climate here is pretty much the same as it was since we started measuring things. November often sucks with excessive rain, and we get mud slides and summer fires happen, even without stupid people who light them (no stats on that ever revealed).
If the Turd starts funding the military, it won’t be to help us out.
Provinces should have their own militias. Whining about the feds has never made a difference.
The absolute last thing that I want to spend money on is more military, police, RCMP or equipment for any of them. We’ve learned that our government is not to be trusted – we shouldn’t be increasing their control over the populace.
B.C. will get by and maybe learn a lesson or two in self-reliance as a result.
Maybe we need our own ” Cajun Navy “.
Has the RCMP started kicking in doors yet, looking for firearms?
I agree, and await the RCMP announcement that they will be going house-to-house in Sumas Prairie to secure any firearms a la Grande Prairie fiasco.
On a slightly different subject, GlobullshitBC news (which I rarely watch) seems to have accidentally revealed:
1. If you need to feed 300 trapped truck drivers, forget canaduh.gov or Red Cross rely on “A group of volunteers at the BC Khalsa Darbar Society ”
2. If you need to protect critical flood pump infrastructure forget provguv.useless or canforces.slow but rely on civilian volunteers turning out in the middle of the night.
3. If a young mother needs to get medications for her child forget BCHealth they are too busy “fighting” an imaginary deadly chinese virus rely on generous donor to buy a aircraft evacuation.
Why exactly do we need constipated government agencies they are worse than useless. NDP-NFG learned NOTHING from last summers fire disaster our emergency and disaster services are just a paper shuffling exercise.
This. I am glad we don’t have much military because it will get used against the citizens of this shithole. Members of the military and rcmp aught to resign now for that reason.
The RCMP? Puh-leeze. The thugs in Red Serge can’t wait to kick around unarmed civilians, they don’t do well with armed ones as every Nova Scotian knows. I make in one of my life’s missions to nail every Mountie wife I can, they are uniformly grateful.
The problem with S&R outfits is mission creep. These are volunteers, however, they go cap in hand to government for MO funding and MO expensive equipment every year.
The stupid public, who go into the wilderness unprepared and irresponsible, use S&R as a babysitting service when they get in trouble. All at no charge!
Yes, the military is sadly lacking in BC, but hey Ottawa is the Center of the world. BC is way way near China!
This kind of reminds me of this past summer. My son was going hiking with my grandson in Riding Mountain. Now it isn’t a mountain. if it were in BC people wouldn’t even notice it, much less give it a name. But I insisted they go on their hike with a proper knife with fire starter, bear spray, insect repellant, hat, hiking shoes, water in the backpack ect. People do get lost and injured in the park and occasionally attacked by a bear or a moose that doesn’t want to be in a selfie and every so often it’s overnight before the rangers find them. My son and grandson were climbing the trail and my son said a few people gave them funny looks. They passed rangers with quads carrying injured people out twice. He said one of the rangers looked at them and their gear said “Thank God not everyone is a moron out here.”
Yet in the civilian world there are numerous Bell 204, 205, 212 and other helicopters that could serve as stop gap alternatives until the inevitable multi-billion dollar helicopter procurment happens with the Forces. These companies that own them contract with provincial forestry departments all the time and their pilots are extremely skilled, especially getting people and equipment in and out of rugged terrain and under pressure (think raging fires).
It gets worse. A good friend of ours flies a Griffon helicopter out of Trenton on search and rescue. They are responsible for right up to the Arctic. You may remember a rescue maybe a half dozen years ago in Hudson’s Bay when an Inuit got stranded on the ice. A local helicopter tried to rescue the man and sank into the ice. Our friend was the pilot who rescued both. The crews had to fly the helicopter all the way from Trenton which took something like 24 hours.
What’s most revealing about this issue is the contrast with the vitriol poured on Dubya over Hurricane Katrina by the MSM and the complete absence of similar criticism when it comes to Justin.
Missing in all of the above discussions is the salient fact that the capital of BC is served by one two lane highway. 90% of all supplies to Victoria are generally shipped through the ferry terminal at Duke Point. These supplies are then trucked down to Victoria via Highway #1, a two lane road in some areas. Calling it a highway may have worked in Victoria’s reign but today not so much. In the event of a major disaster, and I’m not talking about a two day rainfall, but a major disaster there is not a snow balls chance in hell that the Army, Navy, and Airforce could bring the assistance needed in time to avert colossal collateral damage. We have been riding the coat tails of US Armed Forces so long we have, as a nation, forgotten why a strong bodied Armed Force is required not only for war but for a genuine national emergency, and I’m not talking clearing snow or filling sandbags. We have a country with a two hundred thousand kilometer coastline and a navy that cannot patrol 1/100 of that. But enough on that topic.
So don’t be blaming the Armed Forces for their efforts to assist in this recovery effort, we are all to blame for repeatedly electing successive governments that continually shirk their responsibility to properly govern. Taxes spent on propaganda bodies that outlived their usefulness forty years ago. Taxes spent of Foreign aid that should have been spent here at home. Taxes spent on pie in the sky dreams that we can control the climate. Taxes spent on trying to find Unicorn Pharts and Pixie Dust to power our industries when every sentient being knows that there are no Unicorns or Pixies. If you want to find someone to blame for what is happening on the Wet Coast right now start by looking in the mirror. We are all to blame for shirking our responsibility to hold our governments to account. We are to blame for believing that the government will solve the problems they promise to solve. We are to blame for shirking our basic responsibility and that is to accept our own personal responsibility and act accordingly.
Amen to that.
The only thing guaranteed to shock the elites out of their complacency is barbarians arriving at the gates of their capitals—or, failing that, in the airspace over the capitals prepared to bomb the financial districts to the ground—and finding that anybody in his right mind and of any use to an army has deserted or joined the enemy rather than die for an obviously lost cause.
The Soviet Union died thirty years ago this December. The Russians don’t work for western globalists any more and will have better things to do when China is ready to take over the planet than save the West from itself. Plan accordingly.
Its interesting that they not only didn’t mention that the helicopters were RCAF Search and Rescue Cormorants but that they were the EH 101 Helicopters that Cretin cancelled. That cost us $400 Million to get out of the contract plus all the lost jobs from our share of the building program. Those are the only helicopters capable of flying in icing conditions (deicing in the blades) and in the artic, how many people noticed the redundant third engine from the exhaust stacks, which is why it can carry so many people and fly in any weather. Our other helicopters have all weather pilots with fair weather helos. The Cormorant is a MilSpec helicopter and is the civilian version of the Merlin Naval Helicopter used by some NATO forces – UK, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Poland etc, it was also chosen by the USMC as the new Marine One helo to transport the President but will be manufactured by Lockheed Martin instead of AugustaWestand and will be called the US 101. The EH101 is a very capable helicopter but we ended up with the S92 from Sikorsky as the CH148 Cyclone and we appear to be the only Navy operating them, since they are a civilian helicopter converted to military use, not a military designed helicopter, its also the same helicopter that crashed off Newfoundland in 2009 and we later lost one in 2020 in the Ionian Sea.
But hey, $21 a day for child care.