The Besz Dispenser - This Week's Rant

For the week of October 9th, 1998

An Army's life for me

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love living in Canada. We have a pirate for a Prime Minister, Hop-A-Long Bouchard as the Royal Opposition, Buddy Holly stirring the pot on all sides, OHIP (at least for now), mountains, fresh-water lakes, most of NORAD and both the world's tallest free-standing building and the world's largest mall.

However, we do have our downs. We have our dollar pretending to be at Canada's Wonderland, the RCMP pretending to be the LAPD and the Van Doos Airborne pretending to be Bill Clinton and Dirty Harry at the same time. Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with this grand country of ours: The Canadian Armed Forces.

The Canadian Armed Forces is, to use someone else's line, "like Switzerland without the knife." The troops have nothing for them, equipment or money-wise and what equipment they do have is either falling apart or not enough to help. Example 1: the Labrador helicopter that went down, killing all six crew members inside while it was on route to Canadian Armed Forces Base Greenwood, Nova Scotia. Right now, investigators are searching to see if the pilots had some sort of disease or health problem that could have made them crash, as well as to see if the debris will give clues as to what went wrong.

Well, I'd like to shed some light on this for the investigators. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the pilots, or weather, or trees, or any act of God. Maybe it was the fact that the Labrador fleet was made in 1963 and that all the engines needed to be replaced, lest they fall out. Already there are reports of malfunctions and required engine upgrades, and we are shelling out millions of dollars to fix these problems instead of buying newer vehicles.

Are there any smart people in the military brass? Can they not see the patterns of costly repairs and upgrades and understand that changing over from the 1963 Labrador to another helicopter probably made in 1975 will not help? They overlook the big picture for the small picture, the one that says that some duct tape will keep that rotor on for another year, at least.

And while we're on this subject, why are our enlisted men who wear their uniforms with pride going home and changing into McDonald's uniforms? Because they are not getting paid enough to live. Who has ever heard of that? These are men that we expect to protect us, to die for the country, and we don't give them anything to help them. No good equipment, no warm quarters or even any proper housing at all, and now no money to buy food for their families or themselves. Of course, this could make our army more deadly. Not because of equipment or training, but because they are desperate and hungry. They see the other side as food. That's enough to make anyone fight more.

My plea to the military is this: get new equipment now. Give our fighting men something useful. No enlisted man should have to be a security guard in his spare time, and no country should have one submarine less than the Edmonton Mall. And personally, if I ever fly in a plane and it crashes and they have to send out Labrador rescue helicopters to save me, I'd rather walk. I'd have a better chance of making it out, broken leg and all.

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