MILNEWS.ca News Highlights – 10 June 12

• Syria  “Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is offering the United Nations envoy to Syria Canada’s support to help end the ongoing violence in the Mideast country, as rebels take their fight against President Bashar al-Assad to Damascus, the center of the leader’s power. Baird spoke with Kofi Annan by telephone late Friday and Canadian officials say he offered any help Canada can provide. Overnight Friday, bullets and shrapnel shells smashed into homes in the Syrian capital of Damascus as troops battled rebels in the streets ….” - more here
• Afghanistan  What Iran’s up to in Afghanistan (spoiler alert:  no good)
• Yet another east coast Reserve unit gets a name change  “The Honourable Peter MacKay, Minister of National Defence, announced (yesterday) that the name of 2nd Battalion, The Royal New Brunswick Regiment (North Shore), an Army Reserve unit assigned to 37 Canadian Brigade Group, will revert to it’s historical designation, the North Shore Regiment …. From its birth as the 73rd Northumberland (New Brunswick) Battalion of Infantry in 1870, many in Northeastern New Brunswick have served with this illustrious unit. The unit fought in South Africa, the First World War and the Second World War, and won a total of 54 battle honours. In 1956, the North Shore Regiment was designated as 2nd Battalion, The Royal New Brunswick Regiment (North Shore) ….”
• Is it just me, or have there been a lot of Ministerial announcements coming out of National Defence and Veterans Affairs lately?
• Defence Minister:  thanks for all the hard work helping fix up the troops, bone doctors
• Defence Minister:  Happy 40th birthday, Order of Military Merit
• Vets Affairs Minister to thank folks in Halifax today for their contributions
• Vets Affairs Minister pays tribute to former Vets Affairs Minister, Minister of National Defence Gilles Lamontagne
• Senator, on behalf of Vets Affairs Minister, thanks Newfoundland Legion volunteer for service with Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal
• Vets Affairs Minister set for another “important announcement”, this one at the Royal Canadian Legion convention in Halifax tomorrow
• Stuart Langridge, R.I.P.  Latest messaging from the Minister of National Defence in the House on the CF holding back documents from a hearing looking into a soldier’s suicide  “…. it was a tragic death. The loss of anyone, any soldier or any Canadian to suicide is a tragedy. We have expressed our condolences to the Fynes family. I have met with Corporal Langridge’s mother. In fact, we have put additional funding into the Military Police Complaints Commission process, which is ongoing. As the member would know, there are funds there, over $2.3 million, to ensure commission counsel and additional funding for the Fynes family into this affair. Being a lawyer, the member would and should know that this process is ongoing and we should wait for the result. With respect to protecting clients, the member also should know, being a lawyer, that the Supreme Court has specifically spoken out on this issue. The Blood decision of 2008 said, “Solicitor-client privilege is fundamental to the proper functioning of our legal system”. The decision went on to say, “Without that assurance, access to justice and the quality of justice in this country would be severely compromised”. The member is the one who is compromising the truth by repeatedly putting false information forward.”
• What happens when both spouses are fighting the after effects of war at the same time?
• Liberal House Leader Marc Garneau underwhelmed by government’s support of the CF  “The Conservatives love to portray themselves as the only ones who really care about the brave men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — especially after the infamous “decade of darkness,” when the military, along with the rest of government, sustained significant cutbacks in the fight to reduce Canada’s crippling national debt. But let’s have a look at the Conservatives’ claim and see whether it’s backed by evidence ….”
• Toronto Star columnist questions need for all those non-bases  “Sometimes, it’s as if Stephen Harper’s Conservatives suffer from delusions of grandeur. How else to explain the decision by Canada’s apparently cash-strapped federal government to set up a network of military bases around the world? That’s usually something only countries with imperial pretensions, such as the U.S., France and Britain, do. And even the U.S. is pulling back these days. As reported by my colleague Allan Woods, who broke this story, Ottawa claims its new bases will ultimately save taxpayers money. But that rationale only works if the government is planning to deploy Canadian soldiers on a regular basis to global hot spots. Are the Conservatives setting the stage for more Libyas and Afghanistans? ….”
• Letter to the editor on how it’s not JUST U.N. forces keeping a grip on situations anymore “While it is true that Canada is not a significant contributor to UN peacekeeping, this is not the tragedy some would claim it to be (Canada Casts Aside The Blue Helmet – June 8). Peacekeeping – more precisely, peace support operations – is no longer the preserve of the blue helmets. Even before the Balkan conflicts highlighted the folly of deploying lightly armed forces into active war zones, responsibility for fostering stability had been contracted out to ad hoc groupings of states and, more recently, to international bodies such as NATO and the African Union. Often these actors are better resourced than the UN. Canada was once one of relatively few nations with the resources required to operate effectively on overseas missions; today, considerably more players are able to do so ….”
• Way Up North (1)  Former northern military boss worries about Canada reneging on Arctic promises  “…. Will the present commitments go the way of nuclear submarines and Polar Class 8 ice breaker? Let us hope not because nature is following her own timetable and is opening up the Northwest Passage which is still contested as an international strait with all of what that implies for Canadian sovereignty.”
• Way Up North (2)  Canada’s new man on the U.N. panel that decides on where the continental shelf is  “Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird today welcomed the election of Richard Haworth to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for the 2012-17 term …. Dr. Haworth is the first Canadian elected to the Commission, having been nominated as a candidate by Canada, Australia and New Zealand …. The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf was established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It consists of 21 independent experts in geology, geophysics and hydrography. Members are elected every five years by states party to the Convention. Expanding economic opportunity in the North and for Northerners is a priority for the Harper government. Canada is currently working to define the outer limits of its continental shelf. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada are preparing Canada’s submission to the Commission.”
• What’s Canada Buying?  Wanted:  someone to, on an as-needed basis, take care of RCN ships (trash pickup, sewage removal, etc.) in and around B.C.
• F-35 Tug o’ War  Latest messaging from the Defence Minister in the House on Friday  “Mr. Speaker, as has already been communicated to the publicly funded broadcaster for its shockumentary dramatization last night, Canada’s involvement in the F-35 program, as the member would know, goes back to 1997. It was in fact under a previous government. The decision in 2010 to purchase the F-35 was based on the advice of officials within the Department of National Defence, the Department of Public Works and members of the Canadian Forces, and, in fact, not lobbyists at all. The member also knows that we have a secretariat now in place to increase transparency and accountability and reporting to the public. We will wait on that advice. No money has been spent thus far on the acquisition. Funding is frozen at this point.”
• Khadr Boy  “Janice Williamson knows that few Canadians have lost sleep over Omar Khadr and his experience with American military justice. She hopes to rattle that slumber with a 450-page wake-up call. A professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Williamson is the editor of Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, a new book just released through McGill-Queen’s University Press. It’s a compilation of some 30 essays, articles, poems and screenplay excerpts — all of them weighing in on Khadr’s background, his incarcerations, the actions and inactions of Canadian authorities and the implications raised by his legal case ….”
• War of 1812  A new American read of the war  “If Canadians know any history at all, they know the story of the war of 1812. (Or at least the part about the British burning the White House.) Americans usually focus their remembrance on bigger, bloodier conflicts. Yet in this bicentennial year, one American historian is urging his countrymen to appreciate that their nationhood was forged in two centuries of war up and down the bloody warpath between Albany and Montreal. Eliot Cohen is one of America’s leading writers on military affairs. His 2002 book Supreme Command (a study of civilian leadership in wartime) featured on president Bush’s reading list that year. I traveled to Iraq with him in 2005 and had the pleasure of introducing him at a recent book event at the Canadian embassy in Washington. Cohen’s new book, Conquered Into Liberty, offers an arresting idea. It was during their long struggle against the French and Indians that the New England colonies developed a distinctive American idea of how war should be fought ….”

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