ShipSpotting.com

© Andrew Lester

Driving past Nanoose Bay in the late Seventies was an adventure that must have twisted more than a few necks and people did double-takes at the sight of what appeared to be a World War II.-vintage submarine painted a bright yellow sitting across the bay and the marine ordinance testing station. Given that we were only ten years out from the original penning of Yellow Submarine and that the Canadian Navy didn’t seem to be that much of a threat to anyone, it was easy to think of this phenomenon as being fairly innocuous and more than a little amusing. The business at hand, it turns out, was fairly serious, and involved much more than just the Canadian Navy, with nasty real subs coming and going from the Winchelsea test range to see what they could potentially blow up with their non-doomsday ordinance.

I also recall having a rather visceral recoil at the announcement in the late 1990s when it was announced that Canada was buying four mothballed British subs to renew our aging and ineffective fleet. Having had experiences with Triumph, Norton and BSA motorcycles and with Triumph, MG, Morris and Jaguar automobiles, I was horrified to think that we were going to spend $750m for equipment from the land that produced Lucas electrics, commonly known in motoring circles, was Lucas, as the Prince of Darkness, a tart little appellation relating to the failure of all systems and the consequent lack of light or spark. In particular, on had to sake oneself why it was that the Royal Navy (the real one, as depicted on the box of Players cigarettes and a Procol Harum record) had mothballed these modern marvels. We were assured that they would be put ship shape and fighting fit prior to delivery, but such has not turned out to be the case, with these ships (actually, don’t real seamen call subs “boats”?) spending more time in refit than working to defend out coastlines from the marauding hordes of….the drug interdicted? The Russians? I’ve seen with my own eyes a couple of American aircraft carriers that have managed to slip through the protective ring, disgorging a multitude of swabs onto lighters and Government Street to admire the hanging baskets.

True to form, it seems to have taken years to refit  the ships prior to taking delivery, and then the poop came off the poop deck, with a series of onboard fires, groundings, leaks, both internal and external, and who knows what else. So the big news seems to be that the Athabaskan made an appearance being towed in dry dock to Ogden Point to be placed gently in the water to see if she would float, prior to shallow diving and eventual full sea trials. This refit apparently took five years, following the original refit. I suspect that the cost of getting this lot ready for service is more than the original purchase price, and we still don’t have a serviceable submarine fleet.

I would be happy to do without the sub fleet altogether. These are at least as useful as F-35 fighters, which is to say, they are good for the defines industry and no one else. My proposal is that they be converted into low-cost housing, or at least disarmed and set to tasks like monitoring ocean temperature, acidity, radiation levels and other potentially useful information, but I have a difficult time rationalizing even that usage when these things have to be manned by real personnel whose hair must stand up on learning of deployment, or who clearly already suffer from PTSD, and should be ashore getting treatment. Part of the romance of anything in British Racing Green was that it was a ready excuse to retire to the garage, but I don’t think we want to be doing that when the garage turns out to be Davie Jones’s Locker.

I have pretty strong recollections of arriving in these parts in March of 1968 and feeling that BC was a couple or three decades behind my former California digs, behind in crime, behind in grime, behind in overconsumption and bluster. OK, no more Fillmore/Avalon Ballroom/Straight Theater dance-concerts and no more free wheeling social life in the way it was practiced in marvellous Marin and in the Marina district. I also recall that, not long after, I thought it might be an idea to actually walk the five miles to school one lovely morning, and that said walk took longer than it might otherwise have because Saltspringers at the time didn’t see that walking was a viable mode of transportation and would pull over to offer a ride (“Hey, aren’t you one of the new kids? Lemme give you a lift…”), and where there were several versions of shaking heads that a teen would actually walk rather than get a ride right to the front door of the school. The community ran the gamut from the hip and out there to the real estate developing movers and shakers, but there did seem to be a very sense of community and a willingness to help others where the need arose. Saltspring Island, along with most of the East Coast of Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast and the Salish Sea generally have gone the way of Marvellous Marin, becoming a mecca for money from elsewhere, a locus of gentrification, and, in a way, a mirror of a society that has seriously lost its way. In the same way, our Canadian society has caught up with much of the mean-spirited social Darwinism of our friends to the South, and much of this is reflected in the state of our cherished community institutions, health care being a prime example.

We love you, especially your wallet.

A recent look at some time-shifted television from Detroit gave rise to some reflection on what health care will look like in a short time if we continue along our current path to reinserting greed into the equation. Every break for ads contained at least one, and often several, spots for health-related items. Some of these were prescription medications (“Talk to your doctor about adding Rigormortis.”) but many were for actual hospitals and their associated health management companies. I don’t even want to know what it costs to advertise on network television, even in a depressed market like Detroit, but it must be substantial, and some of the outfits aren’t even located in Detroit–In one instance, it is suggested that you make the trek to Chicago to treat your cancer. In one half-hour, there must have been at least a dozen of these slick presentations. It’s plain that a good portion of the health dollars spent in the U.S. (read private medical care systems) goes to promotion. There is also all the paper shuffling, apparently a much steeper cost in the U.S. than in more social jurisdictions, and, finally, beyond the salaries for highly trained professionals, there is the cost of hiring the best and brightest administrators of corporate health management organizations and a dime or two for shareholders. The Affordable Health Care Act is but a timid step is a vague approximation of the right direction, and, oh! my, what a fuss it has caused among the fans of Tea and the Fraser Institute, excuse me, Heritage Institute zombies loose on the streets of Laredo. And here in the land of Canuckistan, where socialism runs rampant, there are signs that we’re headed very much the way of the good ole boys who shoot ducks. That same Fraser Institute published a report yesterday bemoaning the increase in the interval between diagnosis by a generalist and treatment by a specialist, noting that said interval had pretty much doubled since 1993, and that Canadians should get accustomed to a more innovative system (code for a privatized, for-profit system). Ironic that they should cite 1993 as a baseline. Oh, yeah, it’s a nice, round 20 years, but it also marks the coming to office of one Paul Martin as finance minister, whose desire to slay the deficit outweighed such promises as scrapping NAFTA, reversing the GST and killing the helicopter contract. Martin did in the deficit, but mostly at the cost of services to the general citizenry, returning less money to provinces for health and education, for housing and social programs, a canon right out of the FI playbook. And now, behold, we have a proliferation of advertising on Canadian media about insurance to cover items not paid for by general health care, where Blue Cross will, for a monthly premium, pick at least part of the tab for any comely young woman who happens to get bitten in the butt by some stuffed toy in unlikely circumstances. It gives me this sinking feeling that we are looking at another of those altered baselines, where we get Mike Duffy’s and Pamela Wallin’s expenses, expensive military hardware of dubious usefulness, a surveillance state only slightly less imposing than the NSofA, but poverty and illness on reserves and in city cores, closed public hospitals, schools of increasing irrelevance, and a parliamentary system that is crumbling under Con attack.

If you don’t see this blossoming right before your eyes, save up some coin and see your nearest political ophthalmologist.

This little video is pretty enlightening:

https://www.upworthy.com/his-first-4-sentences-are-interesting-the-5th-blew-my-mind-and-made-me-a-little-sick-2?c=upw8

Step On the Assembly Line, Pay First At The Door

Small, but effective, rogues’ gallery.

CETA: CEE TA look of Canada as it disappears off in the distance. This treaty has little to do with putting Canadians to work, and less yet to do with the prosperity of thee and me. It aligns us with the European Corporate Bureaucrats, meaning that everything will likely continue to get more expensive, and that control over pharmaceuticals and water will disappear entirely as the NAFTA-Chapter 11-style investor state relations clauses are invoked to override any sort of local control over economic issues. Along with the loss of economic autonomy goes the consequent loss of sovereignty as Canada slides to the bottom of the corporate client chasm. Harper, as usual, is sanguine in his expectations for the results of this agreement, as he is for the China-Canada FIPPA and the TPP, and well he should be as he ensures that the economic cupboard for Canada is entirely bare before he makes an exit for his beloved USA, where he counts on joining the winners’ circle in the economic game with the wealth and status conferred on elder statesmen and economic stooges.

And, no surprise, no one in the usual press sources has much to say about the downstream effects of this abomination, other than to mention changes in cheese quotas and the increased freedom of beef farmers to export into the EU (they don’t seem to have noticed that EU producers are already going down in droves in affluent jurisdictions as poorer Eastern producers undercut  labour costs and sidestep inspections. Same old crap as  FTA and NAFTA. Have fun, boys and girls.