It’s weird that they keep calling out the Leopard 2A4 (or, correctly, the Leopard 2A4M CAN, but the article doesn’t call it that) when talking about outdated equipment.

Like, yeah, the Leopard 2 is a design from the eighties. So is every modern main battle tank in widespread usage. The Abrams, the Leopard, the Challenger, the LeClerc; they’re all from the eighties and nineties, because the basic frame still works as long as you continually update the equipment. And those updates have been made; the reason why the correct designation is 2A4M CAN is because that denotes the multiple equipment upgrade packages those vehicles have received.

In fact, every Leopard in Canadian service would be designated as a 2A6M CAN (functionally, a 2A7, the differences are very minor) if not for the fact that the 2A4s fail to meet exactly one criteria; they have the wrong gun. This is because the 2A6 Leopard mounts an L55 gun, while the 2A4 mounts the shorter L44. Why do we still have the shorter gun? Because the crews preferred it that. The shorter gun was better for maneuvering in Afghanistan. So they kept the shorter guns knowing they can upgrade to the L55 any time they like. Swapping it out basically takes a day. It’s a very small change.

Does Canada have serious problems with outdated or lacking equipment? Yes, absolutely. But our tanks aren’t exactly a prime example of that. The Leopard 2 continues to be the best battle tank in the world and we have a very well equipped version of one. They could use active protection systems, but those aren’t exactly widespread in any military (at least, not if you want a version that doesn’t vaporize any friendly infantry near the tank) and I’m sure there’s a wishlist of other things tankers would love to have, but all in all what we’ve got is very good.

What really needs attention is our lack of air defense, our outdated helicopters, our lack of attack helicopters, rocket artillery and mobile artillery, the fact that our night vision is on loan from the US, the fact that we’re still using the M72 LAW, the fact that our only ATGM is the TOW, the fact that way too many of our LAVs are in poor repair, or the fact that two thirds of our armour divisions don’t actually have tanks at all and are instead riding around in TAPVs.

I just wish journalists would take the time to talk to people in the military and find out what the real logistics issues are, instead of just going “Hurr durr tank from eighties.” Do you know what the number piece of equipment I hear soldiers complain about is? Wrenches. They literally can’t keep their AFVs running, because they don’t have the budget to replace basic tools that go missing. That’s where the money needs to be spent.

“Match the force” is extremely broad. If someone tries to beat the shit out of you with their bare hands, and you defend yourself with a baseball bat, that’s almost certainly going to be kosher. It doesn’t have to be exact.

Failing to use proportional force has to be really egregious to meet the standard. Something like shooting someone who was twenty paces away from you and armed only with a tire iron (even then you might still have a case). That’s a situation where any reasonable person could have defused the situation by just telling the other guy to fuck off, or get down on their knees with their hands behind their head. And even then, you’d probably still be OK to shoot if, say, they lunged at you (check with a lawyer before putting this advice into practice, obviously).

Basically, if you can make the case that what you did was necessary for your own safety, you’re in the clear.

The other stuff that gets people jacked up is continuing to “fight back” after the threat is over. You hit a guy with a baseball bat, he goes down… Yeah, that’s probably kosher. If you were afraid for your life, well, you did what you had to. But if you then proceed to beat the guy until his skull shatters… Well, what part of that was necessary?

No one has to think through the tests described in the law, because those tests simply exist to define what everyone can already intuitively understand as being reasonable behaviours. You defended yourself? OK. You hunted the guy down and tortured him? Not OK. This isn’t complicated, and it’s not difficult. You just have to exercise a modicum of self-restraint. And the cops look very, very favourably on people who were defending themselves, unless there was clear evidence that they either majorly crossed a line, or they were actively looking for trouble (ie, walking around armed for a fight).

That’s fine. The law allows for that. If someone tries to beat the shit out of you and you defend yourself, you’re in the clear.

Examples where people get charged are things like the guy who saw someone going through his truck and shot him, or the guy who chased after a fleeing burglar, dragged him back into the house and beat him unconscious. Those are both real examples, and in both cases they clearly went beyond self defense.

We don’t know the facts in this particular case, but it’s very likely going to turn out to be some similar set of circumstances.

Unless they can come up with a truly spectacular defence, they will be. There’s very little tolerance for this sort of thing among the forces leadership. I know it’s hard to believe that, but I know a lot of people in the CAF and this kind of shit really is the exception, not the norm. For the most part, the CAF really fucking Hates Nazis.

The company wouldn’t have been relying on government intervention if the Liberals didn’t have such a track record of working against labour rights. If you want fewer strikes and shorter strikes, the government needs to categorically take back to work legislation off the table.

Yes, they do. They’re touting those alternatives because if they offer you a refund or credit and you accept, they no longer have that legal obligation.

The changes would remove the right of farmers to save and reuse seeds and cuttings from protected “fruits, vegetables, ornamental varieties, other plants reproduced through vegetative propagation and hybrids.” For most plants recognized under the law, the protections last for 20 years.

This is an absolutely fucking terrible idea that will severely impact our food security, and increase food prices.

Fuck that shit, it’s bad enough having to share a border with those idiots. They can stay the fuck over on their side thank you very much.

Specifically, you want to get your hands on their Unfiltered Gin 22. It is, hands down, the best gin I have ever tasted.

I got the opportunity to try this limited run from Compass recently, and it’s fantastic. Unfortunately, sold out already and they’re not currently making more, but they damn well should.

In general though, I found myself switching to Canadian whiskey in my cocktails a while ago. Canadian Club is still dog-ass and you shouldn’t touch the stuff, but that doesn’t mean other distillers haven’t been upping their game. Dillons has a really nice whiskey out now, to complement their selection of - and I am 100% not exaggerating here - the best god damn gins ever made, and the Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye deserves all the awards it was showered with. There’s also the Alberta Premium Cask Strength which everyone has been raving about. I’ve tried the regular Alberta Premium and it really is excellent. I imagine the cask strength is even better.

Yeah, that whole thing about supply/demand curves that you learned on day one econ 101? Yeah, that’s bullshit.

In capitalism, they control the supply, so you pay what they demand. It’s that simple. Markets do not in fact regulate themselves, and never have.

Well, yes, although not that many. Small arms in Canada are almost all domestically produced. Armoured vehicles are domestically produced with the exception of the Leopard, which is German. Even stuff that has an American name on it, like Textron, gets built up here (Textron stuff for Canadian use is all made in Quebec). Our ships are built by Irving. We use the Carl G and the RB-70, both from Saab. Our M777 artillery pieces are from British Aerospace. Even American sounding weapons like the M2 Browning (which is only used by reservists, not reg-force) are actually made by FN Herstal, a Belgian company. Despite the oft-touted fact that Canada maintains a lot of weapons compatibility with the US, that doesn’t mean we’re sourcing everything from them.

When it comes to the things we do buy from them, like, say, the M72 LAW, or our night vision systems, you can’t just turn that stuff around overnight. This shit with the US has only been going down in earnest for less than a year. Military procurement requires massive standardization; if you replace one soldier’s night vision with a new model, you replace it for every soldier, because everyone has to be using the same kit. So swapping out something like the M72 means evaluating options until we find something that has enough firepower, is light enough, reliable enough, accurate enough, easy enough to use, doesn’t cost too much, and comes from a supplier we can trust (or can be produced domestically under license) and then replacing our entire stockpile of M72s with that new weapon. That’s no small task.

The main area where we rely far too much on the US is aircraft. That’s tricky, because finding better options isn’t as easy as it sounds. The F-35 is the only fifth gen fighter on the market. That matters, and at the time that we made the original commitment to buy it really was the best option going. No, it does not in fact have all the issues that Russia Today claims it does (wow, I wonder why they would lie about that?), and yes, stealth does in fact really, really matter in air to air combat; if you detect your enemy before they detect you, you win. It really is that simple.

Obviously, we now have to re-evaluate that choice, based on the very serious questions that have to be asked about the reliability of the supplier. But where does that leave us? The CF-18 is also America, and desperately out of date. The Gripen, or any other similar option, are 4.5th Gen at best. Good planes, but already out of date. There are several 6th Gen fighter projects already in the works. There’s no good choice here. I suspect the least bad option is to buy the Gripen as a stopgap and then immediately start evaluating both European 6th Gen projects, but that’s just me. I don’t envy anyone having to make that decision.

And that’s not even considering all the other aircraft that we source from the US. It’s one of the very few areas where they have actually managed to maintain a serious lead. Finding better options will not be easy, and as I mentioned above, it’s not just a matter of changing who we buy from; we’d have to switch out entire fleets, in order to maintain manageable logistics and training. There’s no way of solving that which doesn’t come with massive costs.

I wonder how many people just find a different job during the wait and tell them to fuck off when they finally come calling, because it’s not like they give you updates and most people don’t really want to make a decades-long career out of it.

A lot. It’s one of the biggest issues with recruitment. You think about your average 18 year old picking the military as their career; by the time they get told they can swear their oath and head off to St Jean, they’re 20, probably have a girlfriend, a job that they’ve been at for a year or more, if they’re really lucky maybe even the prospect of promotion or perhaps an apprenticeship that they’re working on. Suddenly the idea of packing up your life to spend two months in basic, then sit around waiting for anything from months to years for your occupational training, before you can finally start a career really doesn’t seem all that appealing.

To give an idea of how bad the problem is, when they opened up recruitment to permanent residents (a smart move, no argument there), they got 20,000 applications right away. Two years later, they had recruited 77 of those applicants. That is fucking dire. As a result of that they’ve reconfigured how they process security clearances, which will help some, but as you noted the medical stuff is a huge hold-up and there’s no excuse for it. The entire medical review process needs to be completely overhauled. It should not take as long as it does to clear someone.

The actual pay increase is 13% or less for everyone who isn’t 1st year private (or equivalent rank). The rest is in additional benefits, such as Land Duty Allowance, domestic operations pay, etc. Still a decent increase overall.

That said, this barely keeps military pay in line with inflation at this point. While military pay does get small yearly increases, they’ve lagged way behind how much more expensive everything is getting. All in all, much needed, and honestly still a little underwhelming.

There are some substantial amounts ear-marked for sign-up and re-signing bonuses for trades that are particularly struggling for members, which might help a bit with recruiting and retention. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve either of the other two huge impediments to recruitment and retention. The first is that the entire process takes far, far too long. Most people cannot wait a year to get a job. There has been some improvement in this area with the move to process security clearances while people are in basic (because, let’s face it, you learn absolutely nothing in basic that’s sensitive information) but there still needs to be serious improvement in how quickly things are processed. In particular, Ottawa’s handling of medical files needs to be completely overhauled. Right now it takes way too fucking long to sign off on fitness for service.

The second big issue is that the structures of military life were established at a time when families lived on one income; that meant that you could, as a service member, haul your family off to whatever place you get posted and things would basically be OK. Yeah, relocating always sucks, but it didn’t come with the added difficulty of your partner likely needing to find a new job. The best solution the present day army has for this is “Oh, well, uh, we’ll find them some kind of civilian admin role that pays dogshit.” If your partner has any profession more specialised than “Secretary”, they’re fucked, especially as most bases are located somewhere between Butt Fuck and Nowhere. So as soon as any service member marries, and especially if they have kids, asking them to relocate is often tantamount to asking them to quit. While intake is a problem, retention is an even bigger problem and this is a huge part of why. Unfortunately solving this problem is a lot trickier. I could get into some of the changes that would help, but this getting overlong already.

To be clear, I don’t want anyone to think that everything is bad and not getting better. There have been improvements, especially with the update to the housing differential; moving from a flat percentage to setting the allowance based on pay is a massive improvement that really helps out lower ranks posted to places with higher rents (y’know, everywhere). And as I mentioned earlier, the changes to the security policy have helped speed up the recruitment process.

In all, there’s still a lot that needs to change, but this is definitely a welcome step.

(Full disclosure: I am part of a military family.)

“We’ve always said we will apply tariffs where they had the maximum impact on the United States and minimum impact in Canada,” said Carney when asked why Canada hasn’t fired back against the new tariff rate. “So we don’t automatically adjust. We look at what we can do for our industry that’s most effective. In some cases that will be to remove tariffs.”

This is an entirely reasonable position. America’s tariffs against Canada are hurting themselves as much as, if not more than they’re hurting us. We don’t have to play that same game. The point of applying tariffs is to put economic pressure on the US. If the tariffs end up hurting our economy more than it hurts theirs, that entirely defeats the point.

So yeah, let them hit us with blanket tariffs and starve themselves of copper, aluminum, steel and lumber, while we continue to buy what we need from them and slap giant tariffs on the things we don’t need.

LocalSend should be called God Send because it’ll save your life. It’s AirDrop, but for everything and open source. Works really well, no setup, no server.

Audiobookshelf. Not exactly a “hidden” gem at this point, but I’m putting it here for today’s lucky 10,000. Simply the best way to store and stream audiobooks. Does podcasts too, and ebooks, although there are better tools for those.

I addressed this back in my original comment. At this point you’re just embarrassing yourself and wasting my time. I’m not going to bother replying further, you clearly need to get back to school and learn some basic reading comprehension.

What was your exit strategy from this reply?

Because if I said “Yes” then your next step is to quote the part of the tweet that you think backs up your assertion. Only, you already did that. And I already pointed out that it doesn’t say what you think it says. So in what possible way did you imagine that this line of argument was going to end up with you looking good?

If the existence of the state of Israel requires the extermination or forced relocation of the people of Palestine, then it should not exist.

If the existence of the state is Isreal does not require the extermination or forced relocation of the people of Palestine, then what Israel is doing is indefensible.

You know these facts. They are self evident. There is no way to defend Israel’s actions without ultimately arguing against Israel’s right to exist at all, which is why you’re hiding behind this disingenuous mask of “Just asking questions” and constantly talking around your meaning instead of outright saying it.