Daydream Notes

But: https://archive.ph/Q8K1W quote: A new report paints Canada’s military police leadership as shutting down complaints, ignoring parliamentary-mandated civilian oversight and bungling investigations to the point where a criminal convicted of attempted murder almost went free. The report by the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian watchdog created by Parliament, outlines a deteriorating situation in which the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal has been resisting independent oversight. “The situation escalated from resistance to outright refusal to respect the oversight regime mandated by Parliament,” commission chairperson Tammy Tremblay wrote in her annual report released Tuesday. At times the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, or CFPM, has shut down complaints into police actions before they could be heard, the MPCC report noted. The CFPM has also refused to provide information needed for the commission to carry out its oversight f...

By 2030 Canada was going to decide what would replace the CP-140 long range Anti-Submarine Warfare [ASW] aircraft. The DND  planned a competition to "assess needs and products", but because America has been complaining to the PM about Canada being shit at natsec, the logical move was to buy some American shit to hopefully shut them up. In an almost singularly odd move, the baksheesh to America was to buy Boeing P-8s, the 737 based ASW aircraft. This move was objected to by everybody Like the premiers of the two biggest provinces asked for a competition, the standing committee on defense unanimously asked for a competition, the Canadian arms industry has been apoplectic to be cut out of not only a major purchase, but a major purchase where Canada is in fact quite technologically capable at, ASW warfare. Which, naturally, the P-8 doesn't use There's also the CP-140 Aurora (Canuk Orion), which is just finishing up a $400 million dollar upgrade. This was to kee...

  Current head of CF lied about knowing about another senior officer's sexcrime In other words, it is Monday. But when you dig into the details a bit: Despite allegedly knowing of the allegation, Acting Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre confirmed Trevor Cadieu as the new army commander following the approval of Cadieu’s promotion to lieutenant general on Aug. 8. In a statement to this newspaper, the Department of National Defence said Eyre only found out about the allegations against Cadieu when he was informed by military police on Sept. 5. But the alleged victim, as well as an email from Cadieu himself, tell a different story. In an email sent to his alleged victim on July 11, Cadieu writes that Eyre had been informed by other officers about the allegations. “The CDS can’t ignore what he’s been told,” Cadieu wrote to the woman, a former Canadian Forces member. “Naturally, as painful as it is to write this, the CDS needs to makes (sic) decisions about my ...

Since January 2021, the Canadian Forces (CF) has been lost in a scandal supercell, which the leadership didn't see coming, but everybody else in the CF and outside of it did. The other thing I can observe: so the Defense Minister is Harjit Sajjan. He was a police detective in Vancouver, and also rose to the rank of Lt. Col. in the Canadian Army. On the one hand, you can see that somebody with lots of experience in the military is the sort of person you want in the role, IE because they should know their stuff. There's a distinct drawback, now obvious: if you come up in these circles, you might have the same blind spots. Things start with the recently retired General Vance. Remember when the smack talk was all about "why did you take so long to say 'actually, maybe CF personnel shouldn't belong to right wing terror groups'?" Gen. Vance investigated for sexual impropriety Naturally:   quote: Vance was also the driving force behind Operation Ho...

One lesson Canada took from the Second World War was that their previous military procurement strategy didn't work. Up until that point, Canada had always relied on buying hardware, like aircraft and ships, from the UK and America. What Canada discovered after following the UK into war in 1939 was that when a major war happens, both those nations are suddenly too busy with their own needs to sell to Canada. This proved a particular issue when defending Canada; for several years, German U-boats could operate in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off Canada's coast while resources to hunt them were so lacking that America and the UK had to assume aerial anti-submarine patrols until Canada could get its collective shit together.  So at the end of the Second World War, Canada followed a strategy of building some defense industry, and some purchasing from its allies, depending on what native industrial strengths it could utilize. One of these places was surface ships for the Royal Canadia...

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman has been somewhat vindicated, the fed dropped the lawsuit against him, with the prosecuting attorney saying publicly "we've got nothing". It could be that the Fed thought it'd just be a drag next election, but it's satisfying to see their horseshit fail so abjectly defense watch has a good summary Norman of course is now demanding his old job bad just to twist the knife in his former comrades in arms at the DND Also, Canada and the F-35 have taken a new turn. OK, so remember when the fed took de-facto policy and made it official, that any fighter design had to officially promise that industrial baksheeh ? Well it turns out that's not allowed in the framework in which the F-35 was developed, which actually wants F-35 sub-components to be sourced competitively (IE by LockMart, the primary contractor), and explicitly forbids nations from trying to get more baksheeh done in their own nation. While Canada now is BFFs with LockMart, this d...

It's leaking hydraulic fluid in heaven, now. I've been reading Charlie Foxtrot: Fixing Defense Procurement in Canada , and I think anybody who enjoys this feature will like it. Stuff has happened the past few weeks: Some 40 years after the program to replace them began, the CH-124 Sea King helicopters have flown for the last time. Canada chooses design for Canadian Surface Combatant. The winner is the LockMart-BAE joint project Type 26 Frigates. 60 Billion will be spent constructing 15 Frigates. This move has been expected since 2017, when other bidders started complaining the fix was in for the Type 26. This is because the Type 26, unlike the other contenders, hasn't been built yet, something that the competition explicitly said was a selection criteria. Alion just filed a lawsuit against Canada about this, the second major lawsuit coming out of the NSS after Vice Adm. Norman's wrongful dismissal lawsuit.   This has caused the Canadian International Trade T...

So, last time I linked a document that ended with four recommendations for the NSP.  1. Open-up the non-contractually-binding umbrella agreements with Irving and Seaspan. 2. Cancel the Canadian Surface Combatant design competition and re-launch the entire procurement as an expedited fixed-price competition involving completely off-the-shelf designs.    3. Cancel the Joint Support Ship design contract and re-launch an expedited fixed-price competition for the immediate conversion of a second container ship into a supply ship. 4. Shelve the plan to build a heavy polar icebreaker in Vancouver and launch an expedited fixed-price competition for the conversion or construction of 4-5 medium icebreakers. The good news is that #4 is now being taken up.  Davie Shipyard gets contract for three commercial icebreakers for Canadian Coast Guard. Considering how far behind the NSP is, this is good, though I suspect at least a big a consideration was cushioning eco...