The Mark
CBC’s announcement that it is withdrawing from foreign-language broadcasting in two of the four BRIC countries is just another nail in the coffin for Canadian internationalism.
Day: April 5, 2012
The Incredible Shrinking Canada… Just Keeps Getting Smaller
Over the past few days there has been some commentary in the mainstream and electronic media about the hard reality of this country`s ever diminishing place in the world.
Still, such observations have not produced the groundswell resistance that they warrant among Canadians.
For reasons which I have tried to assess earlier, this is not entirely surprising.
Moreover, a considerable part of this inattention might be attributed to the sideswiping of any detailed analysis of the last week`s budget storey by the release on April 03 of the Auditor General`s bombshell report detailing the epic mismanagement of F-35 fighter procurement file. To put the content of that document into perspective, the Auditor General exposes vastly more wastage of public funds on that misbegotten project than the total amount which will be saved as a result of the all of the new cuts being imposed upon DFAIT and CIDA.
The reverberations associated with the widening F-35 scandal also effectively scuttled all but a trickle of meaningful coverage of the release government`s final report on Canada`s (disasterous) engagement in Afghanistan.
No amount of bureaucratic whitewashing will ever be sufficient clean the bloodstains from that tragic experience.
It is perhaps worth pausing to reflect on these disturbing realities for a few moments… Among other things, that is what happens when international policy and priorities become militarized, and when defense dominates over diplomacy and development. Meanwhile, as lions share of international policy resources continue to be poured into DND, not a word is said about the desperate need for national debate on defense policy.