OP-ED: Canada burns, Carney pays everyone else
"It didn’t take long for Ontario residents to express disgust that our political leaders had seemingly dropped the ball and allowed the fires to spread out of control."
Since Prime Minister Mark Carney came into office, a total of $ 25.8 billion has been committed to Ukraine — $ 2 billion of which was announced this month for armoured Canadian vehicles to be built and sent to Ukraine.
He also pledged $ 500 million in “humanitarian” aid to Gaza, the most recent $ 100 million gleefully announced by Foreign Minister Anita Anand in June.
Anyone with a shred of common sense knows that the money will likely be used by the governing power, Hamas, for anything but aid, food, or rebuilding war-torn areas.
By contrast, the Liberals announced in May they’d be leasing 10 firefighting aircraft from May to October for provinces across Canada to share.
That would come out of a $316 million funding envelope, we were told (we are never given the exact figure).
For the sake of argument, let’s say that amounts to $ 150 million. That’s just slightly more than Anand handed over to Hamas in June.
Our priorities are totally screwed up in Canada, and our leadership is non-existent.
That was borne out last week when 650,000 hectares of forest and 191 wildfires in northern Ontario spewed a thick blanket of acrid smoke through Ontario and the northern states.
Half of those wildfires were out of control.
Hazardous air quality alerts were issued not just in Toronto but in such U.S. cities as Toledo, Ohio, Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C.
Saturday’s rain helped keep the fires from spreading but did not douse them.
It didn’t take long for Ontario residents to express disgust that our political leaders had seemingly dropped the ball and allowed the fires to spread out of control.
Terrible air quality is no joke, but our leaders didn’t seem to care.
For days, those Canadians not under Mark Carney’s spell reasoned that with the $28.5 billion given to Ukraine, or even a portion of it, the federal government could buy a fleet of water bombers instead of leasing them.
At what has been calculated as about $ 50 million to $ 80 million per water bomber, we could have had upwards of 356 new bombers.
The $ 100 million given to Gaza just last month could have been used for two water bombers.
But the safety of Canadians seems not to be a priority of the narcissistic PM when he can act the big man and be the benefactor of Ukraine’s grifter President and Hamas.
Carney seemed not to take the fires very seriously at all, sandwiching this milquetoast tweet between his daily braggadocio:
On Friday, the impact of the wildfires on U.S. border states was all over Fox News, and once again, Canada came across as ruled by idiots.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham did an entire segment on the negligence of Canadian politicians, running clips from Carney excusing it as climate change and Premier Doug Ford whining that the Americans should have sent help.
When U.S. President Donald Trump and other politicians stated that they’d hold Canada responsible for being invaded by “filthy, polluted and unhealthy air” from the wildfires, Carney blamed the U.S. for not taking climate change seriously.
I’m not quite sure how clean energy or wind power would have prevented the forest fires since, according to statistics, 90% of such fires are started by human error.
But Carney will never ever admit he could do better.
Ford dropped the ball from the get-go, and it did not go unnoticed by the U.S. media.
When it was suggested that he’d kept the budget for emergency firefighting low at $150-million this year after a bad year last year—while spending $75-million on U.S. attack ads — lashed out at his critics. He was repeatedly on the defensive.
He spent days trying to make up for lost time, announcing the day after it all came to a head and people were choking from the rancid air quality that he’d allocated $ 650 million to buy five firefighting helicopters and six water bombers.
Too little, too late.
He showed up in Thunder Bay, one of the hard-hit areas, for a photo opp on Saturday.
To further stoke anti-American sentiment, he claimed the U.S. hadn’t helped, except for his pal, corrupt lame duck Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
This was after he declared that Canadians loved Americans.
It’s enough to make one crazy.
But the truth is, there has been cooperation through longstanding agreements with the National Interagency Fire Centre, and cross-border assistance is being provided with personnel and equipment.
Perhaps Ford should do his homework before spouting off at the mouth.
Perhaps he should have given more attention to managing issues like this instead of conspiring to take over the federal leadership from Pierre Poilievre or pouring Crown Royal down the drain or dissing Trump on CNN.
The problem is that far too many Canadians — beaten down, busy with their own lives or just too weak — have come to accept the arrogance and incompetence of our politicians.
Few question Carney’s cavalier, obnoxious, secretive and dismissive behaviour.
And Ford is permitted to tap dance around a situation he’s so obviously mismanaged.
Too many Canadians have been brainwashed to fume about the wrong things — Trump (aka the Big Bad Orange man) — instead of what’s right in front of our noses.
Even when public safety is at stake.
They refuse to even acknowledge that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
I cannot comment about the Ontario government’s competence regarding wildfires since I am not resident there.
But I can reflect upon the incompetence of Trudeau Liberals, now the Carney Liberals, regarding the Jasper fires of 2024 where fuel was allowed to build up around the town site despite almost a decade of warnings, most notably fuel caused by the pine beetle. Then there were the two provinces neighbouring Jasper National Park offering to send in their professional forest fire fighters: two provinces of opposing government ideologies but agree forest fires are bad. Alberta offered state of the art crown fire fighting equipment. A unit of professional fire fighters even came down from the Northwest Territories never dreaming such help would be turned away but they were wrong. All this was refused.
The conclusion of my reflection? Ms. Levy is correct. The federal Liberals do not care.
A rewrite from "Canada burns, Carney pays everyone else"...
CARNEY BURNS CANADA