Thunder Bay MPs tout new defence strategy as good for region

The city and region will benefit from a recently-announced federal national defence strategy.

That’s according to the Thunder Bay area’s two Liberal MPs. Thunder Bay-Superior North’s Patty Hajdu and Thunder Bay-Rainy River’s Marcus Powlowski were at Confederation College’s aviation centre on Friday touting the defence industrial strategy announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday.

Part of the initiative is $6.6 billion for a variety of things, including constructing military equipment in Canada, according to a FedNor media release issued Friday.

“The intent is to be able to produce as much as we can for our own military needs and our own sovereignty needs,” Hajdu said. “Of course, there will be times where we are having to procure from another ally in terms of specific equipment that we can’t produce on Canadian soil.”

“The investments are intended to boost our capacity … from a knowledge perspective, a training perspective and from an industrial perspective.”

Overall, the Feb. 17 federal announcement promised hundreds of billions of dollars in defence-related procurement opportunities and funding over the next decade, the creation of 125,000 “high-paying careers,” ensuring 70 per cent of defence acquisitions go to Canadian firms and raising the country’s defence industry revenues by nearly three and a half times, among other measures.

Powlowski, Hajdu’s crosstown colleague, said given the current international climate (including an increasingly hostile United States) it’s better that Canadian companies benefit, and if equipment has both military and non-military applications, the better.

“Yes, we have to spend on defence, but for the most part, we don’t want to use the money to buy airplanes, to buy boats, to buy drones to get them blown up in a conflict,” he said. “We’re investing in things, but certainly if we invest in things which we can use for other purposes as well, this is a kind of a win-win.”

The event at the College’s hangar and training centre on Friday highlighted a loan of just over $1.5 million from FedNor to Levaero Aviation, a Thunder Bay-based company that provides a number of aviation services. Its website says it is the exclusive Canadian distributor of the Pilatus PC-12 and PC-24 aircraft and does aircraft acquisition and sales, parts and maintenance and charter and management services.

FedNor’s media release said that money has been used to expand Levaero’s maintenance and refurbishment department, specifically an over-5,300 square-foot structure for new equipment and staff needed for refurbishing aircraft components.

That money is “already out the door,” said Hajdu, who is also the minister responsible for FedNor.

The company also has a partnership with Confederation College where it helps maintain the college’s aircraft for its aviation programs, and otherwise supports them, Michelle Salo, the school’s president, told reporters.

She said Levaero has always been a common employment destination for graduates of its aircraft maintenance program.

Hajdu and Powlowski said companies like Levaero and other regionally-based businesses have a role to play, even if they don’t directly manufacture military equipment.

“There’s the big contracts like the F-35s versus the Gripens; the submarines, those are the big contracts,” Powlowski said. “They’re going to have a lot of money, but there are also a lot of smaller companies that are involved in supply chains for those bigger companies.”

“Where possible, we’d like to have those supply chains employing Canadians rather than being supply chains in Mexico or China or Taiwan.”

In the defence initiative’s announced 10-year span, Hajdu said “the best case scenario” is that “we’re confident that Canada can defend itself, that we can act as an ally, that we’ve met our NATO commitments.”

“And that we have a skilled workforce with confident Canadians knowing that they have a place in that skilled workforce.” – tbnewswatch.com

article website here

…“The intent is to be able to produce as much as we can for our own military needs and our own sovereignty needs,” Hajdu said. “…

Why is that not already a thing?   Why did the reporter not ask?

…“The investments are intended to boost our capacity … from a knowledge perspective, a training perspective and from an industrial perspective.”…

Why is that not already a thing? Why did the reporter not ask?

…“Where possible, we’d like to have those supply chains employing Canadians rather than being supply chains in Mexico or China or Taiwan.”…

Why is that not already a thing?

…“we’re confident that Canada can defend itself,…

Against who?

War is always the way governments get out of financial shitstorms.  When all else fails and financial collapse is inevitable, start a war.

Either way, this is not going to end well.  Financial collapse because of the endless debt governments are taking on, hyper-inflation which all that debt creates or the millions if not billions of people that a global conflict will kill.  I do not see an upside.

All that money that we will be spending on defence against an as of yet unknow attacker could easily build millions of houses so that all Canadians can afford one. Could provide hospitals with the best and most modern equipment. Could streamline the food supply chain providing affordable, heathy food to all Canadians.

Nobody is interested in that.  Its al, about war.  The Military Industrial Complex and the shareholders of the companies that will be raking in all of the sweet, sweet taxpayer cash will be making out like bandits.   Hajdu and Pawlowski did not mention that.