Wanna know what makes me genuinely angry? Old pistols. (Plus, the weekly recap)
This isn't an availability problem, this is a government problem. And for something essential to the safety of our troops.
Canadian troops inspect a Browning Hi-Power pistol during an exercise with allied forces in the United States. Photo by Lance Cpl. Christopher J. Gallagher, United States Marine Corps.
I saw the headline and I knew, in a weird way, it was going to ruin my week. I even said to a friend right away, oh God, not this again. She tried to warn me. She said, Matt, just don't read it this time. You don't need to get worked up. But I already had, of course.
I'm not into performative emotion. I'm barely into actual emotion. I'm a bit of a Vulcan. Normally, when things get grim, my sense of humour emerges: dark humour, sure, but still. Humour. I'm not wired for anger.
But the saga of the Canadian military's efforts to replace our handgun inventory genuinely makes me angry. For reasons that are very relevant to our broader challenges today.
Some history first: during the Second World War, Canada manufactured hundreds of thousands of Browning "Hi-Power" 9mm pistols. The pistols were originally made by Belgian manufacturer FN, but Belgium, of course, was overrun by the Nazis early in the war. The schematics and part diagrams were evacuated before the Germans arrived and the pistol saw service in numerous allied militaries. The Canadian army ended up acquiring 60,000 of them, all built in 1944 and 1945. And here's where things get bonkers: we've never replaced them. Some Canadian military units have used more modern pistols, acquired in smaller batches, but the standard sidearm of the Canadian Armed Forces, today, isn't just the same kind of pistol we used in the Second World War. It's literally the same pistols.
Reliability issues with the pistols are a chronic problem. I mean, they're 75 years old, and they've been in use continuously. Our military weapons technicians do what they can, and they've been stripping some pistols for spare parts to put into other pistols for decades. But the Hi-Powers are in desperate need of a replacement. They're a generation overdue for replacement. But in keeping with the finest traditions of Canadian military procurement, we can't get it done. It's beyond our ability.
We've tried, sort of. At the start of 2017, the military began work on a replacement program that would have procured up to 25,000 new 9mm semi-automatic pistols for the Canadian Armed Forces. The military gave itself 10 years to get this accomplished and budgeted $50 million. It's hard to overstate how crazy that is. Pistols aren't complicated. If you have a credit card and a firearms licence, you can walk into a store and buy one. A lot of what the military needs is super complex and custom-made. Pistols are easy. There are factories all over the world that are already producing proven, reliable, affordable designs. Buying new pistols has got to be about the simplest procurement any military is ever going to face. And we still thought we'd need 10 years to do it. A decade.
The amazing thing is, by total fluke, in 2016, the British also decided they needed new pistols. And they also decided they needed 25,000 of them. This is entirely coincidental, but it's a fantastically convenient coincidence: it's a rare apples-to-apples comparison of two national procurement systems. And how'd it go?
Well, the Brits selected a type of pistol, purchased 25,000 of them and issued them to their military units by 2018. They wrapped the whole thing up in two years. The total cost was $15,000,000.
In Canada, we set a 10-year goal for the same thing, budgeted more than three times as much ... but never got it off the ground. No progress was made.
So now, the military is trying again.
You might already be sensing why this pisses me off, but as noted above, there's two specific things about this that make me angry, and ought to make you angry, too.
The first is simple: pistols are a soldier's weapon of last resort. Their use in crime and Hollywood productions has left the general public with an exaggerated sense of how powerful and useful a pistol is. They're actually lousy weapons. They're not very powerful, are only effective at short range and are difficult to accurately aim. But they have limited use for soldiers because they can be used in close quarters and operated with one hand. If a Canadian soldier is reaching for their pistol, it's because everything has gone very badly wrong, and they are trying to stop an enemy that is very, very close to them — posing an immediate danger. In these circumstances, more than almost any other, you have to be 100 per cent confident that the weapon is going to work when you reach for it. And we're sending troops into danger all over the world with last-resort weapons that absolutely no one has faith in. This is a massive abdication of our basic duty to our fighting men and women. If we were issuing sailors faulty lifejackets or aircrew 75-year-old parachutes, people would understand why that's outrageous. It's the same with pistols. Or it should be.
The second reason: like I said above, a pistol is easy. If you can't replace a pistol, you might as well give up. It's like not being able to get your soldiers boots or sleeping bags. Oh, wait. We suck at that, too. For years, Canadian soldiers bought their own boots. Our dysfunctional procurement system was so bad that they just started buying their own.
It's the same with pistols. A Canadian soldier can't go out and buy a tank or a warship or a heavy-lift helicopter. But they could buy a pistol or a pair of boots, because those things are actually easy to make and in abundant supply. This isn't an availability problem, this is a government problem. And for something that's not only basic but essential to the safety of our troops.
The last week has been full of stories of overcrowding and dysfunction at testing sites for COVID-19. A friend of mine needed to take his daughter, and left in disgust at the size of the lineup. He asked in a group chat how things could still be this bad after seven months.
And I thought to myself, dude, we've been trying to buy the army a gun for a decade. It's still this bad because our government is incapable of performing basic tasks of governance ... and Canadians either don't know or don't care.
And yes, this makes me angry. Genuinely angry. And I get even angrier when I wonder why I seem to be the only one who feels this way.
I'd like to tell you I feel better for having gotten that off my chest. But honestly? I don't.
As to what else I was up to this week, it was a busy one.
I covered the PM's speech on Wednesday night, and was unimpressed. It's not that I disagreed with what he had to say. I mostly did agree with it. But it was enormously banal and entirely political — and that's not what national addresses are supposed to be for. I opened my column in the Post by noting that. "You know," I mused, "if you’re an executive at one of Canada’s broadcast news networks, and you’d been assured by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s staff that the national address he wanted to give Wednesday wasn’t political, but a matter of national import, it was maybe, maybe, five minutes into Trudeau’s remarks — tops! — when you had to have realized you’d been had." There were other weird parts of the speech as well, including his breezy assurances that good behaviour can avoid the second wave even while explaining that we were in the second wave.
"It was hard not to notice that the PM moved awfully quick from how we can avoid a disastrous second wave into how his government was going to get us through it," I noted. "The effect of it all was a bit like an airline flight attendant calmly reading from an aircraft’s emergency procedures brochure while blowing the hatch open and leaping down the inflatable slide."
Oh, and one other thing: I noted in the column that the PM was declaring a second wave, even though his chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, was not saying that. I didn't have time before that column's deadline to get into that oddity, so I did some poking around the next day. I reported what I found on Twitter. Check it out.
Also in the Post, I helped kick off a new series of articles about how Canada can (and should!) get serious about its interests in the world. Canadians have gotten flaky, I wrote. We've had it too good for too long. "Many of the problems that are real, pressing, day-to-day issues for huge segments of humanity are so remote and distant that Canadians forget they exist, or at least believe they could never happen here. Bad things happen in other places, to other people. Lulled into complacency by our economic power and the protection of our mighty ally to the south, we’ve been able to pretend that the world isn’t still a dangerous, unstable place." I added later: "Many of the assumptions upon which Canadians have long based their understanding of the world are changing, fast. And our government, and broader public, gives every impression of not caring a bit. We just had a throne speech this week. Out of thousands of words, did more than a few dozen touch on any of this? And did any of those few dozen actually say anything useful?"
And yeah, I mentioned the pistols thing, too. Check that Post column out here.
I was busy at TVO.org as well this week, staying on top of developments as the second wave (as per the PM, if not Dr. Tam) arrives in Ontario.
On Tuesday, I wrote approvingly about the first plank in the province's plan — that we all get flu shots. It seems odd to focus on the flu when the danger is COVID-19, I granted, but it does make sense. "[P]ushing hard on flu shots is actually a smart, achievable means to [fight COVID]," I wrote. "We can’t yet vaccinate against the coronavirus, and, while we should all keep washing our hands and staying away from people when possible, the reality of our economic reopening and the return to school for children means that we’re going to see COVID-19 cases swing up from lockdown-low levels. That’s unavoidable. But every flu patient we keep out of hospital means a bed available for a COVID-19 one. It’s grim math, but it works."
And on Friday, after Ontario changed rules around who should get tested for COVID-19 (and why), I interviewed Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease expert from McMaster University. He had a lot of smart things to say, as always, but the upshot? He thinks changing the testing rules is smart. He'd even been calling for it! Check out that interview here.
That’s it for me this week, folks. I hope to be around here more often soon, time permitting. In the meantime, take care of yourselves.
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