Why I Dislike Montreal Bagels: My Definitive Listicle

 One of the enduring battles on twitter is between those who dislike Montreal bagels and people with bad judgment.  It came up today yet again, so why do I dislike Montreal bagels so much?

1. Most importantly, if they are not fresh out of the oven, they are bricks.  Chewy is not even close to what they are.
2. Some people like the wood oven taste (ignoring how bad it is for the environment but whatevs), but I find eating burnt baked goods to be suboptimal.
3. The choice is between poppyseed and sesame seed.  Which is kind of like: would you prefer to be burned by acid or by fire?  Neither one is a desirable choice.  Yes, there is lots of controversy over the flavors of non-Montreal bagels, but the choice of sesame and poppy is one of yuck or ick.  

 That's it.  The only things wrong with Montreal bagels are how they feel in one's mouth (brick), how they taste (burnt), and the flavors they come in.  Other than that, they are fine.  

Make mine NYC everyday and twice on Sunday.  The diversity of NYC bagels--pumpernickel, onion, egg, etc--means not just variety but freedom to choose.  Soft bagels that don't risk my teeth.  The most excellent platform for some cream cheese, lox, and red onions.  Or, if one prefers, fried egg, cheese, and bacon or ham.  

Montreal has a lot of great food, but the stuff that gets the most promotion/attention (let's talk smoked meat some other day) is wildly overvalued.  Perhaps it is all about overcompensation?

 

Quarantine Report, Week 67: Carleton Rocks

 The week started with Father's Day and ended with mild side effects from the second shot, so a better week than most.  My daughter has not been with me the last several Father's Days, but I get to see her soon, so that is a good enough present.  My wife helpfully bought a few silly presents for the day--aprons given the past year of cooking and baking.  

And, yes, I went overboard on the baking this week to celebrate Father's Day and then the vax day.  First was the Irish Cream Pound case, which had, yes, a heap of Bailey's.  It was pretty terrific.

And then I made this after I got vaxxed.  To thank Dolly Parton for the miracle that is Moderna.  It was a funfetti cake with more sugar in a cake than Mrs. Spew has had since ... she was a kid?  Super sweet just like Dolly and the prospect of breaking quarantine.

 

 

 

So, yeah, we went to Carleton, got in line, the nurse at the front was cheerful and super-organized, and then it was easy peasy from there to the end.  The only hard part was finding our way out of the building since we were directed through the a back way so that we didn't encounter the un-vaxxed.  It was smart, but kind of reminded me of that scene from Spinal Tap where the band could not find the stage.

The big question is: what next?  The Canadian health folks put out the rules or guidelines yesterday, which are not nearly as wide open as those the CDC put out.  In terms of my own behavior, in two weeks, once the vaccine has been processed by my bod, I will continue to wear masks inside in stores and such.  Partly because I don't want to send confusing signals, partly because that seems to be the rule for being among the unvaxxed, and partly because catching an non-fatal, non-hospitalized case of COVID is still not pleasant.  And we don't know enough about the long term effects of mild cases of COVID in those who are fully vaxxed.  It will also depend on the local rate of infection.

I will get a haircut (floofy no more?), I will go to the movies (without Mrs. Spew since she is a bit more nervous than I), we will start going to patios and then eventually inside restaurants.  And, yes, I will go to the US to see my family in August.  That is the big one--seeing my mother, my siblings, and, yes, Hollywood Spew!  I will probably call my weekly reports something else in two weeks, as I will no longer be "in quarantine."  Of course, breakthroughs, new variants, another virus may cause us to return to this state of being.  And that would suck, so I am not throwing away the masks (which I will wear now when I have a cold, Asia-Pacific style) or the sanitizer stuff.  I do hope that stores can stop practicing hygiene theory--wiping everything down after every client--and I hope schools focus on improving ventilation.

This week was busy in both expected and unexpected ways.  The CDSN Personnel Team held a workshop on the Power of Diversity on Friday/Saturday.  It was really interesting, with most of the focus on the status of immigrants (previous workshops had focused more on women and on historically excluded people).  I chaired on session and served as a breakout room moderator as well despite not knowing much about this stuff.  The upside, of course, is that I learn a lot. 

The unexpected busy-ness involved a bunch of media hits as there was much attention by the journalists on the end of this term of parliament.  The timing was perfect for me as I had a meeting with Dave and Phil for our project on legislatures and oversight over the armed forces.  So, that stuff was fresh in my mind as I was observing that our initial stance that the Canadian House of Commons Defence Committee is less relevant than most was perhaps an understatement.  What I learned this week is that a minority government still controls the agenda of the committee, so, yeah, the committee didn't issue a report about the Vance/Sajjan mess.  This video has most of my rants in one place as Dale Smith, fellow fan of Nigella Lawson, asked good, triggering questions. I did dodge some media hits by recommending people who have far more expertise on the stuff, such as maritime disputes.  I was asked by Matt Gurney, a radio host, whether there will be any real change in the Canadian Armed Forces and Department of National Defence with the media soon to be distracted by the possibility of an election.  I suggested that post-election, there will be a new Defence Minister, so they will likely be attentive to that choice (please no more senior military types), and the report by retired Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour will serve to energize the media.  I do think there are many folks in the CAF now are motivated and interested--but the old boys network remains powerful, and culture is hard to change.  So, no easy, instant fixes.

The meeting with Dave and Phil led to a surprising division of labor with me focusing on the short term article and the two of them focusing on writing the start of the book.  It is late in the summer (it is nearly half gone!), so my teammates are skeptical we can finish the book by the end of the summer.  However, I think we will have a bad draft of a good book by then.  While we are doing that, Phil and I are finally working on the Canadian case, so I interviewed the Conservative Defence Critic, James Bezan.  He was struck that the questions we wrote were written six years ago as he thought they were most relevant now.  So, woot for us!  

In the big picture, things are getting much better in Canada and the US and much worse in much of the rest of the world.  We have to keep that in mind--that the planet needs to be vaccinated, not just our immediate neighbors.  We also have take seriously what our countries have done.  The finding of perhaps 750 Indigenous kids' graves at a second residential school (kiddie concentration camps may be offputting, but it should be) is just a start of Canada coming to grips with its history.  Having an Indigenous Secretary of Interior in the US, Deb Haaland, will mean that the US may look at its own legacy of similar policies of stealing kids from their families and putting them into awful circumstances.  One of the bright spots of Canada's pandemic response has been that the First Nations have been in the front of the line for vaccines, and there has been much effort to help them deal with ... damn ... crappy health care infrastructure.  So much more to do.  

As we turn to the big national holidays--Canada Day and Independence Day--we need to reflect what the values of our countries are, how we have fallen short, and how we can do better.  We sure as hell need some Critical Race Theory, precisely because the party of bad faith and of white supremacy is pushing against it.  

Be well and get your vaccines!

When Life Imitates Research or How Lame Can Parliamentary Oversight Be in Canada?

 Phil, Dave, and I are hopefully finishing our book project this summer that compares the role of legislatures in the civil-military dynamics of democracies.  The starting point of this project was my realization that the relevant committee in Canada, the House of Commons Defence Committee, was largely blind and irrelevant.  Today, I am seeing that this starting point remains valid--that oversight over defence here is a mess, and that the House of Commons has little leverage.  Why?  Well, as Phil and I wrote in an article originally entitled "Ignorant Critic or Informed Overseer," (editors/reviewers insisted on something far less accurate), the Canadian political system rewards mindless point-scoring and does not incentivize serious oversight.  

And today?  Today, the Liberals on the Defence Committee filibustered for so long that the report on the Vance/Sexual Misconduct/Abuse of Power scandal in the Canadian Armed Forces is not going to happen.  I didn't know that filibustering in committee was a thing, but now I do.  Our paper had focused in part on the contrast between majority and minority governments.  That this investigation would not have gotten very far in a majority government because the government of the day controls the agenda, so the Defence Committee is prevented from looking into anything too serious.  When the governing party does not hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons, then the opposition parties, if they can cooperate, can control the agenda and investigate what they want.  Well, we might want to revise the article since I did not appreciate the filibustering thing.  

The domestic context is this: Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan is important politically to the Liberals--he raises money and brings in votes.  So, they want to protect him, and a report, politicized or not, would be pretty scathing since the Minister essentially admitted that he does not understand what is job entails.  Which means that the party that proclaims to be feminist is preventing a report from being issued on how the Canadian Armed Forces leadership has failed their women and their men.  I guess the bet is that the Liberal base will see the effort to produce the report to be a Conservative game to score points unfairly, just as they saw the censure of the Minister last week to be such (with the Conservatives playing into this).  There were enough Liberals on my twitter feed arguing that Sajjan has been treated unfairly that this strategy might work.  And it is easier to refute a non-report than a report.  

If I were the Conservatives, I would disseminate a draft report, one that is stripped of the most strident partisan sniping and focuses simply on the failures of Sajjan and the Liberal Party to take this stuff seriously.  Will they do that?  Probably not given the stuff they crammed into the censure motion.  

Like much of the past year, I am not so much surprised but appalled to find that my previous views were confirmed.  This filibuster, along with the Conservatives upending the relatively new intelligence review board, shows that, well, the Canadian political system is not really that mature.  Every actor seems to choose the shortest-term, most partisan option, which then does not really help that much since everyone else can see that is what they are doing, reducing the legitimacy of pretty much all involved.  

These folks make me feel like an idealist or naive, but I just think that one can be smart and partisan and still have an eye on the national interest.  The key should be that the parties different on how to define the national interest, rather than focusing solely on how to score some meaningless points.  Instead:

Quarantine Report, Week 66: Damn, This Road Is Long With Many Curves

 Sixty-six weeks of this madness with yet another week of ups and big downs.  Everyone has experienced much loss over the course of the pandemic.  We have been lucky that no immediate family has died unless one counts our cat or a pseudo-uncle.  Bob went to that upstate farm, as he stopped eating and the treatments for his various pains were working for shorter and shorter periods of time.  I have reported here and elsewhere how he changed from being a very feisty cat with sharp claws to being the cuddliest of pandemic pets.  I started taking many pictures of him this winter/spring because I knew time was running out and because he was so damned cute on my lap.  He had never been a lap pet--he would sit next to my wife, but he was not the cuddly cat my daughter demanded way back when.  This year, however, he found solace and he gave solace by insisting a few times each day to be lifted into my lap when I was at my computer and then he would hang out under my desk.  Now we are furless for the first time since 1992.  It will take some getting used to.

Our second major loss was of someone who was not family but was family--Stanley Lavin.  He and my father were best friends, so our families vacationed together until I was old enough to

remember them.  So, all I have are vague memories and mostly memories of people telling me about the stuff that happened.  I do remember some of our last trip--to Mexico--when I was five.  I remember Uncle Stanley making me laugh a lot and him laughing a lot.  I am pretty sure he influenced my sense of humor the most, although his favorite bit, singing Home on the Range at all kinds of events, was far beyond me.  I only saw him at big events since we stopped vacationing with a few exceptions.  I wish I had sought him and his spectacular wife more when traveling through NYC.  Stanley was not a Covid statistic as he had been declining for years.  I did get to see him at my father's funeral a couple of years ago, and I did make him laugh a bit, which I will always treasure, as giving back to one who gave me so much.  I watched his funeral via the internet because that is what we do these days.  His kids told stories about him, and I learned stuff that I didn't know.  I did remember his fondness for gin and tonics so I will be shopping for some tonic this afternoon so I can raise the appropriately filled glass to him.  As I have said before, connect with folks--this pandemic reminds us of that more than ever.

Everything else pales in comparison, but there was some good news this week.  Ontario changed the interval between shots, so all of GenX-AZ in Ontario were on their computers at 8:01am on Monday.  The slots got filled up fast, and then folks on twitter let us know that there were new slots.  So, we first had appointments on the other side of town on Canada Day, but we managed an alternative approach that will get us our shots a week earlier.  Woot!   And, yes, we are going for the cocktail--mixing the first AZ dose with Moderna.  And then a couple of weeks later, we will be able to move about the cabin and beyond.  

Meanwhile, the Canadian defence politics beat got hot this week because the Conservatives pushed through a motion censuring the Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.  I explained how that motion both hit and missed the target here.  I got asked to do an early Saturday morning radio hit to talk about the NATO summit, which, alas, the host of the radio program used to segue to focus on China.  Not my area of expertise, but live radio so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  I did email the producer to complain, but I expect memories to be short.

More fun was having my name and tweets and those of friends (Steph Carvin, Thomas Juneau) tossed around in the House of Commons during Question Period:

The context was that the Conservatives pulled out of a national security advisory review panel to demonstrate their, um, China-phobic bona fides, I think.  So, the three of us were not pleased and said so on twitter.  I think it might have been the first time my name was bandied about in Question Period.  Funny that my more strident stuff about the Defence Minister didn't come up instead.  Anyhow, the Minister of Health kind of knows whom I am, so there's that.  Canada is such a small pond!

Ontario and other provinces are starting loosen things up with the percentage of semi vaxed (one shot) surpassing 70% of those eligible and fully vaxxed (2 shots plus 2 weeks) approaching 20%.  I am worried as that still means 80% are vulnerable to the Delta variant, and the wastewater trends, a leading indicator, are not good even as the lagging indicators (hospitalization/death) are looking good.  So, we will remain cautious on the indoor stuff until we are 2+2.  On the outdoor stuff, it looks like Ultimate may start in early July, and that would be wonderful.  Thanks to the daily stress-exercise--biking or treadmilling--I am in better shape now than a year ago despite my best stress-baking efforts.  Will that make me speedier on the ultimate field?  Probably not.  

Tomorrow is Father's Day, so I am using that as an excuse to make something truly decadent--Irish pound cake--which involves Baileys.  As always, I tend to focus on the single mothers out there who are both mother and father, including my sister-in-law, Liz, who has raised to amazing young women despite incredibly difficult circumstances.  The best Father's Day present I am getting this year is the knowledge that I will finally be seeing my daughter at the end of July at the Saideman family summer gathering.  It has been too damned long.  I am just so proud of the social justice warrior that she has become.  

Be well! 

Censuring the Defence Minister--Getting it Right and Wrong

 So, the House of Commons censured Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan.  Given that I have been calling for Sajjan to be removed from this position, I should a fan of this, yes?  Mostly but not entirely.  

First, this should not have been necessary.  Sajjan should have been removed after his second disastrous appearance before the Defence Committee.  He basically showed that he had lied in his earlier testimony and, to me, more importantly, did not understand his job.  That his job included overseeing the Chief of the Defence Staff which Sajjan suggested would be politicizing if he actually had any curiosity about the allegations against Vance.   

Second, this actual motion was a mess, wrapping into it stuff that didn't belong and omitting stuff that should have been included.  Let me listicle to explain:

1. Misleading Canadians on withdrawal of fighter jets in fight against ISIS?  Um, what?  There had been no discussion of this in years, and it is not clear what was so misleading.
2. Misleading Canadians about his service record?  Um, so Sajjan inflated his record (he and General Fraser overplay Medusa as a success--it was a shitshow), but that really is irrelevant.  Sure, I don't think that former military officers should be Minister or Secretary of Defence, but this is a strange thing to have here.
3. Presiding over wrongful accusation and dismissal of Vice-Admiral Norman.  The Norman affair was a mess, and it had a significant role in destabilizing the leadership of the CAF with the Vice Chief office involving about as much job security as being Trump's Comms person.  So, this is probably fair--that the MND should be left holding the bag for this mess even thought it was above his paygrade probably.
4. Engaging in a cover-up of sexual misconduct allegations?  I think that entirely misses the point.  It was not so much a cover-up but abdication of responsibility.  

The Vance/McDonald/etc mess is on Sajjan but not for covering up.  Sajjan's mistakes here were many (another listicle):

1. Not being sufficiently curious about allegations that arose about Vance--yes, he pushed onto staffers, but he should have thought about it, gotten more info as he had a decision to make every single day but especially around year three, four, and five--whether to keep Vance around.
2. Not being sufficiently curious about the state of the Deschamps report implementation.  Given the supposed priority of personnel, why didn't Sajjan push Vance to implement the report? Instead, that Vance did some stuff that was the opposite--the Duty to Report--stands out.
3. Letting Vance make senior appointments without much guidance or oversight.  Vance chose a guy who had a reputation for getting away with sexual misconduct--Mulligan Man Edmundson--as head of the personnel branch, which, yes, had much responsibility for sexual misconduct issues.  
4. Lying to the Defence Committee--I guess this is the coverup stuff that is in the actual censure motion.  To be clear, on this, Sajjan was not covering up sexual misconduct--he was covering up his failure to deal with sexual misconduct and abuse of power. 
5. Permitting the sense of impunity the senior officers had to do what they want, whether that is to golf with those who were being investigated or to appoint people with crappy records to high positions or to have a set of rules that only apply to junior officers, etc.
6. Oh, and, I forgot, appointing a new Chief of the Defence Staff with a problematic record.  Vetting is part of the job.
   

So, yes, Sajjan deserves to be censured, and he deserves to be shuffled out of the position.  But the opposition made a mess of the motion.  As a result, it looks more partisan than it needs to be, which blunts its edge.  Yes, all of this is partisan, but the best partisan attacks are those that look like they are purely in the national interest, putting the target on the defensive.  

Anyhow, because Sajjan is important for fund-raising and for vote-getting, Trudeau is going to keep him around until after the next election.  Which will erode his feminist credentials even further.  I wonder if they did the math on that--how likely is it that people will decide to vote for someone else because of Sajjan's deadweight?  I am sure they have surveyed and gamed it out.  I just wish there was an opposition party I could vote for.  

 

 

 

 

Happy Anniversary, Indiana Jones!

 Today is the 40th anniversary of the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It is my favorite movie, bar none.  The funny thing is that I avoided it at first because I thought it was about religion--some story I read featured the ark or something.  The second funny thing is that the first time I saw it was at summer camp, and the van for the group (the kids who stayed a full 8 weeks got to go to town during the evening in between 4 week sessions) was late.  We came in just as Marion was drinking the big dude under the table.  Yet even if one loses the first part, one of the greatest openings to any movie, and the MF snake in the MF plane (way before Sam Jackson), the movie still rocks.

So, why do I love it so? 

1. 
   The tagline for the second movie described the first one so well: "If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones."  Just so much great action, thrilling, even when you know the hero must live.  From the escape from the cave at the start to the bar fight to the sequence from the tomb to the plane to the truck chase to the sub scene to the opening of the ark, the movie just grabs you (or me, anyway).  
   
2. Indiana Jones is such a great character.  Smart, clever, resilient, funny, flawed, human (he gets hurt and feels the pain).  
3. Marion.  I married a snarky brunette with freckles.  Coincidence?  I am not sure.  Marion was the first female action hero that I can recall.  She was not just pretty, but she was determined, resourceful as her ability with a skillet against bad guys demonstrated, and, yes, she could drink.  Indiana was a fool to let her go, and we needed the fourth movie, despite its flaws, just so we could get Marion back in our lives again.
   
   
4. The best bad guys.  Not just the cartoonish Nazis--we love seeing Indy beat them and best them--but Belloq.  Whose smarts and arrogance made him a good match, the best match for Indiana Jones of all of the bad guys he faced.  He could not have tricked Belloq into drinking from the wrong cup.  
5. Did I mention the sequence from the tomb to the plane to the truck chase? Any of those would be the best action sequence in a movie but to have them back to back to back?  Wow.  
6. 
   Hey, a professor as hero?  Did that shape my destiny as well?  Well, no.  But still, woot!
7. So much funny stuff along the way.  The movie was just very well written.  
   
8. A great score.  John Williams's best stuff?  Not sure but it competes well with his Star Wars stuff.  

One can quibble--that Indiana Jones is a product of imperialism--it belongs in whose museum--and more, but what a great piece of entertainment that still works today.  Its imagery, its quotes and memes, and all the rest are still relevant today and are burned into popular culture.  

So, enjoy the ride as the map shows the hero moving across the world.

Quarantine Report, Week 65: Phased 1

 Ontario is loosening up.  Woot?  Um, not so woot.  Long lines yesterday at clothing stores which have been closed for a few months, the full extent of Costco is now open, and, yes, patios at restaurants.  It is not enough and too much.  It is not enough because the schools remain closed, and the kids could really use just a few weeks of hanging out together.  It is not enough for me because ultimate frisbee can only start in phase 2 in three weeks even though we know that outdoor stuff is really safe.  It is too much in that people are going to let their guards down even as there are variants that are pretty harmful to those who have only had one shot.  Ottawa and Ontario are at about 70% for one shot but only 10% for two.  That latter number will accelerate, but we aren't there yet.  

My basic approach is to be pessimistic in the short run and optimistic in the long run.  I am not confident that Canada will change the travel restrictions soon.  Indeed, last night, I had an epiphany--that there was no way they would change the restrictions until after Trudeau comes back from the G7.  This government cares mostly about optics (except when it comes to having a defence minister who does not know what the job entails) so they would not want to reduce the restrictions at a time where it would make things very easy for PMJT to come back.  So, the "logic" of early July makes more sense in that context.  That and Doug Ford blaming foreigners for his own failed responses makes the Liberals more cautious.

 In a mostly meeting-less week (not a trend, alas), we made much progress on planning a series of CDSN events.  The summer institute's speaker lineup is nearly complete, the Year Ahead in December is getting there, our 9-11 event is 2/3s set, and we have started to go through the many applications for a new Project Coordinator.  I am taking my time on this hire, as I have learned that rushing it does not work out so well.  We have one podcast to record this week before we take a pause.  Our wonderful podcast producer, Melissa Jennings, is traveling and could use a break.  So, after the upcoming week, the next #BattleRhythm will be around Bastille Day, which is actually when I am slated for my next shot.

The baking continues.  I mentioned the s'more brownies I was going to make last weekend.  They were as gooey and as tasty as I had hoped for.  I distributed to our neighbors as I didn't want to cause Mrs. Spew and I to go into sugar shock. The next recipes?  Not sure, but the pressure is on as my family has informed me that I will be cooking and baking at least one night of the Saideman reunion in August.  I am going to have to figure out what worked best over the past year .... that is besides chocolate chip cookie dough pots which are, of course, required.

 

 

 

 

The story at home of late is the aging of Bob.  My daughter insisted long ago that she wanted a cat, and so we got Bob from a shelter.  He turned out to be less cuddly than we hoped, the kind of cat who would take a good petting session and turn it into a good practice first aid session.  In the past few years, he has slowed down.  During the pandemic, he has gotten positively cuddly.  He now limps around the house as his back legs and back bother him.  So, we have moved from mutual suspicion and distrust to detente to pandemic pals.  I have never been a cat person and am a bit allergic (but my daughter suggesting at age 6 or 7 that we get divorced so she could have one house with mom and a cat and another with dad and the dogs causes me to drop the objection).  So, he now insists on being picked up and put on my lap a couple of times a day to hang out for a while, making it hard to type.  But since I regret not spending enough time in the latter days of the lives of dog 1 and dog 2, I figure I can do this for Bob.  We are nearing the stage where we have to start weighing how much pain he is in versus how much he still has a decent life.  We have been through this before, but it does not get easier.  

I will finish on a silly note.  The good news is that I am biking farther and farther, getting more exercise as the weather has been mostly terrific. The bad news that the southern end of my route has both a donut shop and an ice cream truck.  Last week, I had to try the bubble waffle cone.  Well, it was more waffle than cone as you can see.  I also ordered the cookie monster ice cream for complete decadence.  Because the only way through this pandemic is to grab and hold onto (and eat) the sweetest stuff one can find.  Even if it offsets the benefits of the bike ride.  

Good luck finding the sweet stuff while we make our way through the next phases of this thing.

 

This Is Canada

 In the aftermath of a mass murder attack, folks tend to say: this isn't America or this isn't Canada.  As Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino noted, this is very much America.  Canada isn't the US--it has less gun violence, its racial politics are different, but, yes, violence is inherent in the system.

In 2015, after violent Islamophobic hate crimes in Toronto, some local Muslim girls were warned not to jaywalk in case a driver decided impulsively to hit them.

So, many people have worried about this exact kind of attack for at least six years. https://t.co/LKd7XbGM0t

— Selena Ross (@seleross) June 9, 2021

We just had an attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario, where a driver killed four members of the family leaving the youngest severely wounded and orphaned.  This is not the first attack on Muslims.  An attack on a mosque was only four years ago.  It seems light years away when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed Syrian refugees in the face of rising xenophobia and Islamophobia.  Since then, Quebec has passed legislation squarely aimed against Muslim women who were hijabs as well as other religious minorities.  It may be too much to say that the recent violence is state sanctioned but not too far to say that the province has created a permissive environment that allows those who hate Muslims to feel as if they have a legitimate grievance.  

To be sure, this is not just a Quebec thing as that legislation is popular in the rest of Canada, that violence has occurred in Ontario not just this week but often.  That Muslims throughout Canada report hostility and harassment on a regular basis.  

This is a time of hate.  Several things are coming together.  The pandemic and the economic challenges have caused people to seek blame, to be frustrated, to seek to act out.  Fox and its ilk compete to curry with the resentful--putting out the most awful brew of lies and blamecasting.  Social media giants like facebook, twitter, and google have pursued clicks and encouraged others to do so, helping to radicalize folks.  The shift in right wing politics, where resentment boils over, has led to politicians either tolerating awful stuff because they fear electoral repercussions (notice the Republicans buying into the Big Lie, notice the Conservative Party of Canada having fights about whether to go further right or to become more centrist) or embracing it in order to get votes.  The People's Party of Canada is a xenophobic party seeking to use hate to get beyond two percent of the vote.  The centrist parties are reluctant to confront the hate of the so-called populists.  Trudeau criticized the Quebec legislation when it came out a few years ago. Now, he mostly demurs.  

These are very dangerous times for those who are different and for Democracy.  Canada is in better shape since its diversity and its institutions make it hard for the Conservatives to shift further right and still win elections. But the environment is still breeding violence.  Perhaps most Canadians buy into some version of the multicultural ideal of strength from diversity, living with each other, but there are sufficient numbers of folks out there willing to do harm.  This, alas, is Canada.

Quarantine Report 64: Fluffier Than Before

 Yeah, I have let myself completely go during this pandemic.  Which means I have had the opportunity to notice how daily growth can produce notable changes every once in a while.  Like, when I was growing my beard out, it seemed the same for a while and then suddenly much bigger.  Now, tis my hair which seemed a bit long suddenly feels like I have wings on the sides of my head.  I am the fluffiest I have been since ... high school I guess.   I can feel my hair flop around as I go downstairs or as the breeze blows when I go outside to get the mail. It has been seven months since my last haircut, and the next one will happen after I get my second shot which is still a month or more away.

And, yes, we have both more and less certainty in Ontario.  The authorities now say we of GenX-AZ can mix if we want to, getting Moderna or Pfizer for our second shot or we can stick with AZ.  Of course, the problem with the latter is finding it, since there is not so much of it.  They say that we are eligible for our second shot 12 weeks after our first, but then there are some folks who are getting ahead of that pace.  The good news is that the Ontario authorities are calling all the folks over 80 who have not gotten a second shot.  The bad news is that this is necessary in part because the web-based system was down.  And, yeah, for those hunting shots, there are two paths--the govt locations which book up fast and the pharmacies which require tenacity to find one accepting appointments.  I did go on campus briefly and saw the line for vaccines, so I feel pretty good about getting my second dose (non-AZ, if I want that) as Carleton is only vaxxing students, faculty, and staff.  

It was my first time on campus since ..... October.  Last time, it was to get a flu shot.  This time, it was to pick up 25 copies of a book we are assigning and providing to the participants.  We have a nearly complete roster of participants--emerging scholars, junior military officers, junior policy officers, etc.  We have a nearly complete roster of presenters.  So, the event is in good shape.  A key part of it is to build bridges and foster networking across the traditional divides.  That was supposed to be facilitated by lunches/dinners/coffee/bar time.  So, the event will be online, which not only means less social time but also less time--there is no way I want folks to be on screens for entire days.  The bright side is that we don't have to arrange travel or the like, so it is an easier event to organize.  We have some stuff we have to do, but we are nearly there.

The CDSN and CSIDS are also organizing a couple of 20th anniversary of 9/11 events, so we are working on that as well.  We dropped the 50th anniversary of BattleRhythm this week, so that was a nice marker of how much progress we have made.  As we say on this episode, we really don't know who is listening, but we've had enough folks across town tell us that they listen that we believe we have some listeners and many of them are in or near government.  I am most grateful to Stéfanie von Hlatky for being such a great host, as this has added a heap of worktime to her very busy schedule.  She brings terrific insights, much humor, and great connections that make for great interviews.  Melissa Jennings, the CDSN's Director of Communications, produces each podcast with great care, diligence, and patience.  Paxon Mayer, our PhD RA, helps prep us with the research she does for us.  It is a terrific team, and I am lucky to have them.  Otherwise, we are in the middle of a transition as our previous project coordinator has moved on, and we are in the midst of hiring a new staffer.  If I didn't buy principal-agency theory before, I certainly do now.  

On the Canadian defence scene, there was not too much news this week--just one more senior officer losing his job, this time for uttering the N word apparently.  Two retired chiefs of the defence staff wrote a regrettable op-ed where they worried about the plight of senior officers.  Not a great look, given that this culture that they blame is one that they did little/nothing to change.  It happened on their watch, and now they want to say "hey, due process" at a time where it is clear intra-CAF processes are anything but due.  So, they didn't cover themselves in glory.  My take on that was:

When abuse of power is such a central part of the CAF story, two former CDS's complaining about how this has affected the senior officers reveals more than the authors intend.

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) June 4, 2021

On the personal front, it might best be summed up by this latest google map of where I traveled in May, quite a contrast to the average May where I have done fieldwork in Brazil, South Korea, and Europe.

The farthest north and west I went was to Costco.  The farthest south was biking to Manotick for exercise and for, um, ice cream.  Indeed, the trend of the week was combining exercise with bad eating as I tried out the donut shack and a new ice cream place.  I have lost weight during the pandemic, but most of that was in the first few months.  My plateau since has reflected a balancing of stress exercise, stress baking, and stress eating.  I am guessing next month's map will feature the trip to Carleton as my longest voyage of June.  I am looking forward to the family reunion at the end of July in Philly.  My daughter will make it from LA so I get to see her for the first time since Dec 2019, and it will be the first time seeing everyone else since Thanksgiving of 2019.  Zoom is helpful, but it just isn't the same.  Oh, and samplers of beers in Philly bars await me along with steak sandwiches and pretzels.  We shall see if I have to really quarantine when I get back, as that is what the Canadian border policy calls for.  Will it change by then?  I doubt it.

Time to make some s'mores brownies as the treat of the week--the aforementioned stress baking.  Be well and good luck in this uncertain time!

215 and Then So Many More

 Canada has been shaken by the discovery of a mass grave for 215 Indigenous kids at a residential school.  Children from Indigenous families were taken away from their communities and forced to go these schools that were designed to remove their identities and make them as white and as Christian (Catholic, either mostly or entirely, I have not read enough to be sure) as possible.  The conditions at these places caused tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other diseases to thrive, not unlike concentration camps I have toured in Germany, and priests and nuns and others abused the children.  

As an immigrant, I did not have the opportunity to be failed by Canadian schools (my Canadian friends report not getting much info about this stuff when they went to school).  Instead, I learned only a smidge as this stuff was referred to in the citizenship guide we read to prepare for the test:

This text understates the harm as the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that 4,000 children died at these schools--a far higher rate than kids in the rest of the population--and a number that many see as an underestimate.  What always gets me is that these policies and schools continued into the 1990s.  Well, that's not fair.  They continue to this day but in a different form.  Instead of residential schools akin to concentration camps, we have kids taken away from their families due to welfare policies where the parents are seen as unfit due to the scars and legacies of the past--that past oppression and persecution has lead to poverty and other poor conditions, so the state comes in and takes kids away.  

The Commission had all kinds of recommendations including spending money on finding the rest of the mass graves.  It does appear that some of this has been funded, but it is not clear to me why so little progress has been made.  

The US has a similar situation as the equivalent of re-education camps were set up in the US, they had high rates of death and disease and accidents.  I don't know if this stuff is covered in the Native American museum in Washington, DC, as my visit there was cut short.  Each year (except during pandemics), my daughter and I visit a few Smithsonian museums on the Mall in DC.  Three years ago, we went to the Native American History Museum, but we didn't stay long.  My daughter was really uncomfortable with the government that continues to persecute Native Americans curating a museum about them.  There were displays that were critical of the Trail of Tears and about Standing Rock, but I don't remember anything about the damage done to the kids.  

Anyhow, because I didn't know that much about the Canadian experience, I felt a bit more comfortable with genocide being used to describe what the US did to Native Americans than what Canada did to the First Nations.  The more I learn, the more I realize that the word fits only too well.  Much more needs to be done to recognize what happened, to compensate for the damage, and to improve the policies and the realities that the Indigenous people of Canada face. 

Quarantine, Week 63: Revisiting the Past

I was not expecting nostalgia week to be this week, but it happens.

First, today is the anniversary of War Machine coming out four years ago, the first time I helped the script writing of a movie!  Well, sort of.

Second, speaking of Afghanistan, I gave a lecture to the NATO Field School, a program led by Alex Moens, a CDSN co-director, on ISAF's performance in Afghanistan.  So, that forced me to think about my two most recent books which not so recent anymore.  The students asked really good questions and made me think a bit about whether the stuff I believed then applies now and what I thought about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  And ye olde ambivalence returned--I know that leaving will not help Afghanistan, but I also know that staying a year would make a huge difference.  So, a tricky thing to end one's participation in a forever war, which, yes, will continue.

Third, less nostalgia and much more dark history.  Despite studying the 67 page citizenship test guide, I really don't know much about Canadian history.  That was driven home yesterday, when news broke that someone had found 215 bodies of indigenous kids who had been taken from their families and forces into residential schools.  CNN calls it unthinkable, but it has been known for a long time (although not by me) that kids died at these "schools" at a rate similar to POWs in German camps during WWII.  That the lack of medical facilities and, to be blunt, the complete and total apathy about the condition of the kids meant that TB and other diseases ravaged them.  Just awful.  I knew it was bad, but not this bad.  And the residential schools didn't close until ... 1996.  25 years ago?!  That is appalling!  

But not everything was old or awful this week.  We had a student defend her dissertation proposal in record time, making my proposal class look good. Of course, it was entirely her focus and work that made it happen, but I can still do a happy dance.

My niece graduated from law school (keeping the streak alive, as she is the only lawyer in this next generation of Saidemans [my cousins' kids are too young, so they could be lawyers too].  The rest of the children of my siblings have neatly avoided that whole law school thing.  Anyway, back to the new lawyer who will be doing much good, as she is very much a social justice warrior.  We are super proud and know that:

On the vaccine front, Ontario is now moving towards second doses as we have reached 60% of folks getting their first ones.  That appears to be the magic number for when the pace of first doses slows and there "needs" to be more arms for the vaccines that are piling up.  The new schedule suggests June or early July, which are upon us, for me and Mrs. Spew.  So, maybe the date on my first vax document of
mid-July will actually be realized.  But still so much uncertainty and little faith that they will get their shit together.  

It has been six months or so since my last haircut, and my hair is now longer and thicker than any time since my teens, I think.  So much hair over/around my ears that masks and glasses slide off a bit.  Not long enough for a manbun.... but I can see it from here.

Good weather and clarity about the relative safety of the outdoors has meant more conversations with neighbors.  We don't wear masks outdoors while still keeping a distance.  I hope that other lessons will be applied--less pandemic theater of wiping down surfaces and perhaps more thought about ventilation--would be nice.  I wish Ontario would relax the outdoor rules--folks can gather in groups of 10 but no sports leagues.  Which means no ultimate.  I am much more confident that we can play ultimate and not transmit the disease, but governments lag.  

Similarly, a report came out saying that Canada should do away with much of the travel quarantine bs for those who are vaccinated and for those who are partially so.  Which means, yes, they need to start deciding how to implement vaccine passports of some kind... despite leaving the collection of data to the provinces.  Sometimes, Canada does federalism in the dumbest possible ways.  

The highlight of next week will be the 50th episode of BattleRhythm--the podcast has been much work but very much worth it.  We still don't really know who the audience is, but it does seem to have one.  I am very grateful to Stef vH for agreeing to do it, as she puts a lot more work into it than I do.  And our producer, Melissa Jennings, does such a great job with it.  I will write more about the two years of podcasting next week.  I will note hear that when someone tells me they follow me on twitter, I get embarassed and apologize (I am not alone as there was a thread this past week where that was the modal response).  But when folks say they listen to the podcast, I do feel pride.  Perhaps because my social media stuff ranges from least thoughtful and edited (twitter) to half-baked (Semi-Spew) to most considered and edited and with smart, careful hands on the wheel (the aforementioned SvH and MJ).  

My American friends have a three day weekend to kick off summer.  Enjoy!  We had ours last weekend.  Get vaxxed and again!

 

 

CDSN, Year 2: More Zoom, Still Woot!

 Two years ago was the Canadian Defence and Security Network's official launch, and I marked here last year the progress in the first year, so why not do it again?  We had to re-arrange stuff and cancel some activities because of the pandemic, but, as I keep saying, COVID reveals the weaknesses and the strengths of organizations just like it reveals pre-existing conditions in people.  Overall, the CDSN responded well to the shocks, as our forthcoming annual report will make clear.  Using the framework I started with last year, I will note the highlights and the lowlights and the next steps.  I am very proud of our team and how we made our way through the quarantine and made some contributions along the way.

So, what have been the highlights?

• Continuing to build an excellent team.  Melissa Jennings, our Director of Communications, now is responsible for two podcasts as we added Conseils de Sécurité (more on that below) to BattleRhythm.  She has built a respository for all of our publications, she has managed the Youtube account that holds the videos of our events, she mostly runs the team of research assistants She is the glue that holds the CDSN together.  Stephanie Plante serves as our Project Coordinator for the year before moving on next month.  Her energy was most welcome during our many zoom meetings, and she helped out on a number of fronts including budgeting and event planning.  We had a new team of research assistants.  Paxton Mayer helped keep the podcast updated with news reports, produced the Year Ahead report, and did much research along the way.  Our team of MA students--Vincent Belanger, Evelyne Goulet, and Graeme Hopkins--were super helpful, including translating some of our activities into French, supporting the podcast, helping us run our various events, and engaging in random bits of research as we went along.  I'd include a picture of all us working together, but I have not met any of them in person except Paxton.  Given the stresses of the year and the challenges of working through zoom, these students exceeded all expectations, and I am very grateful for everything they did.  Again, the folks at Carleton, especially Sherry LaPlante in the research accounting office, did tremendous work for us.
• We have doubled our podcasts! Conseils de Sécurité hosted by Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé and Thomas Juneau is a joint venture with RSA-NSA, producing podcasts in French.  They kicked off by interviewing the Minister of Foreign Affairs and have kept up the pace quite well. Stef vH and I had a very good year, improving the rhythm of BattleRhythm, making it less of a grind on Melissa and Stef.  The highest highlight was the recent joint interview of Deputy Minister of Defence Jody Thomas and Acting Chief of Defence Staff LGen Wayne Eyre.  The crisis of misconduct and abuse of power has been a steady drumbeat (yeah, I know what I am doing) for the past several months on the podcast, so this joint interview was the culmination of that.  We have gotten much positive feedback, although I still don't really know who listens besides my sister.  
• Our five research themes held workshops this year online and produced a quite a bit of research.  I am so grateful to the co-directors of the CDSN for leading these efforts despite the tough times.  The CDSN survey, with the Nanos firm, one of our partners, will be a public good for scholars of Canadian defence and security.  It produced interesting results, and the rollout, led by JC Boucher, gave it much visibility in government and beyond.  We will be doing another one in year 6 of the grant. 
• Our annual events went very well.  We held online versions of the Year Ahead and of the Capstone.  The Year Ahead included panels on China, comparing pandemic responses, greyzone warfare, a great diversity fireside chat, and the keynote conversation with Ambassador for Women, Peace, and Security Jacqueline O'Neil.  It didn't have the same networking punch as there were no lines for coffee or lunch for folks to meet and chat, but we had sharp people provide insightful perspectives about the stuff on the near horizon.  The Capstone event, which aims to give a platform to the best presentations from our partners and contributors across Canada, highlighted a variety of interesting work.  Again, I regret that the networking component suffered, but two Capstones in the books means it is now an institution!  
• More new partners! We added two new organizations to our roster of partners: the aforementioned Network for Strategic Analysis and L’Institut militaire de Québec.  It was not planned but was not entirely a coincidence that our two new partners are Francophone entities.  The CDSN is also the RCDS, and although I am linguistically lame, our network is not.  Having partners focused on activities and entities in Quebec [IMQ] and building bridges between the Francophone and English communities [NSA] helps the CDSN be a truly national, coast to coast community.  
• Our first post-doc and our first book workshop!  Linna Tam-Seto is/was our first post-doc.  She fit in very well with the Personnel Theme, as she worked on mentoring, gender, and the Canadian Armed Forces.  Her work was quite timely, making her a natural interview target for the Canadian media as the CAF leadership crisis reverberated.  Stephanie Martel was our first Book Workshop victim/winner, as we had a team of folks scrub her book so that it would find a good press.  Her work on Asian security communities was most interesting, and I look forward to seeing it in print soon.
• We had our first Undergraduate Excellence Scholars: Ozan Ayata and Stella-Luna Ha.  The aim of this effort is to get undergraduates, especially those from traditionally underrepresented communities, interested in defence and security and involved in our efforts.  Stella and Ozan played a role in our Capstone, and we will be seeking other means by which to engage in undergraduates in our efforts. 
  
• We held a second COVID response conference where we asked more government agencies for questions, and we produced recently a memo that gave our responses in a short format.
• We worked with Organizations in Solidarity in the aftermath of last year's police violence to learn how we can do better to elevate the voices of racialized communities in Canada.  This has led to us consulting people from a variety of perspectives and getting proposals from different EDI consulting groups.  We are still figuring out our approach.  The conversations have been productive. 
  

Lowlights? Yes, alas.

• The pandemic caused us to cancel the first Summer Institute.  We will hold this summer's institute online.  I am looking forward to it, but all of our meetings that got moved online just aren't the same--a key part of the CDSN is to build networks bridging various divides.  Much harder to do so when people don't meet in person.  I have vowed to have a social event once we can to bring together many of the people who we have met online so that we can meet in person.
• We didn't have a Paterson Chair talk since we want that to be an in-person event.
  
• We have had some churn, as my military friends would say, in our team.  We are hiring to replace Stephanie P, which means time spent on hiring and training, which means more work for Melissa.  The new project coordinator will be our third in three years.  I am hoping this position does not become the Spinal Tap drummer spot.  This is normal for our kind of enterprise, but it does, well, disturb our rhythm.  
• Our grant efforts did not pan out this year.  We have enough funds to do what we need to do, but not enough to do what we want to do.  We came close, but did not finish in the money.  The good news is that our efforts were quite good and we should be competitive next year.
  

We've been lucky that our kind of stuff can be moved online, and we have been determined to make things work despite the complexities.   Our online events have worked out well, and we will have more tricks up our sleeves after the pandemic.   I am so very grateful for the patience, enthusiasm, and insights that the various folks working in the CDSN and those working with the CDSN have provided over the past year.  Hard to believe we are into year 3.  Rock on, Canadian defence and security community.

Quarantine, Week 62: Making News and Making Plans

It was a week chock full of Canadian civ-mil stuff, mostly inspired by our podcast where Stef vH and I interviewed Deputy Minister Jody Thomas and Acting Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre.  That interview inspired posts about the parliament looking in the wrong place and the realization that Canada's civilians lost control of the armed forces a while ago.  It was strange to see past and on-going work on legislatures and the armed forces start to transition into future work--departments/ministries of defense--in a single week, but that is where my head is at these days. 

That and making all kinds of plans--CDSN, teaching, and personal.  We are putting together the pieces for three sets of CDSN and CSIDS events--our Summer Institute in August, 9/11 20th anniversary, and the Year Ahead.  The first is an effort to provide some professional develop and networking for the next generation of military officers, policy officers, academics, journalists, and others in our defence and security community.  We have participants and, thanks to this week's work, we now have most of the presenter spots filled.  Now, I just need to figure out the daily small group exercises.  

We are working on a couple of ways to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  We hope to put a video of many folks across the various communities who will speak to what we can learn from our reaction on that day and since that day.  We are also working on a couple of panels with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute--one focused on protecting North America and one figuring out what we can learn from how the government and society reacted to 9/11 and the impact of the ensuing policies.  

The third event is our annual event that previews the next year.  We have consulted our partners, especially those in government, to figure out what are the things in the near horizon that we need to think about.  We hope to have an in-person event.  We should have a good mix of panels on a variety of topics.  

Teaching plans firmed up as we got our schedules for 2021-22.  My courses will be online in the fall and in-person in the winter.  That is what I preferred as I am uncertain how many students will be vaccinated by August, given how the rollout here has been messy.  I am not worried about myself, as I should get my second shot by mid-summer (see below), but students from wherever.  I am teaching US Foreign and Security Policy this fall for the first time in a couple of years, and I have to figure out the balance of "the old systems work again" vs "Trump broke the system, so how much of foreign policy making has changed".  I have Civ-Mil at 8:30am face to face in the winter, so that will be a rude re-introduction of winter commuting, but it will be good to see folks in person.  For both semesters, I will be teaching again the Dissertation Proposal class.  We made sufficient progress this winter that the fall Diss Prop class will be smaller as several students will defend their proposal this summer.

The big thing to plan now is the summer trip.  Really?  Maybe.  Depending on when I get the second shot, I hope to join my family for our annual summer reunion.  We are converging on my mom's place for heaps of steak sandwiches and pretzels.  The trick is not getting into the US but getting home.  Maybe things will changed for those who have been vaxxed, but I doubt that the Canadian government will move that fast.  So, it will likely require a covid test in Philly before I return, uploading info to an app, getting tested at the border, pledging to live by myself in the non-Mrs. Spew-occupied parts of the house and having her do all of the shopping for two weeks, and heaps of monitoring.  Oh my.  And, yeah, it will just be me as Bob is too old to be left in a kennel and catsitting in a pandemic is difficult.  

The plan until then is to just bike and treadmill and bake (perhaps less) and be alert to the ever-changing policies in Ontario.  The incompetent murder clowns here still seem to think that outside stuff can be bad, and they are confused about how to get people their second doses.  We will probably get AZ next month, but if the tests show that mixing works, then I will get whatever I can.  I am tempted to get a third short while in Philly since access in the US now is easy.  While the Canadians can be smug about reaching the US level of first shots, we still live in a far more uncertain world as the shots are not widely available or easily accessible.  The provincial rollout has been a mess and has produced very inequitable results.  The aggregate numbers look pretty good, but underneath that is a mess.  

Q time is strange--2020 seemed to take forever, but it is already May 2021.  We are pretty close in North America to getting to a new normal.  I know that the events of the fall will be strange, but I am hoping the winter (full of ski trips with friends and relatives) will be full of relief and even, dare I say it, joy.  

Be well!

 

 

The Failure of Civilian Control: Canadian Edition

 As a scholar of civil-military relations, I have been watching the Canadian scene closely for a few years.  I was not closely following the Deschamps report and its implementation, but as I learn more about it and listen to experts on gender and the Canadian Armed Forces, I realize that civilian control of the military in Canada is really lacking.  No, this is not about the possibility of a coup, it is about whether the CAF will do what the civilians want.  Whenever I talked about civilian control in Canada and how lame the Parliament is in this process, pointing out that the only two civilians that matter are the Prime Minister and the Minister of National Defence, folks would point to the Department of National Defence and the Deputy Minister.  I would respond that those civilians are not elected, limiting democratic control of the armed forces. But now, I have to go a bit further.

I have been thinking about this since Stéfanie von Hlatky and I interviewed Deputy Minister Jody Thomas and Acting Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre for the BattleRhythm podcast.  For me, the most striking part of the podcast was at the 43:20 mark (or thereabouts) when Thomas says that her views on the Deschamps report were not welcome and that nothing structural was done to implement Deschamps's recommendations.  This is most striking because the DM and the CDS have overlapping responsibilities but are supposed to work as a team.  This interview suggests that Vance and his team left the civilians entirely out of it.  

This does not absolve the civilians of blame or responsibility, but points again to the most relevant civilians--the Prime Minister and the Minister of National Defence.  I have been harping away for a few months that Harjit Sajjan does not understand the job of the Minister of National Defence, mostly because of how he responded to questions from the Defence Committee about how to deal with allegations about the Chief of Defence Staff.  But the sexual misconduct/abuse of power scandal is deeper than that.  For me, the big question is: why weren't some of the Deschamps recommendations implemented and why was Operation Honour so focused on an element, Duty to Report, that was the exact opposite of what Deschamp recommended?

So, before I get back to civilian control, let me remind myself and whoever reads this what Deschamps recommended and what was implemented (blue) or not (red) or maybe/sort of (purple):

1. Acknowledge that inappropriate sexual conduct is a serious problem that exists in the CAF and undertake to address it.
2. Establish a strategy to effect cultural change to eliminate the sexualized environment and to better integrate women, including by conducting a gender-based analysis of CAF policies. [Op Honour really did not aim to change the culture of the CAF, and, as I will discuss further below, the way GBA+ was applied, it really didn't hit lots of core of the sexualized environment.]
3. Create an independent center for accountability for sexual assault and harassment outside of the CAF with the responsibility for receiving reports of inappropriate sexual conduct, as well as prevention, coordination and monitoring of training, victim support, monitoring of accountability, and research, and to act as a central authority for the collection of data. [Not sure how independent the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre is, but Thomas says in the interview that the data collection remains a problem.]
4. Allow members to report incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault to the center for accountability for sexual assault and harassment, or simply to request support services without the obligation to trigger a formal complaint process. [Duty to report contradicted this directly, requiring anyone who experienced, witnessed, or heard about sexual misconduct to report.  The experts argue that "Duty to Respond" is a better way to go--to require agencies and personnel to respond to a situation as the survivor wants, as some want treatment/help but not prosecution of the perpetrator.  In the US, one can do a restricted report which focuses on care of the survivor and then later change to unrestricted which brings in the legal process (h/t to Megan Mackenzie for pointing this out to me)].  
5. With the participation of the center for accountability for sexual assault and harassment: Develop a simple, broad definition of sexual harassment that effectively captures all dimensions of the member's relationship with the CAF.  [Not sure about all of this but the stories of the past three months indicate that the consent issue is hardly clear or well worked out within the CAF--this is something that Stef vH has focused on in her testimony before the Defence Committee and in our podcasts]
   
6.  With the participation of the center for accountability for sexual assault and harassment, develop a unified policy approach to address inappropriate sexual conduct and include as many aspects as possible of inappropriate sexual conduct in a single policy using plain language. [Given that there seemed to be different rules for the CDS and other double standards, nope.]

There were more recommendations, but you get the idea.  The point here is that Vance's Operation Honour really didn't follow through on what Deschamps recommended.  Of course, there is no obligation by the government to implement fully an independent report, even if they asked for it.  But this government said they were putting personnel first and put the personnel section of the Defence Review in the front of the Strong, Secure, Engaged document to demonstrate that commitment.  So, one might have reasonably expected that the one person above the Chief of Defence Staff would check in from time to time and see how things were going.  By 2018, there were folks raising questions about Operation Honour and the Duty to Report.  Shouldn't Sajjan have looked at what Vance and his team had done and raised questions?  

 

A more specific question: the CDS is the one who promotes people within the CAF, such as the Chief of Military Personnel, but if personnel is such an important issue, shouldn't the MND give advice and lean hard on the CDS to pick an individual who might not have had a record of sexual misconduct?  Vice Admiral Edmundson had earned the nickname "Mulligan man" for getting second chances.  That was Vance's decision, but the Minister's job was to oversee the CDS, especially on priority issues.  And not to exaggerate things too much, but Personnel Chief may not be seen as an important job--it is not as attractive as Chief of the Navy or head of CJOC--but Lenin and Trostsky gave personnel stuff to Stalin because they found it boring and look what happened to them.  For the priority issue?  So, again, Sajjan didn't do his job and does not seem to understand his job.

Which gets us back to civilian control of the CAF.  Which civilians are making sure the CAF does what the civilians want?  Not the Minister of National Defence.  Not the Prime Minister who keeps an incompetent MND in place because Sajjan matters a lot for votes and campaign contributions.  Not the House of Commons.  Yes, the Defence Committee did do some work on this the past few months, but tended to stray into mindless point-scoring rather than asking why the CAF did not implement the Deschamps report.  The Status of Women Committee is doing a better job, but the problem, of course, is that neither of these committees nor the Parliament itself have much power to shift money or affect promotions.  They can legislate, sort of.  And they must in order to have not just independent reporting but prosecution of perpetrators.  

 

The only civilians who have really played the role they are supposed to in Canada's civil-military dynamics are: the media and the outsiders.  Mercedes Stephenson, Amanda Connolly, and those elsewhere who followed up on the story of abuse of power and sexual misconduct have pulled the fire alarm, by providing survivors with a chance to tell their stories and by putting the collective feet of the government, DND, and the CAF to the fire [two fire metaphors, Steve?].  Similarly, those who have been working on this for years--Megan Mackenzie of Simon Fraser; Linna Tam-Seto who is the CDSN's first post-doc; Maya Eichler of Mount Saint Vincent; Stéfanie von Hlatky of Queens, the CDSN, and RSA; Alan Okros of Canadian Forces College; Charlotte Duval-Lantoine of CGAI; Allan English of Queens'; and many others.  They have talked to the media, appeared before the various committees, and been on social media.  But all they can do is speak and write.  

 

The responsibility for the Canadian Armed Forces falls squarely on just two civilians.  One has delegated the job to the other, and the other does not know what the job is.  Which suggests that the former does not really care that much about this issue.  Justin Trudeau may be a feminist in some areas, but certainly not here.  He has been PM long enough that he owns all of this even if Vance was appointed by his predecessor.  Trudeau kept Vance around even though Vance shirked in the classic principal-agent language--that he did not do what the civilians wanted when it came to the Deschamps report.  And it is on those civilians who failed to oversee, to incentivize, and, if necessary (and it was necessary), find a better agent to do the job.

 

So, yeah, I am not sure there has been civilian control of the CAF under Trudeau.  And, yes, with that level of commitment, I don't know if the Arbour recommendations, whatever they are, will have more of an impact than those of the previous retired female supreme court justice.

 

Where the House of Commons Should Focus And Where It Does, Civ-Mil Scandal Edition

 Damn those incentive structures, damn them to hell!  I know why Canada's defence committee is so lame, but it is still most frustrating.  I was talking to a reporter this morning who wanted to discuss the Defence Committee's focus on the partisan games--now focusing on what the Harper people did or did not do in 2015.  It does seem like the Conservatives in 2015 took these issues about as seriously as the Liberals did in 2018: hey, there are rumors Jon Vance has engaged in bad behavior, can do we do the minimum possible?  Ok.  

I tend to think that those in the highest offices should be held to a higher standard.  So, a Supreme Court nominee facing credible accusations of misconduct should be ditched.  A Chief of Defence Staff nominee who has multiple (two is multiple) allegations/rumors should either be dropped or should be micro-managed when it comes to issues relating to those rumors.  A Chief facing rumors again around the time a normal term ends should be moved from, easily.  

The fun part of the media and for the parties is that they can focus on the who knew what when in 2015 and 2018 rather than addressing the more important issues going forward: 

a) why wasn't the Deschamps report implemented?
b) why was the Duty to Report a centerpiece of Operation Honour despite it directly conflicting with Deschamps's recommendations?

These are the retrospective questions, among others, that can help us understand what happens next--will the military resist the next retired Supreme Court justice's recommendations?  Will the civilians at the top let that happen?  

In the interview Stéfanie von Hlatky and I had last week to be in our next #BattleRhythm podcast this Wednesday, we asked about this, and the answer was pretty striking. I am not going to step on our podcast, but I will say Sam Huntington might have been pleased but not so much anyone else.  We did not have time to push further, but I do think future study by the media, by relevant parliamentary committees, and by academics should examine why Vance and his team resisted the report, how they were able to resist it, and whether those dynamics are still in play.

In the US  and in other allies, resistance to moving prosecution of sexual misconduct outside the chain of command is crumbling, mostly because everyone has realized that militaries can't handle it adequately.  

And this gets us back to the politicians.  We have two committees working on this--the Defence Committee and the Status of Women committee.  The latter is consulting a wide variety of experts, trying to figure out how to make this stuff work better.  The former is mostly now engaged in point-scoring.  I am trying to figure out if there is a division of labour between the two or the two committees having different incentives.   

For me, it goes back to the paper I wrote with Phil Lagassé that was originally called "Ignorant Critic or Informed Overseer" which the editors insisted in changing.  Parties here reward politicians for scoring points, not for improving policies.  Party discipline is intense here, so politicians can't buck their masters to ask tough questions of their own party or go off message when asking questions of the opposing parties' officials.  So, in this matter, the focus turned to the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff rather than either remaining on the wounded Defence Minister or on real policy reforms.  

And, yes, the media plays along with it because a good, bloody fight between parties is a hell of a lot more fun than a policy fight.  I should disaggregate the media, as the reporters who have talked to the people who have survived the misconduct and abuse of power have revealed so much that needed to be exposed.  But so much of the conversation quickly then turns to the parties.  Both of the major parties messed up this file.  So, maybe there is some systemic stuff going on--not just within the CAF but within the political system as well.

Of course, the only folks who have incentives to study the stuff that is systemically broken are the academics.  Because that is what grants are made of?  Or just outraged outsiders venting their spleens?  The good news is that there are academics out there, including the Personnel Theme of the CDSN, looking into this stuff, who are not only appearing in the media but in front of these committees.  I need to chat with them to see if they get better questions from the Status of Women committee than from the Defence Committee, but I have a guess. 

Anyhow, listen to our podcast in two days (available at all of the usual podcast outlets including here) and let me know what you think.