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Ryder

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Yup I find western world hypocritical in many ways. They have indulged in human rights violations in middle east (on fake evidence w.r.t Iraq WMD)....all through that time they also helped build up PRC to what it is in some very short-sighted way (they both assumed PRC people cannot level up and stay as cheap wage stuff only etc and also assumed that somehow PRC turns into some less draconian entity after what it had done). It was all part of globalist haze of winning the cold war and deciding to reward PRC in some way since they did their bit to help w.r.t USSR in 2nd half of cold war etc.

US PNTR was signed literally while the blood stains where still quite fresh in tianenmen, ridiculous how hypocritical western govts are and how greedy+dumb wallstreet (And all the donor groups) are.

It is quite unimaginable to me what west has done w.r.t Turkey (NATO ally) for example (this goes well past Erdogan own short-sighted mistakes)...as direct result of this quagmire set up to turkey's south too.

Now we have to deal with this BS going forward....I don't let western apologists and virtue signallers off the hook when they try to act all uppity about this (PRC w.r.t uighurs). I give them a dose of their culpability in all of this....they have to coldly hold themselves to account on it to have any chance of dealing with it well going forward.

You know in Australia a lot of people once warned that China was going to get strong in the future. Instead our politicians backed by think tanks turned a blind eye to it because of their love of money and their stupid arrogance not to mention even using the race card by saying stop being racist now China's influence is already in the Australian government I mean you had politicians who met with ccp officials in private which ASIO our intelligence agency of Australia uncovered which led to some resigning not to mention a University student in Brisbane got suspended because he protested against the CCP.
 

Nilgiri

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Erin O’Toole is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.


Too often, the relationship between Canada and India has been about our past. It’s become about how, through the years, we have failed to connect with each other. Some stories, like the Komagata Maru or Air India, are profound tragedies that we must never forget.

I firmly believe that the key to a secure future for both of our countries lies in unleashing the full potential of what we can build together. We are free, market democracies. We are separated by oceans but bound by the ties of family and history. That shared history may be what makes us Commonwealth cousins, but our fierce commitment to a democratic and prosperous future should be what makes us partners.


Canada needs an economic future that reduces our dependence on China’s industry and marketplace. We can only accomplish that by deepening ties with the world’s largest democracy, India.

From 2005-2015, under the Conservative government, Canadian exports to India grew by nearly 300 per cent, or 30 per cent per year. Our imports from India grew as well, by 120 per cent over that same period, or about 12 per cent per year. Under the Trudeau Liberals, however, the growth in our trade with India has stagnated. From 2015-2019, our export growth has fallen from 30 per cent to just three per cent per year. That doesn’t even keep pace with India’s inflation.

Tremendous opportunity awaits Canada in the Indo-Pacific, but Trudeau has failed to nurture those relationships, grow those trade partnerships, and enhance our security alliances. This missed opportunity requires an urgent course correction. India has already demonstrated its strategic bench strength in pharmaceuticals. Unlike Canada, India has invested deeply in expanding its domestic manufacturing of vaccines and medical supplies. In a world gripped by vaccine nationalism, India has been a beacon of hope for countries like ours who need to import vaccines and medical supplies.

And while India has expressed generosity in its willingness to work with Canada on the distribution of vaccines, one must wonder if we would have been better positioned with India had our government been nurturing that vital trade relationship from the onset of the pandemic.

Let us remember that Indians and Canadians fought alongside each other in the First and Second World Wars. Our fallen are buried together in Commonwealth cemeteries across Europe. We can bring those long-standing military ties into the 21st century and expand our security efforts within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD). Yet, to date, Canada has not been involved in the talks. The alliance includes India, Japan, Australia and the United States. Canada should be at that table renewing relationships with our democratic allies, and being a serious voice on the world stage again.

We need to kick-start the relationship. India is Canada’s tenth largest trading partner, but it has the potential to become our second. India’s economic transformation is underway, and it is one that should not only be applauded but supported.

Our current priorities for co-operation include supporting Indian energy security ambitions through increased exports of conventional and nuclear energy, as well as clean and renewable energy technology. I would propose a long-term strategic energy partnership to build off that.

Extensive Canadian experience in designing and engineering infrastructure should be harnessed to help India meet substantial urban and transportation infrastructure needs. And we could increase our exports of food products and fertilizers to support India’s food security goals by leveraging the innovation of Canadian farmers to establish a world-class agriculture partnership.

We could be launching bold initiatives across technology, medicine, energy and infrastructure to strengthen security and scale innovation, generating jobs, investment and strategic partnerships. Our students and university research initiatives can drive the future of this relationship.

With the Indo-Pacific as the centre of gravity for global growth, there are many mutually beneficial opportunities for our two governments to better enable businesses to develop new markets, find new investment opportunities, and create jobs for both Indians and Canadians.

But we can’t do any of that with a relationship on the back burner. While democracies in Australia, India, Japan and the United States are forging alliances in the Indo-Pacific region to counter Beijing’s influence, Justin Trudeau is out of step with our allies.

Historic accomplishments were achieved by Canada’s previous Conservative government in our relations with India. These will be a foundation upon which we can rebuild strong ties. The Republic of India is a great democracy, and an emerging power. Now is the time to find ways to partner for the betterment of our citizens and the world.

Erin O’Toole is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
 
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Nilgiri

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OTTAWA: Canada on Wednesday (local time) thanked India for sending coronavirus vaccines, of which 500,000 doses reached on March 4, a week after the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved.
Anita Anand, MP for Oakville and Minister of Public Services and Procurement, said in a tweet, "The AZ/CoviShield vaccine is now in Canada. The first tranche of 500,000 doses arrived this morning from Serum Institute of India with 1.5 million more doses to follow. Thank you to all whose hard work made this happen. We look forward to future collaboration."


While lauding the efforts made by Anand and her team to procure the coronavirus vaccines, Jennifer O'Connell, MP for Pickering-Uxbridge, said, "This is incredible work - AstraZeneca was approved this past Friday and thanks to Minister Anita, her team and the many others involved, 5 days later we have received 500,000 doses with 1.5 million more on the way! We're now set to receive more than 6.5M doses by the end of March!"

Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month spoke to his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau and assured that India will do its best to support Canada's Covid-19 vaccination efforts.

Expressing his appreciation, the Canadian Prime Minister said that if the world managed to conquer Covid-19, "it would be significantly because of India's tremendous pharmaceutical capacity, and Prime Minister Modi's leadership in sharing this capacity with the world". The Prime Minister thanked PM Trudeau for his sentiments.

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India earlier this month said that "Dear Hon'ble PM @JustinTrudeau, I thank you for your warm words towards India and its vaccine industry. As we await regulatory approvals from Canada, I assure you, @SerumInstIndia will fly out #COVISHIELD to Canada in less than a month; I'm on it!"
 

crixus

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SHOULD CANADA HAVE A FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE?
Do we need to send Canadians abroad to spy on our enemies?



FOREIGN%20INTELLIGENCE%20V3.jpg
Canada has no foreign human intelligence service – an espionage agency - like the British or Australian Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). A Canadian secret service, properly directed and tightly controlled by the government, appropriately staffed and operationally aggressive, could well produce high-quality intelligence for Canada and its close allies pursuant to a few carefully selected priorities, like nuclear weapons proliferation.

It is wrong to say that Canada currently has no foreign intelligence capability at all, as some allege. Canada’s Communications Security Establishment carries out cyber and signals intelligence operations against entities outside Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service collects foreign intelligence to a limited degree.Global Affairs Canada uses its diplomats overseas to gather sensitive information from foreign politicians and officials. The Canadian Armed Forces produce significant imagery intelligence from satellites or drones and deploy Defence Attachés abroad. There is a vast amount of information publicly available from the media and academe, which, read with discrimination - just as raw secret intelligence reports must also be - can be most insightful. Canada’s leaders will not always be one hundred percent informed on all issues, but they are never entirely blind.

Some public essays on the subject have made risibly extravagant claims about what a Canadian foreign intelligence service could do. And these articles typically address the pros of having a service but evade the cons. Realism is vital. No debate about whether Canada should, or should not, have such a service can afford to ignore the good and the bad. Nor should expectations, such as the number of objectives a small service could attack, be exaggerated.

Intelligence agencies seek to uncover enemy secrets by secretly intercepting communications, cyber-hacking computers, and photographing facilities and armies. But some deep secrets cannot be discovered except by human spies – by espionage - since not every secret is recorded on a computer. For example, any Iranian decision to make nuclear weapons will almost certainly be transmitted verbally, not electronically. This should not, of course, obscure that so much human activity these days leaves digital ‘footprints’ or ‘crumbs’ that can be detected.

What then is espionage? A terse definition is ‘spies secretly stealing secrets’. Espionage is not done by heavily armed ‘spies’ shooting their way into a secret enemy facility; this is utter Hollywood nonsense. And note well – intelligence officers only very rarely spy themselves. Instead, they suborn foreigners to spy for them. They get humans who are inside the espionage agency’s targets to do the spying; these insiders are what professionals call ‘agents’, not the intelligence officers who control them. The spring that drives the machinery of espionage is the human relationship of the intelligence officer and his agent. Effective espionage services aggressively hunt for potential agents; they do not passively wait for them to show up at, say, an embassy and volunteer.

But why spy at all? Because Canada’s enemies have many secrets they keep from us to give them serious advantages over Canada and its allies in peace, in grey-zone conflict and in armed conflict. Contrary to the belief of some, these secrets do not all reside on the Internet, waiting to be discovered; if they were there, Osama bin Laden would have been found and killed years earlier. Thus, some secret intelligence operations are necessary, and human intelligence services are required to conduct espionage against whatever proves impervious to technical forms of intelligence attack.
“A Canadian foreign intelligence service would have to be operationally aggressive; if not, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.”  Colonel R. Geoffrey St. John


Canada, to the dismay, sometimes disbelief, of many Canadians, has enemies - calling them just ‘competitors’ or ‘adversaries’ is to sugar-coat what they do to us. To know the secrets of how they hurt and especially will in future harm Canadians, intelligence collection, including human spying, on those enemies is vital. Since the hurt is often done secretly, we need some foreigners in the enemy camp to spy for us. To quote a former Chief of the British SIS, we need foreigners to betray that which needs betraying. We need them to spy on that which needs spying on - like nuclear weapons proliferation.

A Canadian secret service would garner for the country key strategic advantages. It would send a powerful signal to allies – and enemies – that Canada is a strong, committed partner in defence of the West in a dangerous world. If the service was genuinely first-rate, it would yield a disproportionate value relative to its costs. Some Government political and operational decisions would be much better informed, and some illusions dispelled.

Sending the espionage service’s reports to allies would result in those allies sending us more of their human intelligence than Canada now gets; we will get back rather more than we give – as is currently the case with our Five Eyes intelligence alliance. In that sense, Canada would turn an intelligence profit.

Provided the Canadian espionage service is tough and aggressive, rather than being populated by milksops, its establishment would send a powerful signal to Canadians about our national grit and determination not to be messed with. But if it is a timid, passive agency, this would be painfully clear to the world; in that case, we would be better off without it. A mere (and expensive) vanity piece would earn Canada nothing but the contempt of allies and enemies alike.



“A Canadian foreign intelligence service would have to be operationally aggressive;
if not, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.”




Realistically, no espionage agency can spy on any and every target that government might wish it to; no Canadian service would ever be large enough. The targets selected must be a few which pose a strategic threat to Canada’s vital interests. Moreover, the targets selected must represent long-term threats; successfully recruiting human espionage sources to spy on threats takes months, even years. Therefore, a secret human intelligence service cannot chase CNN stories or be expected to begin reporting on a new priority overnight. Attempting to rush espionage will result in embarrassing failures. Espionage is a slow business and cannot be hurried.

Two more points. Given the central importance of cyber operations to espionage, a Canadian service must have a strong in-house cyber team, and its officers must all be very computer savvy. Second, it is no good to run exquisitely effective espionage operations if there is no will or capacity on the part of government to act on the intelligence received. If nuclear weapons proliferation is the target, and we learn that such-and-such a country is secretly developing nuclear weapons, some sort of action must be taken. If not, to what end the whole exercise – why spy at all? (That said, while Canada may not be able or wish to act, a close ally might be willing and capable.)

It will take an entire generation for any new espionage service to reach full operational capability, and thus the delivery of intelligence until then may be less than hoped. Still, rushing things would be a recipe for frequent failures. It would be better to advance at a more measured pace, allowing service officers to gain experience and confidence. If Canada wants a highly effective service by 2050, we had better set it up pretty damn quick.

It would be idle to imagine there are no downsides to a Canadian espionage service. Espionage is operationally and morally hazardous. It would cost at a minimum several hundred million dollars a year. Inevitably, some operations will be blown to Canada’s embarrassment, though typically, all that happens is that a few diplomat-spies get punted. Some believe that all secret services eventually start killing people and sabotaging things. Still, rogue behaviour can be prevented by tight, active political control and by denying the service any capacity for violence. (In this vein, neither the Communications Security Establishment nor the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have ever been accused of such vicious tactics.)

If you really want to know how espionage works, ditch the silly fictions of screen and page. Instead, turn to quality non-fiction books. I recommend, for example, “The Spy and the Traitor” by Ben Macintyre or “The Art of Betrayal” by Gordon Corera; both are fascinating and instructive. From works like these, it is clear - crack espionage services work subtly, silently, carefully – and their officers are tough-minded and highly intelligent.

The Government of Canada must seriously examine establishing a secret intelligence service by weighing the pros and cons. To govern is to choose. Choose well.




Colonel R. Geoffrey St. John, MSM, CD (Ret’d, Canadian Armed Forces Intelligence Branch), Senior Research Associate, Samuel Associates Ottawa

 

Nilgiri

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A Canadian government report on the downing of a Ukrainian jet has found no evidence it was "premeditated", but said Iran was "fully responsible".

Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 was hit by two missiles after taking off from Tehran on 8 January 2020. All 176 people on board died.
Iran - which was accused of hampering independent inquiries - has said it mistook the aircraft for a US missile.
Some 138 of those on board the doomed plane had ties to Canada.
Citizens or residents of four other countries - Ukraine, the UK, Afghanistan and Sweden - were also killed.
Canada said on Thursday that the blame lay with Iran's "civilian and military authorities".

While acknowledging that an air defence unit operator "likely acted on his own in making the decision to launch the missiles", an eight-month forensic investigation concluded that it would not have happened if not for the "incompetence, recklessness, and wanton disregard for human life" of Iranian officials.

"Iran does not get off the hook in any way whatsoever," said Canadian Foreign Minister Marc Garneau at a news conference on Thursday. "It is totally responsible for what happened."
The probe found that Iranian anti-aircraft missiles were on high alert, yet authorities did not close its airspace or notify airlines in operation at the time.
Mr Garneau said that a missile operator made "a series of extremely flawed decisions that could have and should have been avoided".
He added that Iranian military command and control have been too slow both in addressing the failures and taking measures to prevent future tragedy.
Officials called for "a comprehensive and honest explanation from the Iranian regime" as the report acknowledges a lack of access to the evidence, crash site, and witnesses.

Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility for the crash and allowed the crash site to be both bulldozed and looted.
But as evidence mounted, the Revolutionary Guards' Aerospace Force said an air defence unit had mistaken the Boeing 737-800 for a US missile.
Iran's air defences had been on high alert at the time because the country had just fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi military bases hosting US forces in retaliation for the killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad five days earlier.
A final report from the Civil Aviation Organisation of Iran this March concluded an operator "misidentified" the plane and fired the missiles without authorisation from a commander.
On Wednesday, Mr Garneau said the Iranian report had "gaping holes" and "places all of the blame on people lower down in the structure".
But he admitted that his government's forensic team relied upon the report and was unable to draw conclusions that differed from Iran's formal "human error" explanation.

In a statement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: "Iran's official account of events is disingenuous, misleading and superficial, and intentionally ignores key factors".
"Senior regime officials made the decisions that led to this tragedy, and the world must not allow them to hide with impunity behind a handful of low-ranking scapegoats," he said.
Mr Trudeau's administration is seeking reparations from Iran in order to compensate victims' families.
It has also indicated interest in pursuing sanctions or going before the International Criminal Court over the incident.
 

Nilgiri

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It would just be a crossing the t and dotting the i kind of thing officially.

CSIS etc through 5-eyes intel network is already pretty much a robust foreign intel service.
 

DAVEBLOGGINS

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“THE WORLD IS GROWING DARKER”- MND ANITA ANNAND

Today Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Annand signaled changes to Canada’s Defence and Foreign Policies are coming including changes to Canada’s Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE) Defence Policy to include Canada’s commitment to NORAD upgrade programs and revisiting Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) with the United States. It seems that BMD could be on the table once again and may be part of the CSC Frigate program. She also indicated that work is now underway to craft a new Indo-Pacific Strategy for Canada.

 
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Joe Shearer

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“THE WORLD IS GROWING DARKER”- MND ANITA ANNAND

Today Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Annand signaled changes to Canada’s Defence and Foreign Policies are coming including changes to Canada’s Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE) to include Canada’s commitment to NORAD upgrade programs and revisiting Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) with the United States. It seems that BMD could be on the table once again and may be part of the CSC Frigate program. She also indicated that work is now underway to craft a new Indo-Pacific Strategy for Canada.

It boils down to an increasingly aggressive China, and a Russia in free fall. The point is clear, but it still reduces to these two; fortunately, the US has lost the bizarre, war-seeking attitude it seems to have developed from Vietnam onwards.
 

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