woe canada

I love Canada a little less today than I did a year ago. I'm embarrassed about the direction we're heading, and I'm a little bit broken-hearted that the ideals and values I considered profoundly Canadian seem to be mere illusions--superficial semblances of something I thought went deeper into the core of our country.

15 billion dollars spent on the military recently. I'm not going to play the hippy card and claim that we shouldn't spend anything on our armed forces (for PEACEKEEPING), but 15 billion dollars? Imagine what that money could have done for healthcare and social programs. I can't. Because 15 billion is a number so big, my puny little primitive human mind can't wrap itself around the sum. Where did that money come from, anyways? Was the previous government just saving it for a rainy day? Did someone get lucky when doing the laundry and find a spare 15 billion dollars they never noticed was missing?

But that's not the embarrassing part. It's that a former arms lobbiest is now Canada's Minister of Defense. How come the politicians involved in such blatant contradictions, many of them former lawyers, don't recognize this "minor" conflict of interest? A dumb rhetorical query to be sure--I'm sure they do recognize the ethical conundrum and choose to exploit their power rather than act with integrity. Shameful.