Posted on 07/28/2007 5:02:18 AM PDT by Clive
If there is one area of many that the federal Liberals have no right to complain about, it's helicopters.
And yet, that's exactly what Foreign Affairs critic Ujjal Dosanjh did while commenting on the recent bomb attack that narrowly missed Canada's top military man in Afghanistan, Brig.-Gen. Tim Grant.
Why is Grant travelling around in armoured vehicles rather than choppers? Because Canada is the only NATO country with a major contingent of soldiers in Afghanistan that has no helicopters. When troops are injured we must ask the Americans, Dutch or British for help.
"Our military, when we've sent them into harm's way, we should provide them with whatever they require," said Dosanjh, about the need for helicopters.
He must think Canadians are stupid.
The Liberals committed our troops to fight in Afghanistan and extended our mission to Afghanistan's most dangerous area without helicopters. Why didn't Dosanjh insist on getting helicopters during his party's 13 years in power?
When it comes to helicopters, the Liberal record is one of embarrassment, waste, mismanagement and even death.
In 1993, when Jean Chretien became prime minister, he did a heinous and a most uncharacteristic thing -- he lived up to one of his pre-election promises and scrapped the Conservative government's contract to buy 50 Agusta-Westland EH-101 helicopters slated to replace our Labradors and Sea Kings in 1999.
The cancellation cost taxpayers more than $500 million in contract penalties.
Hundreds of hi-tech jobs were also lost because Canada, along with Britain and Italy, would have been one of the builders of the choppers.
Worse yet, in October 1998, six airmen were killed when their 32-year-old Labrador helicopter crashed near Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula.
One of them, Master Cpl. David Gaetz, kept a secret journal of the aircraft's mechanical problems to be opened only after his death, which he believed was highly likely owing to the state of the choppers in which he had to fly.
A Liberal complaining about our lack of helicopters is not unlike a child who kills his parents and cries about being an orphan. It is hypocrisy and it is absurd.
In the election campaign the Liberals had published a book of its election platform and boasted that Canadians could use it as a checklist to confirm how it kept its commitments. The only commitment in the book that was kept was the disastrous cancellation of the helicopter contract.
As a result, the navy is still embarking Sea Kings on its frigates and destroyers.
The liberals also sold off our Chinooks to the Netherlands several years ago. The new Conservative government has placed an order for new Chinooks.
The Chinook / Labrador is one incredible machine. I’d like to offer the use of our own forces to fly your legislators over the Outer Banks, but the helicopters all seem to be busy right now, and when they are finished, we have a long list of U.S. legislators who’ve ‘volunteered’ to go first. But it is nice to know that our guys can be there for your own native sons. Here’s hoping you don’t need them very often.
The words of this liberal hypocrite should be shouted from the rooftops from sea to sea. This decade long helicopter scandal should be a primary election issue of liberal hypocricy and mismanagement.
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