PING!
Posted on 02/16/2007 8:56:07 PM PST by GMMAC
Liberal MP slams Hillier as Conservative 'prop'
Last Updated: Friday, February 16, 2007 | 4:47 PM ET
CBC News
Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre accused Canada's top soldier of being a "prop" for the Tories after Gen. Rick Hillier described the period of budget cuts to the military that began in 1994 as the "decade of darkness."
"I'm offended today," the Quebec MP said following the speech Hillier gave Friday to a defence group in Ottawa.
"We have a chief of defence staff who spoke about 10 years of darkness. I never thought that he would become a prop to the Conservative party."
Although Hillier didn't name the Liberals specifically, he spoke of the challenges the Canadian forces still face because of budget cuts that began in 1994, when the Liberals were in power.
"Over this past one to two years, we have begun to fully realize the immense, the negative impact of the … defence expenditure reductions from 1994 and the lasting most negative legacy that they brought into effect which has to be put right."
Hillier said those cuts to resources, combined with the increase in operations conducted by the Canadian forces around the world, have led to a military that is "fragile," with some parts "on a life support system."
He said those actions have led to some "deep wounds in the department over this past, what I would call, a decade of darkness."
But Coderre challenged Hillier's assessment of the Liberal record. He said the Liberals under then prime minister Jean Chrétien faced a $48-billion annual deficit when they took office and had to act. But, he said, things turned around and Paul Martin's short-lived government had been in the process of restoring the defence budget.
He described Hillier's speech as "highly political" and "inappropriate."
"To get involved in politics, there's one way, you should run," Coderre said.
When asked by reporters about Coderre's comments, Hillier stood by his remarks. He said he is not a politician and it's his job to paint a picture about the state of the armed forces, "like it or not."
"I'm the chief of defence staff. I describe things as accurately, as clearly, as bluntly as I possibly can."
With files from the Canadian Press
PING!
He calls em as he sees em...pretty simple.
Hillier is an honest man.
P*ss on the little twerp. Coderre isn't fit to lick dog droppings off of Hillier's boots.
"We have a chief of defence staff who spoke about 10 years of darkness.....
Libs have a hissy fit when when they get their noses
rubbed in the truth.
Wow, another offended leftist. Tell you what, buddy, why don't you go have a rectal Latte and leave military policy to the grown-ups.
for politicians, power trumps truth
for the military on the battlefield, truth is survival
IMHO, General Hillier is the best thing to happen to the CF in decades. And yes, I would describe the 1990s precisely the way he did--"A period of darkness"---and this not the first time Gen. Hillier has used that phrase --so I would wonder why "the ususal suspects" would chose now to get their panties in a bunch over it.
I listened to Gen. Hillier's speech in its enirety, and he was being quite kind to them -- he said he understood that there were difficult decision to be made at that time regarding the budget, and that he wouldn't have wanted to be in their shoes--and was merely describing the results of those decisions--and he was "bang on".
My husband used to say-"People just don't get it--the military is broken,(because of all the cuts in budget and personnel in particular in the 1990s) and I don't know if it can be fixed".----IMHO it was almost at the point where no amount of trying to play catch up budget-wise would save it. The politicians need to understand that the military is not one of those budgets you can chop, and then catch-up later, because lack of funds and personnel "breaks" the entire system--IMHO
Hey, that scumbag Coderre should just ring up the former little dictator Jean Chretien, and if he can understand any words that come out of his lying mouth, ask him WHY again, the LIEberals chose to kill the deal for replacing those Seaking helicopter flying death-traps, but they DID find more money to buy Chretien's corrupt ass some brand new wings to fly HIM around while collecting LIEberal cash from all of his assorted bag-men around the country, eh?
Get ready to be offended everyday you sausage sucking liberal socialist. Times are a changin' and the rest of Canada is awakening instead of being in the liberal induced fugue state started by Trippy Trudeau and his Quebecois counter part Rene Levesque, both icons of a failed socialism on both sides of the fence.
Canada is about to leave its liberal Francophone miasma behind, and become the Great Nation it is destined to be.
The liberals can either pony up to progress, or be left FAR, far behind.
Coderre is whipple-piffing about deficits, when in fact the Liberals spent much of their money paying for pork barrel social programs in the Francophone Hinterland. In the 1990s over 50% of the population of Quebec became employed with the federal, provincial governments or by Crown Corporations of either. What does that tell you?
A lot of that money came from axing Canada's Defence programs.
Hillier is right on the money. Ten years of darkness. He was being kind. The darkness began with the War Measures Act and the faux deployment of thousands of Canadian troops in Quebec, so Drapeau and Trudeau could be easily elected. In retrospect, both were trotskyites as far as I am concerned. The darkness lasted for 35 years not 10.
That darkness made thousands of us move to the USA, where many of us still reside.Where I live now, I can carry a pistol down the street concealed or not whenever I feel like it, and society here is not disintegrating? How does that work? We all should be mutually dead now from gun shot wounds according to the Lords of Liberal epistomology.
Yes, Hillier is being too kind by a long shot.
As an American, the more I learned about Trudeau, the more sickening it was. Quite literally he was a Nazi supporter during WW2 in his youth, and had he been raised in France, would've been an unapologetic Vichy collaborator and sell-out of his country's freedom (I saw a Louis Malle film not too long ago, "Lacombe, Lucien", and it surely reminded me of what a young Trudeau would've been as a Frenchman).
With leftist Naziism passé after Hitler's demise, he easily segued to the more hardcore Stalinism, and proceeded to remake Canada in that image, taking it away from its Conservative and religious roots. Truly an evil man, if you can call him a man.
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