We Don’t Pay Enough

When I attended the Canadian Forces Staff School many years ago, we worked in syndicates of eight students.  Each day we were presented with different problems to solve.  One such exercise started with the instructor telling us that we had been convened to come up with ideas to spend several million (probably billions today) dollars that had been assigned to the military to spend as soon as possible.  In the next two hours, we filled three blackboards with ideas; everything from new fighter jets to new married quarters.  It was a no brainer.  The next day, the instructor came in and told us that there had been a mistake.  We now had to find ways to save those same millions (billions) which had been slashed from the military budget (a much more realistic scenario).  We laboured over this problem for a full three hours and at the end had only one item on the board, something to do with building no new married quarters.  The lesson was that it turns out to be much easier to spend money than to save it.

This memory came to mind during the recent election campaign.  Each major party promised more goodies for the people such as free drug programs, free dental care and more.  But each party also promised to freeze or even lower taxes.  This of course must lead to higher deficits and debt at some level of government. After all, as governments at both the provincial and federal level, one way to reduce expenditures is to download programs to the next lower level.  Ontario has been a master at this with every Progressive (sic) Conservative government since Mike Harris.  The result has been to overload every municipal budget at the level that cannot run a deficit.  No matter to who, the taxpayer always pays. 

 

If we are to break this cycle of something for nothing, there are only two choices:  cut expenditures; or increase revenues.  As we see from the Staff School exercise, cutting programs, especially those that people have come to rely on, is difficult, and very unlikely to produce the types of savings necessary to come close to balancing a budget.  So, the only thing left is to increase revenue.  Although things like tariffs and user fees can be increased, again by themselves they would never be enough to cover our current deficits.  Things like free trade agreements prohibit raising tariffs too much.  And user fees are generally disliked by the public.

The answer is to raise taxes.  The largest contributor to revenues is income tax and this is where the burden must fall.  I realize that this will be a very unpopular suggestion.  People in Canada and the United States have a serious aversion to paying taxes.  But most European countries have taxes significantly higher than ours. Income taxes up to 60% to 70% are not uncommon for higher paid taxpayers in places such as the Scandinavian countries.  And we North Americans envy them for the extent and quality of their services.  Canada, meanwhile, tries to compare itself to the US when it comes to taxes.  But we forget the differences between the two countries in such things as health care and the enormous level of the US deficit and debt.  Canada has much more land than the US but has less than 10% of their population.  Governments in Canada try to keep business taxes as low as possible so that companies will not move their business elsewhere.  That leaves the burden solely on income tax of the individual taxpayer.  

So, one day you and your friends sit down with a copy of the federal budget and try to find savings of $30 billion a year and see how many things you can all agree on.

Remembrance Day 2019

Good Morning.  I am very honoured that you are going to put up with me for the next few minutes.  My name is Gordon Forbes and I am a veteran who served almost 28 Years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy.

To quote a man named Arthur Koestler “The most persistent sound throughout man’s history has been the beating of war drums.”

How many of you play video games?  How many of you play video war games like Call of Duty or Battle Warships?  Do you think this is a real depiction of war?  Of course, it’s NOT.  In war you don’t hit reboot and resurrect yourself.  In real war, the threats are multidimensional.  Information is sporadic and unpredictable.  Real people get killed.

War represents failure – a failure of foreign policy – a failure of diplomacy – a failure of tolerance – a failure to understand each other.

We remember on this day, 11 November, because that was the day that World War 1 ended in a cease fire.  World War 1 was the worst war in history . . . up until that time.

How would you feel if, tomorrow morning you came to a class of 30 and found only 2 other members of your class were there?  That is Kind of like what happened to the Royal Newfoundland Regiment on the 1^st of July 1916 on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme at a village called Beaumont Hamel. The losses sustained by the regiment that morning were staggering. Of 800 Newfoundlanders who went into battle that morning, only 68 were able to answer the roll call the next day, with more than 700 killed, wounded or missing.  On that same day, over 150,000 men of the British Army were killed, wounded or missing.  That battle ended in a whimper in the middle of November 1916. At that same time, the French Army had been fighting another, equally devastating battle, at Verdun. These were two of many such battles throughout that four year war.

War is hell.

In World War 2, it is estimated that 2 million Russian soldiers were killed in the first six few months after the attack by Germany in 1941.  It is also estimated that 20 million Russians, military and civilian, were killed in the entire war.  Horrifying numbers!

War is hell.

Even today, people, men, women and children, die every day in one war or another.  For modern war is not restricted to neat battle fields.  They are fought over entire countries.  I can give one personnel example.  I was born in England in 1943, the middle of the Second World War.  After the war we lived in an area where V1 flying bombs had passed over on their way to London.  Some fell short.  As a four and five year old I played with two other boys my age.  Between the three of us we had three good eyes . . . and I had two of them.  The other boys had been blinded by flying glass from a V1 bomb explosion across the street from their houses.

I, myself, suffer from post traumatic stress that induced clinical depression and was caused by a tragedy at sea that killed nine of my shipmates. 

So much for horror stories.

Is war ever necessary?  Aggressive war should never be justified.  Whether it is an attack on another nation, ethnic or religious group, or tribe it should never happen.  But defending oneself against such an attack is probably, unfortunately, necessary.  Whether the aggressor is another country or a terrorist organization, defence is justified. 

Wars tend to be started by governments of older men, and now women.  They are then fought by young men and women. 

One of the forms of warfare that we are seeing vividly today is civil war.  Civil war is never civil and as we see in Syria, it can be very violent and cruel. In the past 30 years there have been several civil wars in Africa alone – Somalia (Black Hawk Down), Sudan, Rwanda, the Congo and Nigeria and several of these civil wars are still ongoing.   The American Civil War in 1861 to 1865 had the largest number of American battle deaths of any war ever fought by the United States.  Over 600,000 killed.

Whether aggressive or defensive, war is hell.

If wars have to be fought, how should they be carried out.  It is nice to think that we have the Geneva Conventions to keep war “civilized”.  They indicate the way war is supposed to be fought.  But once battle has been joined, war becomes armed chaos.  The Conventions are broken all the time, even by countries that we think are civilized and our allies.  Survival becomes the one measure of success.  In many cases, the original aim of a conflict is forgotten and fighting rages on regardless, as stated by General Colin Powell, “fighting often continues long past the point where a ‘rational’ calculation would indicate that the war should be ended.” The objective of the Iraq War was to change the regime of Saddam Hussein.  This was achieved within days of the initial attack.  The Iraq war went on for months, and in one form or another goes on today.

War is, indeed, Hell.

But there is one war that we should probably all fight.  It may be the war that will, finally, save civilization as no other war has ever done.  You don’t have to sign up for this war.  There is no army to join.  No drills to carry out. All you have to do is carry on with your life in a way that will sustain our planet. I speak, of course of the war on climate change.  This is a challenge you should all accept.

Thank you for your time and indulgence.  It has been my pleasure to be here today.

There are a lot

On a recent train trip between Ottawa and Halifax it dawned on me as I watched the countryside go by.  There are a lot of trees in this country.  My train trip covered probably less a third of the way across the country.  So, you can imagine how many there are in total.  Our biggest forest is the northern boreal forest that stretches across Quebec, Ontario and the northern prairie provinces and into the arctic.  This forest also stretches across northern Russia so the tree count for this forest must be in the billions.

In addition, there are trees in almost every country in the world.  Despite clear cutting, the Amazon jungle is still of formidable size.  There are still significant forests in Europe, Asia and Africa.

But is it enough?

Scientists tell us that trees are one of the most important resources for ameliorating climate change. A tree’s ability to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen is truly one of the most amazing things about nature.  But we are still seeing climate change get worse despite all of the trees we have.  Why?

The obvious answer is that we are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the trees can handle.  That being the case, we have two choices.  We can plant billions of more trees, or we can significantly decrease the amount of carbon dioxide we put out.  Better still, we can do both and find the balance that will stem or even decrease the change of climate.  But we must act now so that the twin actions will have a chance to take effect.

The current arguments against the fact that climate change is being caused by human activity are, in my research and opinion, false.  Despite the argument that the climate has changed in the past, those changes took place over millennia, not within the lifetime of a single person. The Canadian argument that we don’t need to do anything because we only contribute about 2 percent of the global total ignores the fact that on a per capita basis, we are one of the largest contributors in the world.  And some government decisions have just made things worse, such as Premier Doug Ford’s decision to cancel a provincial tree planting program that would have planted fifty million trees.  That fifty million would help, but a goal of fifty billion may be closer to what’s needed.  In the prairie provinces, their desire to drown the world in their oil could be seen as a crime against humanity.

But the real answer is to seriously curb our use of carbon products.  We will never eliminate the need completely, but its limited use must be carefully and very efficiently done.  If we continue as we are, no matter how many trees we plant and grow, the carbon dioxide will still overwhelm that attempt.  

We should all be concerned about climate change.  And trees, those wonderful, beautiful gifts of nature, can only do so much.  Plant and protect trees and cut down our use of fossil fuels so that maybe we can actually reach or exceed the climate goals that have been established.  Maybe then the trees and us can all survive.