DARTing to help or to blame Sri Lanka!?

Days and days after the Tsunami disaster in Asia, the Canadian government has finally decided (not before sending a team to assess the situation to help in the decision as to whether to send people to the area) to deploy DART, Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team. But even though Prime Minister Paul Martin made the ultimate decision on Sunday (Jan 2 --one week after the disaster), DART will not get to Sri Lanka until Saturday --not for another week. How come? Well, we have no wheels and no wings to do the job. We have to rent planes!!! We have a great team of people willing and able to provide help, excellent equipment, but no effective means of rapid transport. The state medium reports: "Canada will rent two huge Russian-built Antonov aircraft to transport the team and its equipment overseas. It is expected to take four trips" (CBC Link) The count of four trips, of course, does not include the initial trip that the Antonovs will have to make from Russia to Ontario to pick our guys/gals and their equipment.

All told, it will take nearly two weeks for what is supposed to be a "rapid-response" team finally to get to the disaster area (CBC Link on DART). Rapidity, in a disaster situation, is presumably a virtue. The Department of National Defense claims that DART "can bridge the gap until members of the international community arrive to provide long-term help" to a given disaster area. But we are the gap when we are only capable of getting there two weeks after the fact, and more than a weeek after others have already arrived with help. The disaster here is also in our governing leaders' paralysis and indecision. Twenty federal figures were sent to the region to assess the damage, and they left Canada by commercial airliner. But that was not enough technocrats. Now, the politicians will follow. CBC informs that "Three senior cabinet ministers will travel to India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to visit disaster sites and talk about relief efforts." We excell at rapidly sending people to see and to talk. Do we not have diplomats, consular officers and/or military attaches there? Fortunately, by the way, it would likely not take any longer to get DART from one end of our country to the other, if it ever came to that. So, it is not like we are discriminating against the Sri Lankans. I feel good about that.

The defense minister (Graham) seems to be shamelessly blaming the size of the airport in Colombo for the rental of the Russian aircraft. How does that work? Well, it would take more than 24 trips in our largest cargo planes (the Hercules) to get all the equipment and personnel DART needs to get to Sri Lanka. To transport the lot would take more than one month on our Canadian planes (Canadian rapidity as its best). But the minister's point is that it is more efficient to rent two Russian planes (duh!) because they will only take two trips each, otherwise all our planes (in 24 trips) would tie up the puny Colombo airport. Graham pointed out that their airport can only handle two planes at the same time. He seems to be suggesting that all of our 24 planes would arrive at once, which is not at all possible because we could not commit 24 Hercules to fly at once, all the way to Asia. Do we even have 24 Hercs? We simply do not have that kind of capability. So we best send two Antonovs (twice), which is all the Sri Lankan airport can handle. That makes so much sense.

In the Toronto Globe & Mail (G&M Link), the Prime Minister joined in the blaming of the victims, when "He said [that] part of the difficulty is landing in the affected region because the airfields are not available. " Imagine that!? There are no conveniently located airports in the disaster area of a developping country. How dare they don't make it easy for our guys to get in there to help them. They are making us look bad! They should build airports that withstand any and all kinds of natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, volcanos, hurricanes, etc) , and they should have the foresight to build them as close as possible to the area(s) where the disasters will take place.

And blaming the victims, we need, badly. Our federal government simply could not admit that we do not have the necessary capability, in spite of the the boisterous name of the darting unit, and in spite of all the Liberal hot air about helping peoples of the world in time of need, Canadian pride and all the usual propaganda. As Jack Granatstein has pointed out in his book about the killing of the Canadian military, our federal leaders have emasculated our military because they believe that we do not need them to fight wars (coz we're Canadian, eh! We're nice!!). Instead, we left ourselves with only a few over-worked and under-paid soldiers (boy scouts, in Chretien's language) so that we could help others in distress --peace-keeping, and disaster response (which includes shovelling snow in Toronto). But clearly, we can't do much of that either, as a Calgary Sun columnist makes the point rather well (Sun Link). We have no hard power, and we have no soft power! So, notwithstanding our best national intentions, unable to deliver immediately and effectively, and unwilling to face the self-inflicted reality of our armed forces, all that the federal governing politicians are left with is crassly to blame the victim.