I’ve been reading the Manley Report on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Something I’ve wondered about (since 2002ish) is why our troops are there. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be, I’m just curious what the mandate is. What are the goals the Canadian government wishes to achieve? The question isn’t as facetious as it sounds. We can’t decide if the mission is complete until we know what we’re supposed to accomplish while we’re there.

Manley et al. never provide an “official” (ie, government endorsed) answer to this question. Instead, they provide us with the following reasons:

1. It “concerns” global and Canadian security (p. 3, p. 20)
2. we need to maintain Canada’s international reputation (p. 3)
3. we need to help “impoverished and vulnerable” people (p. 3, p. 8 )
4. a lot of Canadians have already died there (p. 3)
5. to engage the international community in future peace keeping/making efforts (p. 8, p. 22)
6. the UN mandated a mission (p. 21)
7. NATO mandated a mission (p. 21)
8. we are there at the behest of the Afghan government (p. ???)

The cynic in me suspects that Canadian involvement in this mission was okayed for diplomatic reasons (ie, appeasing Washington) before a public justification was formulated. Interestingly the reasons provided on the DnD website are much more specific than the those listed by Manley et al.

For the past few years I’ve resisted posting about Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. With the release of the Manley Report¹ that situation has changed. Here we have a report by a (supposedly ) disinterested panel that has had time and resources to explore the issue thoroughly.

The post will provide background, as described by the report.

Here’s the background: In 2001 western forces invaded Afghanistan, toppling the repressive Taliban government. The UN and NATO pass resolutions condoning the action. Since then, the Afghan Compact has been signed (in 2006), and a fairly diverse grouping of nations has, at the request of the Afghan government, been supporting the fledgling Afghan military’s efforts to establish something approaching a national government.

In the seven years since 2001, the Afghan economy as grown at 10% annually. The number of children attending schools is currently at six million (although we aren’t told what that number was back in August ’01, I assume it’s higher now). Afghanistan lingers near the bottom of the UN Human Development Index. Although the report states that “living conditions in Afghanistan have seen measurable, even significant improvement,” (p. 3) it offers no measurements other than these.

Canada currently has 2500ish troops in Afghanistan and nearly 50 civilians in the country (representing CIDA, the RCMP, Correctional Services, and Foreign Affairs)². Our current number of casualties is close to 80 Canadians. We have the highest number of per-capita casualties of the international force.

1. More correctly named “REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT PANEL ON CANADA’S FUTURE ROLE IN AFGHANISTAN, according to their website. (back)
2. The report does not state how many civilians represent the various government departments, so I’m reading between the lines, using information provided on pages 23 and 28 of the report. (back)

A little before Christmas, I started to notice that the IPod Touch had become the fetish object of the season. My fellow Ottawa denizens were wandering around lovingly stroking the screens of their Touches. In the winter. In the cold. Outside. Without gloves. Like idiots.

But it isn’t really their fault, is it? The Touch was developed in Cupertino, California, where the average temperature in January bubbles around 4°C and 15°C. Canadian fetish objects are pretty much the same as those in the United States, but we have a reality that our southern cousins don’t: winter.

Winter plays a huge part of our identity. Canadians snowshow, snowboard, ski, skate, and skidoo. We invented hockey. We dominate the sport of curling. We essentially invented the modern ski resort. In the temperate south of the country, we endure subzero temperatures five to six months of the year.

But our consumer goods, our clothing styles, architectural styles, and fetish objects are designed elsewhere. We use stuff designed in climates where zero is considered cold, and a light dusting of snow will close a city.

Imagine what gadgets would look like if they were designed with winter in mind. When it gets below minus five(ish), you don’t want to expose your skin to the elements for more than a minute or two. If MP3 players were designed by Canadians, they would be easy to control inside a pocket or mitten. They would have controls that are easy to manipulate without being seen. Alternatively, they would have buttons large enough that users would be able to control the volume or navigate tracks without having to remove their frostbite preventing gloves.

When you start to consider the realities of winter, more and more of our society seems like a cargo cult. We’ve imported styles that were created for much warmer places. When you see people walking around in winter, how many people do you see wearing long coats? I don’t mean coats that cover their hips, I mean coats that go to their ankles. When you’re wandering around Ottawa in -20°C weather, wearing a coat that goes to your waist is silly. It means your legs freeze, or you have to wear long-johns¹. But do Canadians wear long coats? No. Because we’re suckers and we import our ideas of style from the south.

The realities of winter hit architecture hard as well. When six months of the year necessitate heavy clothing and heavy boots, our buildings should respect that and provide somewhere to store our sweaters and jackets when inside. Do they? For the most part, no. Malls, libraries, movie theaters, hospitals, and office buildings require us to carry our surplus duds around with us. The few buildings that do feature a coat check tend to be bars or clubs, where being seen is part of the experience.

It would be wonderful if Canadian designers and architects could reverse our fixation on southern climates. Well made Canadian goods that were attractive and designed for our climate would be wonderful. But they seem unlikely to catch on. Too much of our media comes from southern climes, where gloves are a fashion statement, and open air dining is an option year round.

Note: I didn’t notice our tom-foolery myself. It took the first 60 pages of John Ralston Saul’s Refliections of a Siamese Twin to wake me up to our national fixations on warmer climates. Perhaps a solution to our cargo-cultish behaviour was contained in the rest of the book, but JRS didn’t manage to keep my attention past page 61.

1. Woe betide the individual wearing long-johns during their morning commute. When they get to work, that toasty long underwear will be too hot, and they’ll have to find a bathroom for a quick change. (back)

The MetaBall magazine has put together something they call Measure of Progress, which is essentially a system for tracking responses to email queries from MPs.

The idea is elegent: when you want to make correspondence between you and an MP public, you CC democracy@metaball.ca. The emails (and any response CCing the MetaBall people) are indexed by MP and made public on their website.

It’s a pretty nifty idea.

So CBC doesn’t have the spine to stand up to the Chinese government by airing an unedited documentary on the Falun Gong. But the do have the guts to report on their own editorial lapse (then again, the story is just an AP wire story, so maybe their feed-reader published it without human intervention).

Now they say they’re airing a modified version of the documentary. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison of the before and after.

The Canadian dollar has recently reached par with the US dollar. There was much hullabaloo in the Canadian press about the dollar’s growing strength. Being a bit of curmudgeon, I decided to check the historic value of the loonie. I was a little

The Data

Videe Figure 1: Various currencies expressed in terms of the Canadian dollar. The Austrian dollar bubbles around C$1, the euro does the same around C$1.50, and the pound hangs out around C$2.25 (the yen, scaled up 50 times is equally static). Meanwhile, the greenback spends 1997-2003 at about C$1.50, until the start of 2003, when it starts a slow downward slide from C$1.50 to its current value.

Now turn your gaze to Figure 2: The US dollar’s rate from October 1985 to mid-October 2007. A gradual fall from early ’85, turning around at the start of ’92, and gradually increasing until about 2003, at which point it slumps to the current value.

Data acquired from the Bank of Canada and OANDA. All rates are interbank rates. Data and scripts used to generate graphs are available for download.

Conclusions

1. The Canadian dollar is not increasing in value – the yardstick we measure it against is gradually shrinking.
2. While the four currencies shown in Figure 1 seem to be holding their value, the US dollar has lost 30% of its value since 2003.
3. For some reason, 2003 seems like a particularly bad year for the US. I wonder what epic screw-up started then and is continuing into the present day?

The Green Party released its current platform. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but it’s been mentioned in a few places for its stance on net neutrality. Both Michael Geist and DataLibre picked it up.

Apparently not. According to Evan Hughes of the Ottawa-Greens, the Green approach is to use the free-market as a tool to ensure a sustainable and healthy society. The Conservatives seem to think of the free-market as an end unto itself. But when will these hippies learn to keep their articles short?

Although MEC doesn’t go the official fair trade route, they do follow their own guidelines. Which is a helluva lot better than nothing. Ideally, I’d like to see them buy their stuff from accredited Fair Trade factories/companies, but they don’t seem to have followed that route. Why do I mention this? Because companies don’t do enough to ensure that their workers are being treated fairly. And because I noticed they have a blog.

The Canadian blogosphere has been buzzing about three cops trying to throw stones at the SPP protest in Montebello.¹ It seems quite likely that the three gents in question were involved with the cops: at the first sign of trouble they fled into the waiting arms of the Sûreté du Québec; and their boots were identical to those of the Sûreté.

I’m left to wonder about the motive. Why would the RCMP/Sûreté/CSIS bother to dress a few of their own up as protesters? One of them was carrying a rock, so we can guess that they were going to try and throw it at the police line. I can only guess why the RCMP/Sûreté/CSIS would want to do that:

• The threat of violence justifies a large police presence,
  
• It would make the opponents of the SPP look more like whack-jobs and less like people with something to say,
  
• It would give grounds for the police/government to limit protests in future.

But all of those reasons seem so Machiavellian. They seem motivations of a police force desperate to justify its budget, or a government that really is afraid of a “sad” protest with “only” 1,200 attendees.

The only way to get to the bottom of this is to find out who ordered the provocateurs into the protest, and ask them why it was so necessary to smear a legitimate expression of public concern.

1. For those who don’t know, Canada’s main man Stephen Harper is meeting with George Bush and Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon to chat about further integration of North American security forces and economies. (back)