Tuesday Afternoon Links

An assortment of topics for your mid-week perusal...

- Linda McQuaig eviscerates the Cons for wasting billions of public dollars on planes that even they can't pretend to justify as more than a vanity project:

What makes this purchase bizarre is how little use the jets will be, unless we’re waging all-out war.

“It’s hard to see any useful military role for the F-35,” wrote Leonard Johnson, a retired major-general in the Canadian air force and former commandant of the National Defence College in Kingston. “The age of major inter-state war between developed nations has vanished, so why prepare for one?”
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Perhaps we should consult someone more resolutely committed to war — like Defence Minister Peter MacKay. Yet even MacKay struggles to explain the utility of the jets.

Asked at a news conference last month for “specific examples of the uses of these aircraft,” MacKay mostly focused on what a great recruiting device they make.

“[I]t helps a great deal, I can assure you, in recruiting, to have new gear, new equipment, that is state of the art,” MacKay said. “That is a very important part of our regeneration of personnel and pilots in particular. So having that platform capacity is something that is of great importance to the continued growth of the Canadian Forces and the development of our pilots.”

So we’re spending $16 billion — about $470 for every Canadian — so we can have planes that are really attractive to pilots? Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper just to offer every prospective pilot a Porsche?

- Meanwhile, MacKay is also raising the possibility of strongarming the Libs into yet another Afghanistan extension. Which nobody could have predicted.

- We can only hope Jeffrey Simpson is right in his analysis of what the Cons' long-form census debacle will ultimately mean:

The census debate, so provocative and so needless but for the exigencies of ideology, roused civic society as few decisions have done in recent decades. The census will lodge itself in a corner of the electorate’s collective memory as a talisman for what the Harperites might do if given a freer rein and, as such, has ruined what little chance they had of achieving a majority.

Canadian democracy, in this long-term sense, has triumphed by rejecting ideology over reason. Some day, the long-form census will return.

- The Globe and Mail's editorial board suggests that if the economic risks posed by the recession are done with, then leftover stimulus money should be redirected toward "smarter spending" on water, transit and other useful projects. But the likelihood of the Cons accepting that type of common-sense suggestion would seem far greater if they hadn't been the ones to instead set up a photo-op-friendly scheme in the first place.

- Finally, Edmonton-Leduc NDP candidate Artem Medvedev is putting together a new online ad campaign, and wants your input. (For the record, I'm a big fan of the "let's work together" theme, but think the wording could stand to be simplified.)