The Three Eras of Canada's Democracy or How We Got to Where We Are Today.

I first voted in the 1968 elections when Pierre Trudeau and Trudeaumania led the liberals to a massive majority and I've watched Canadian democracy evolve, not always in a good way, ever since.

I've witnessed three political eras in my lifetime.

There was an Era of Rights and Freedoms, the years of Diefenbaker, Pearson and Trudeau.  Some might not realize it but Diefenbaker was a true champion of human rights.  Pearson brought Canada to the world stage as honest broker and peacekeeper.  Trudeau, of course, patriated the constitution and left us with perhaps the most important legislative enactment in our country's history, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  That was the zenith of liberal democracy in Canada.  It truly was our Golden Age.

Although few of us grasped it at the time, Mulroney ushered in the Era of Neoliberalism in the guise of free trade and the incremental surrender of national sovereignty to the forces of market fundamentalism.  The era of neoliberalism represented the years of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin.  Neoliberalism became our orthodoxy until it was even embraced by the New Democrats.

The third era is upon us.  It is the Era of Illiberal Democracy marked by the rise of the authoritarian state and the ascendancy of the state over the individual.  This is Canada under Stephen Harper.

I don't single out Canada for criticism.  Illiberal democracy is spreading fast throughout the world.  We are just following suit.  It's marked by a general shift to the Right, a skewing of the democratic restraints on government, and the emergence of new power structures.

Ignatieff recast the Liberals as Conservative Lite with his endorsement of a "muscular foreign policy", petro-statehood, and his unbalanced support for Israel.  Layton and Mulcair likewise embraced neoliberalism as they abandoned the Left and Blairified the NDP.

Harper has left no shred of doubt that he holds liberal democracy and especially the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in contempt.  He has sought to flout the Charter over and again, only to run afoul of the constitutional guardians, the Supreme Court.  They alone, not our opposition leaders, have ensured we have something left to fight for.

Illiberal democracy is evident in the workings of the authoritarian state.  It is manifest in voter manipulation and fraudulent elections.  It is the vehicle for rising inequality.  It is masked in secrecy and deceit.  It is the modern surveillance state.  It is the advancement of corporate interests (i.e. pipelines) over the public interest (i.e. action to thwart global warming).  We're even seeing the early onset symptoms of a permanent warfare state, outsourcing much of our foreign and military policy to another nation.

This is where we are today, the era of illiberal democracy.  Left unchecked it will worsen and our democracy will continue to be degraded.  We only have to look at America's "bought and paid for" Congress and its corporatist Supreme Court.

How to get back to real democracy is the puzzle.  It certainly cannot be achieved with Liberals as Conservatives and New Democrats as Liberals.  We cannot even the political keel under that reality and the country can only continue to list to the Right.

I fear the only antidote is progressivism, genuine bare-knuckle progressivism. Liberals need to restore their near-dead progressive wing.  New Democrats have to curb their centrism and return to their indispensable role of anchoring the Left and becoming the conscience of Parliament.  Who even speaks for labour any more?  Mulcair?  Spare me.

If we don't realize where we came from, everything great that we had accomplished, where we are today and just how we got here, we become party to ensuring the perpetuation and expansion of illiberal democracy in Canada.  We have a choice but we take it for granted at our and our children's peril.  Our freedom hangs in the balance.

Aviation Week Pays Homage to the Avro Arrow

Few people today know much about Canada's legendary foray into aviation high tech - the Avro Arrow that rolled out of the Avro Canada Malton plant in October, 1957.  Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman revisits that bittersweet moment in Canadian aviation that ended when the Arrow was put to the cutting torch by the conservative government of John Diefenbaker just two years later.


When Aviation Week reported on the fighter's rollout, in October 1957, the magazine called it "a serious contender for the top military aircraft of the next several years". High praise indeed, for a non-U.S. aircraft, given that the XB-58 supersonic bomber was in flight test and that new aircraft in the works included the A-5 Vigilante and the F-4 Phantom.

But the Arrow was extraordinary, and more so, given that the industry that produced it was less than a decade old when the prototype contract was issued in March 1955. Avro Canada had been formed by Britain's Hawker Siddeley Group after World War 2 and had quickly produced the CF-100 interceptor, the C-102 jet airliner (the world's second to fly), and the CF-100's Orenda engine, which was also fitted to Canadian-built Sabre fighters.

The CF-105 was a different kettle of fish entirely, designed to shoot down Soviet jet bombers over the Arctic, long before shorter-legged U.S. interceptors could touch them. Key requirements were a big radar, large missile load, long range and high speed, and agility at high speed and altitude. Translated: get out a long way quickly and accomplish multiple engagements before returning to refuel.

Chief designer Jim Floyd and his team produced a unique configuration, detailed in a 1958 lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society. The delta wing was chosen for supersonic efficiency, and had a cambered and notched leading edge for better maneuverability. It was mounted on top of the fuselage (at the price of a complex landing gear) to gain the benefits of a continuous tip-to-tip structure and a simple fuselage design, with straight inlet ducts, easy engine access, and a large weapon bay. The missile bay was a drop-down pallet, offering the potential of interchangeable units for other missions.

The performance requirements meant that almost everything on the airplane had to be invented. No existing engine would do the job, so Avro spun off a new Orenda Engines subsidiary to produce the Iroquois, the most powerful supersonic engine of the 1950s. The airframe took Canada into the world of integrally machined skins, and both airframe and engine used titanium. The CF-105 was the first aircraft to use 4,000 psi hydraulics. Canada enlisted Hughes for help with the radar and missiles, but the radar was new and the missile was the active-homing Sparrow II. Management was a huge challenge, both because the aircraft was complex (the second-biggest Mach 2 airplane anywhere) and because of the program's sheer size: at its peak, Avro Canada was the nation's third-largest company and in the world Top 100.

Technically, it went quite well. The first four Arrows proved fast, even with interim J75 engines that delivered only three-quarters of the Iroquois' thrust: on the seventh test flight, the first CF-105 accelerated through 1,000 mph in a climb at 50,000 feet. By early 1959, the first Iroquois-powered Mk2 was in taxi tests.

Politically, the story was different. A new Progressive Conservative government had been elected in March 1957, sworn to rein in government spending. ...On February 20, 1959, prime minister John Diefenbaker announced the cancellation of the CF-105, and within two months almost all the hardware in the program had been destroyed and nearly 30,000 jobs eliminated.

The Arrow lived on in legend. Diefenbaker had scrapped the project under direct orders from Washington, which saw it as a threat to the U.S. industry. One of the prototypes had been spirited away before the wrecking crews arrived, and was hidden in Canada or in secret tests in the United States. The Arrow has been the subject of more books and movies than many successful projects. As recently as 2012, the Canadian government -- bumbling its way through another fighter procurement -- was forced to deny that a neo-Arrow was a candidate to replace the F/A-18.

Would it have worked? The late Bill Gunston, technical editor of Flight in the 1950s and a shrewd reader of programs, believed that it would have done, particularly with British support (and the existence of Typhoon today shows how wrong the British government was in 1957). Even with the Soviet Union's backing away from strategic bombers in favor of missiles, the Arrow would have been very useful in Western Europe for defense against Tu-22M regional bombers. But none of that, unfortunately, was foreseen in 1959.

► Read the article from the October 21, 1957 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology:

CF-105 Displays Advanced Engineering (part 1)

CF-105 Displays Advanced Engineering (part 2)

It bears remembering that, today, it's the grandchildren of the Conservative peckerheads who killed off the Arrow and replaced it, bait and switch style, with Bomarc missiles, who are about to saddle the RCAF with the overpriced, overdue and underperforming F-35. I guess there are some things that are just in the blood.

What Would Diefenbaker Make of Steve Harper?

I was just writing a Conservative friend about the Nexen/Athabasca fiasco when a terrible thought crossed my mind.

I imagined what it would be like if "The Chief" John Diefenbaker was alive to witness Steve Harper's sell-out of Canadian resources and jobs to China's Communist masters.   What would old John make of what Harper has done to his Conservative party?  What would he have to say about Harper's collaborator and fellow sell-out, Peter MacKay?

While he was still in Parliament, I managed to spend some time with Mr. Diefenbaker in his office on various occasions discussing this and that.  I liked him and, for all his flaws, saw much in him to admire.   Above all else I saw in him a dedicated and genuine, fellow Canadian.

John Diefenbaker would have no truck with the Beijing Communists.  He was a fierce champion of rights and democracy.  He was an advocate of civil liberties of the sort unknown in China and unwelcome in Harper's lair.

I suppose what he might find most galling was the way Harper has tried to falsely cloak himself in the memory of John Diefenbaker.  I would surely like to hear what The Chief had to say about that and I'll bet it'd be fiery.