Lebanon rescue snafu
Hello
I noticed one Conservative scandal that was missing from this list at
Scandalpedia. The disastrous humanitarian rescue operations that were
put together on the fly by the then brand new Conservative government
in response to the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006. If this is too long
ago as far as scandals go, then my apologies. However, the lack of
planning and poor execution of the rescues certainly does not look
good for the Canadian government especially a Conservative party that
plays up it's love of national defence and sovereignty. We had to do
the embarrassing thing of hiring a shipping line to send three ships
to rescue vacationing or working Canadian citizens. The last time I
checked, we had a few Canadian frigates on NATO duty and I am sure if
we asked NATO politely to temporarily absolve ourselves from patrol
duty to rescue our own citizens in harms way, they would not have
minded. But that didn't happen. Instead, we hire civilian ships that
will not enter a port that is under military fire due to Maritime Law
preventing sea captains from doing so. One of the proposed solutions
was to have military ships act as armed escorts to accompany the
civilian ships into and out of the port. This was not done and our
citizens were left to their own devices to get out of a war zone.
Equally embarrassing was the fact that if a person had dual
citizenship, the secondary country is usually more than happy to
rescue the civilian on Canada's behalf. This will probably require
more research for references, but it was a scandal and Mr. Harper did
not even recall parliament from summer vacation to make it look good
