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Scott Vrooman's blog

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Scott has written and performed comedy for TV (Conan, Picnicface, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), radio (This is That), and the web (Vice, Funny or Die, College Humor, The Toronto Star, The Huffington Post, iPolitics). His sketch group Picnicface broadcast 13 episodes of a sketch show, executive produced by Kid In The Hall Mark McKinney, on Canada’s Comedy Network. Scott co-wrote and co-starred in the feature film Roller Town, which is now streaming on Netflix, and he took a lead role in writing the book Picnicface’s Canada. He was a professional economist at Finance Canada and the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council before pursuing comedy full time. Follow him on Twitter: @mescottvrooman.

Did Harjit Sajjan read his mandate letter?

| January 27, 2016
Did Harjit Sajjan read his mandate letter?

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In Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to defense minister Harjit Sajjan he ordered him to "end Canada's combat mission in Iraq and Syria." But as former defense minister Jason Kenney, who has bravely served this country as a four-star collector of World War II paraphernalia, pointed out with this graphic on Twitter, our airstrikes continue. 

Of course he was missing a few statistics, like how many civilians our 500-pound iron fragmentation bombs have killed. Up to 27 civilians may have been killed in a single Canadian airstrike, as reported by left wing rag The Pentagon. They also reported that Canada's military lawyers said there are "no obligations for the Canadian Armed Forces to conduct an investigation" of the incident. We're peacekeepers, not record keepers. 

So there's no obligation to the families of those civilians, but we do feel an obligation to the American government, who started this perpetual war in 2003. And to the Kurds and Iraqi security forces, who have been accused of unlawful killings, abductions, and revenge attacks against civilians. And to our noble allies in Saudi Arabia, who are indiscriminately bombing civilians in Yemen and also arming a group that includes Al Qaeda.  

And this deep sense of obligation to our benevolent allies led Minister Sajjan to worry that fulfilling his mandate would leave a "capability gap" for the coalition. But a capability gap is what Canadians voted for, because some of them are capable of learning from history that dropping bombs will only lead to more anger, more hate and more violence.

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