Having mentioned the inadequacies of Babel’s MP more than a few times in the past, the point should be quickly made that this is not just a rant. And, as my wife has asked me nicely to not refer to him as ‘that a**hole,’ I will try to be a little more courteous.
I will do it because this is serious. The sad story has to do with something known as the national command centre. This is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) initiative that politicians have mainly ignored for the past quarter century. I bring this up because a prototype national command centre was temporarily in Babel earlier this year. Babel is an ideal locale for this centre on a permanent basis. The cost of having it here temporarily during the G8 and G20 summits was probably enough money to purchase the facilities and pay for the centre’s first year of operations.
The first time I heard of this initiative was about 25 years ago. I was standing at a window in a very large room at the Alta Vista Drive headquarters of the RCMP in Ottawa. The person I was talking with was the officer in charge of the identification section. I pointed to a street about 200 metres away and said: “If a criminal had somehow found a bazooka, he could park over there for about a minute and easily destroy the centralized police records on 2.5 million Canadians and probably kill every person in this room.”
That was when the rationale of the national command centre was discussed. Those records and their now computerized locations are nowhere near as vulnerable today but Canada still does not have a secure site for an outside-of-Ottawa national command centre. With growing terrorism threats against North America, the need is more urgent.
What the national command centre would provide is a secure repository for critical records, a command centre for military, police and emergency services needed in case of a natural or man-made catastrophe that requires immediate multi-facetted interdiction. The centre would coordinate military response with air, naval and ground capabilities as well as all police services and emergency services, depending on what is required.
Babel is an ideal location for this centre as it is close enough to Ottawa for inexpensive secure communications. It is easy to move key personnel to it when needed. It is close to major ground and air military resources for area defence. It has multiple reliable communications networks. It provides good living accommodations for a highly trained staff and the technical support people. The city offers excellent training and educational facilities and a highly rated hospital. It is far enough away from the U.S. border to not be caught up in an event against that country.
Babel made even more sense earlier this year with the G8 in Huntsville and the G20 in Toronto. That is why facilities were rented in Babel at a very high price, equipped and staffed for an amount that has been variously reported as $14 million and $27 million, depending on who might be asked. One suspects that the variance in the figures is that one includes personnel and operating expenses and the other does not.
But where was Babel’s Member of Parliament while Babel housed the national command centre? Maybe he was at hockey school, honing his skills. Maybe he was busy ordering more grey flyers to put in Babel mail boxes in a desperate attempt to get re-elected. What we do know was that he said nothing about making the national command centre a permanent installation in Babel. Mind you, what would be the point? Nobody listens to him in Ottawa anyway.
While it would certainly be better for Babel to have a more intelligent and politically capable Member of Parliament, you would think that someone in his party could kick start the guy to make something happen. Babel deserves better.
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