DND management needs a clean-up Tory cheerleading was over the top

Re: DND and military personnel OK to have side contracts with federal government, March 13.

Wow, no rules for in-house contracting at the Department of National Defence! Why aren't the employees doing a full day's work in-house? They have enough energy left over to take on multimillion-dollar contracts in their spare time? Who is looking after conflicts of interest?

And the department cannot answer the simple question of how many employees are currently also vendors to the department. No wonder it takes an eternity to get anything actually done in this department. Shareholders in a private corporation would not accept this. Neither should citizens who expect to have an effective Defence Department, which surely cannot be the case at the moment.

The Secretary General of

NATO is calling for two per cent of GDP to be spent on defence. For Canada, he should add a rider: a measure of effectiveness in spending money on defence to secure the military requirements on time and budget.

This is a management problem more than a political problem. What the politicians can do is clean out the management stable.

John Hollins, Gloucester

The March 9 Ottawa Citizen set a new benchmark for Conservative cheerleading. First, Postmedia gets a Leger poll that basically uses Pierre Poilievre's rallying cry “Canada is broken” as its question. Then it reports the results that “Canada is broken” on the top of the front-page advertising wrap, then again on the front page, before the actual story appears on the front of the NP section of the paper.

But just in case the readers were not swayed by these results, there is Andrew Macdougall's opinion piece reminiscing about past Conservative glory, and not if Poilievre will win the next election, but by how much.

Charles Crisp, Ottawa