Boy how things can change rapidly when you're not looking.
Do you recall when Canada used to be so obsessed with what was happening in the United States? We were almost paranoid about what they were doing and what they thought of us and whether we could pass their smell test.
Now we see the Goliath to the south being just a regular Wizard of Oz without a lot of substance. Still a giant among giants, but maybe not the tallest giant any more.
They shut down their government. We did the same thing, only our guys call it proroguing. We like silly names to attach to our failures to get things done.
Detroit has declared bankruptcy, and the Americans keep shooting each other by the hundreds without any real civil war being declared while we look on and say "what the heck's going on over there? I just wanna go shopping."
So our major agencies are looking elsewhere in an attempt to justify their jobs.
But instead of launching our spying tools on China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Japan our guys are focusing on, get this Brazil.
What's with that?
What are we going to learn by spying on Brazil?
Do they have a new formula for bikini wax that we need?
We already know what we need to know about Brazil.
They have a lot of bikinis, big beaches and biofuel from sugar cane. They also have one huge Carnival every year just like they do in New Orleans and Trinidad. But those aren't secrets.
We know they have a capital city that is tucked away out of sight if not out of mind, but then so do we. We have Ottawa that is tucked away, out of sight and the people in our capital are pretty well out of their minds.
Canada has something called Communication Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) that is supposed to be our eyes and ears for all things strategic that we're not supposed to know about in foreign lands.
I think it's just a bunch of schoolboys sneaking a peek at beautiful Brazilian girls in bikinis on the big beaches. What else could it be?
So while our major sneaky peek people are training their binoculars on Brazil's corn and sugar cane fields and bikinis, our Canadian auditors are finding out all kinds of silly things going on right here.
A recent audit of the Defence Department showed that the keepers of our military spending are just slightly off the mark by about $1.5 billion to be a little more exact.
It seems Larry and Moe are doing the books at Defence and, get this, they counted an anti-missile system twice while doing inventory. That was a $210 million ooopsy.
But they weren't finished running into doors.
It seems they didn't really know the value of our torpedoes.
They weren't listed in the last Canadian Tire home delivery catalogue, so they just didn't include them. In other words, if you don't know the value, don't count 'em.
I mean, what the heck, what good are our two torpedoes anyway when our ships are in dry dock getting retrofitted or refurbished or renovated, especially those four English submarines we bought over a decade ago that still don't work, on or under water. It's tough to launch torpedoes from a SUV. Most folks would use a ship or at least a boat. But we don't have torpedoes, even if we do have them. So not to worry.
Oh ya, and on the air force side, just to be fair, we learn that they forgot to remove two CF-18 fighter planes from the inventory list after they crashed and burned a couple of years ago. Somebody forgot to tell them. Accountability is not their strong suit.
So there is a good reason why we're not so obsessed with America anymore, not when we're having so much fun keeping track of our own accidental comedians and, of course, Brazil.
