The Snowbirds are Immoral

The Snowbirds are immoral. No, not the Canadians that spend their winters in Florida (I'd do the same if I could), I'm talking about the military air show. You know the group that uses the 1968 planes and that we are so proud of.

Risking peoples lives purely for entertainment is stupid. Granted, getting out of bed is risky (and so is not), but there has to be a point when we realise that the members of the snowbirds are at a greater risk of loosing their lives than our soldiers in Afghanistan!

The excuse we need (it is hard to admit you are wrong) is the age of the planes. We can say that our troops in Afghanistan need our support/affordable housing needs our support/the GST is to high. Replacing those 1968 planes will be expensive. Not as percentage of the billions of dollars we spend annually on the military (I'd venture a number, but I'd be wrong by several billion dollars, and that's bad even by blogging standards), but sticker shock expensive. The kind of sticker shock where you cancel helicopter orders and pay a 20 million dollar fine.

You could argue that the snowbirds contribute to the prestige of Canada. But so does Lake Louise. Nobody dies because of Lake Louise (the adjacent avalanche prone trails, yes, but I digress). Put the money into tourism. Who goes to airshows anyway? Its not cost effective to have these jets fly over a few hundred spectators in Arkansas.

But, more importantly, it is immoral to have tax dollars paying for something so risky and yet so pointless. The snowbirds are like Canadian Idol, except people die, regularly.