It’s safe to assume that Canada produces some of the best military snipers in the world. The Canadian forces are competent… on par with the Yanks, but not as good as the Brits yet. The problem is the value that Canada places upon its military. Here’s a news story I picked up from a newspaper which made me very pissed off with Rick Hillier.

A former Nova Scotia man who was turned down when he tried to join the Canadian air force has won the Distinguished Flying Cross for demonstrating “great courage and composure” while piloting a British military helicopter in Afghanistan.

Flight Lieutenant Christopher Hasler grew up in Bedford, near Halifax, and learned how to fly gliders and Cessnas with the local air cadet squadron.

After job-shadowing a Sea King helicopter pilot at 12 Wing Shearwater and graduating high school, he turned his eye to the sky with the hope of making a career out of flying military choppers.

“I applied out of high school to the Canadian Forces and didn’t get in, for whatever reason,” the 26-year-old said during a Christmas visit with his parents, who live in Ottawa.

“These things happen. So I went to university and still really wanted to fly. So I gave the Royal Air Force a call and then I was successful.”

After a relatively peaceful stint in Iraq in 2004, Hasler was sent to Afghanistan last summer for a two-month tour.

He was the captain of a Chinook on July 17 when he led a group of helicopters into Sangin, a Taliban stronghold where a soldier had been killed the day before while trying to secure the landing site.

The mission was to bring desperately needed supplies to British paratroopers.

The citation says that “he held his nerve while his troops were disembarking at the hottest of helicopter landing sites, allowing them to suppress enemy positions with minimum U.K. casualties.

Hasler, who did another two-month tour of Afghanistan in the fall is to return again early in the new year, plans to attend a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in the spring, when Queen Elizabeth II will present him with the DFC.

This makes me twice as mad because those in Canadian Forces Recruiting turned down my application because I’m not a Canadian citizen. HOW STUPID CAN THE TOFFS IN BUSINESS SUITS GET? The Canadians are bearing the brunt of the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan… Canadian soldiers are dying, yet they won’t send more soldiers or boost the national spending on defence.

Of course… Italy, France and Germany are still a bunch of pussy whipped bunch of pansies who are a disgrace to NATO, by keeping their sorry ass troops up north, and refusing to put them in danger down the south while Canada, Britain, Denmark and the U.S are taking all the crap.