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a former Navy captain who serves as the Naval Association of Canada’s national president, says the Navy’s accomplishments in faraway seas are tough to sell to governments and voters. “It’s hard to describe to people that a ship over in the Indian Ocean is delivering value to Canada. It’s a very complex story,” he says. “It’s not like the Army guys putting sandbags in Winnipeg. That’s a direct connection; you can see it.” Maddison understands that his former colleagues will never have all the money they require. “There are never enough resources to make each and every commander absolutely comfortable, nor should there be,” he says. “Governments are faced with extraordinarily difficult decisions each and every day about where to spend the coin of the realm.” As for Carruthers, he says he is determined to look at the bright side. “I would argue that the Canadian Navy has nothing but a success story going back to the 1950s,” he says. “Every group of ships we’ve built have been the leaders in the world, and they’ve stood us in stead for decades.” But the country’s seamen remain overshadowed, not only by their battle-worn army comrades and precision-guided fighter pilots, but also a government bent on fiscal restraint. As the Navy waits for a new fleet and copes with the shackles of austerity, its struggles remain largely outside an indifferent public’s consciousness. Small wonder it’s the odd drunken sailor who makes his way into the news.
‘This is going to be the absolute low point right now for the Navy, in terms of having operational output’
MIKE DUFFY
‘WE’RE NOW IN COMMUNICATION’ Mike Duffy has reached out to the Peruvian woman who claims to be his daughter. One week after Maclean’s first published news of Karen Duffy’s lawsuit seeking to have the disgraced senator legally recognized as her father, her three-decade-old dream came true. She received a Facebook message from the former television journalist that was later followed by an online chat. “He wrote to me. We’re now in communication, and I’m very happy about it,” the 32-year-old Lima resident said in a brief phone interview. She declined to go into detail, or say whether or not Duffy is open to her claim. “He doesn’t want to talk to journalists about it,” she said. Karen Duffy’s lawsuit in the Corte Superior de Justicia de Lima claims that she is the product of an unlikely affair between a man who was one of the most famous journalists in Canada, and her mother, a convicted drug mule then serving time in an Ottawa halfway house. Seven months after being deported back to Peru, Karen’s mother, Yvette Benites, gave birth to a baby girl and entered Duffy’s name as the father in Lima’s central registry. Both mother and daughter say they made many attempts to contact Duffy over the years, but he never responded. The lawsuit does not seek money, and Karen says she is not interested in Canadian citizenship. Mike Duffy has been aware of the court action since December, but had yet to respond. When first contacted by Maclean’s, he said its allegations were “untrue.” He did not immediately respond to an inquiry about his online communications with Karen and her lawyer, Jorge Alejandro Rázuri. In a brief statement, Rázuri said he received a message from Duffy on July 21, but waited for confirmation of the suspended senator’s identity before putting him in touch with his client. “Out of respect for the parties, we will not be making any other statement,” he wrote. Karen’s Facebook timeline shows a couple of brief exchanges with a “Dennis Duffy.” (Dennis is Mike Duffy’s middle name.) Shortly afterward, she posted the following message for her friends: “It’s impossible, said pride. It’s risky, said experience. No use, said the brain. Just try, whispered the heart.”
Underwater: HMCS Victoria arrives in Pearl Harbor this month for a naval exercise 18
WorldMags.net AUGUST 11, 2014
JONATHON GATEHOUSE
SGT MATTHEW MCGREGOR/COMBAT CAMERA
Slashed budgets already have some ships resting in their jetties. Perry told Maclean’s earlier this year that a pair of coastal defence vessels, which take the lead on counter-narcotics missions in the Caribbean, are tied to the docks in favour of the submarine fleet and the refurbished frigates re-entering service. Maddison admits that the fiscal pressure—and the lack of available ships—has an impact. “We go through these cycles,” he says. “It has placed a lot of pressure on commanders at all levels to generate technical personnel and operational readiness.” There is good news, hidden though it may be. The Navy’s multi-billiondollar, mid-life refit of its dozen frigates—the fleet’s workhorses—is by all accounts on schedule, due to wrap up in 2017, and on budget. The modernization stripped the frigates of outdated technology and produced a rare successful procurement under Tory auspices. And the Navy and its supporters trumpet its ability to keep three destroyers and two supply ships, all of which entered service before 1975, afloat for so many decades— a boast few navies can make. But those morsels of success have done little to raise the Navy’s profile in the eyes of Canadians and officials in Ottawa, especially against the backdrop—until the last troops pulled out earlier this year—of land operations in Afghanistan. The Navy’s anti-smuggling missions in the Arabian Sea or Caribbean regularly took a back seat to that land war. Jim Carruthers,