A couple of weeks ago, Liberal MP Garth Turner was at a meeting with twenty faith leaders.  He ended the meeting with this comment:

"These are contradictory times," said Turner at the conclusion of the meeting. "We don't have funding for youth centres but we do have $150,000 for every shell bought for the sole purpose of destroying a village in Afghanistan. We could buy each Afghan a condominium with that money," he added.

Um, hold on.  Is Garth Turner alleging that the Canadian military is buying weapons and equipment in order to attack civilian targets in Afghanistan?

He doesn't actually say Canadian soldiers are carrying out this particular mission, just that wiping out villages is the real -- no, the sole -- purpose of Canadian weaponry.  At least that's what it sounds like, assuming the quote is accurate.

And as for buying condominiums for Afghans, I'm surprised Garth Turner is suggesting real estate as an investment:

But there are those — like MP and would-be Nostradamus Garth Turner — who are sure we’re due for another big one. Turner’s latest book, Greater Fool: The Troubled Future of Real Estate, is filled with dire scenarios of Canadians losing just about everything they’ve sunk into their homes.

Perhaps Garth Turner thinks the Afghan housing market is in better shape than Canada's.  But then I can't see how, what with Canadian troops preparing to rain destruction on Afghans and their homes.

Talk about downward pressure on the housing market.

Update #1: Garth Turner has responded to a serving member of the family who called him out on his quoted comments:

The words you refer to were taken out of context from a newspaper report and interpreted and embellished by a political opponent of mine who was not at the meeting in which they were spoken.

There you go.  It was taken out of context.  The 39 words in the news report were clearly insufficient to relay Garth Turner's deep support for the military and his appreciation for the accuracy of the Excalibur 155mm artillery shell.  Moreover, the phrase in question -- "every shell bought for the sole purpose of destroying a village" -- was preceded by a mere 17 words, and followed by only 12 more words, an egregious case of cherry-picking.  I mean, really.  "Sole purpose"?  That could mean almost anything.

Update #2: This story continues to grow.  Now the National Post has taken it up, with John Turley-Ewart writing a devastating piece on Garth Turner's responsibilities if it is true that Garth Turner is alleging that the Canadian military is arming its troops with the intention of destroying civilian targets in Afghanistan.

Update #3: I think I hit a nerve.  Usually Garth Turner calls me an idiot in a response to a comment somewhere on an unrelated post, but this time he has allocated an entire post to this issue.  Is that a trickle of sweat on Garth's brow?

In any case, here is what Garth Turner has to say about the context and accuracy of the quote:

Two weeks ago I held a Roundtable on Moral Issues in Halton with twenty-four faith leaders – Christian, Muslim and others – to get their opinion on challenges facing me as a Parliamentarian. One of those, of course, was the war in Afghanistan, which they opposed with conviction. I invited the local paper to sit in, and the young reporter covering the event wrote this:

“These are contradictory times,” said Turner at the conclusion of the meeting. “We don’t have funding for youth centres but we do have $150,000 for every shell bought for the sole purpose of destroying a village in Afghanistan. We could buy each Afghan a condominium with that money.”

Actually, my words were a little different, and the village part was suspect, but the reporter was close enough in his coverage that I didn’t bother correcting him. The shells in question, as I described to the group, are GPS-guided munitions which our forces are using to destroy Taliban positions. They do cost $150,000 each, compared with about $2,000 for a conventional round. I’m told that for the additional cost, the accuracy of strikes is improved by about two dozen meters from a range of up to 20 kilometres. I used this ammunition as an example of what our group had spent two hours discussing – the priorities governments face when allocating limited resources. Maybe it was a bad example. Maybe it was a good one. But I used it. And would again.

The village part was suspect?  The reporter got it wrong?  That's a pretty serious charge...no, wait...it isn't.  Garth Turner doesn't deny that he said "every shell [is] bought for the sole purpose of destroying a village".  It's just suspect.  Whatever that means.

In any case, the reporter was close enough -- Garth Turner's words, not mine.  I guess that means that the quote was accurate enough.  Garth Turner now confirms that he was talking about the XM982 Excalibur artillery shell from Raytheon and BAE.  According to Garth Turner's sources, a $2,000 shell is only two-dozen meters less accurate than the $150,000 Excalibur. 

Official sources peg the accuracy improvement of the XM982 Excalibur as a bit better than that:

The Army plans to extend the range and accuracy of the M-109 Paladin SPH by adapting it to fire the Excalibur. This would extend the Paladin's range by 30 percent. It would improve accuracy by reducing dispersion from 370 meters for traditional artillery projectiles to 10 meters for Excalibur. The Excalibur also can be used both by the M-198 155mm howitzer currently employed by the Army and Marines, and by the XM-777 lightweight 155 mm gun that the services are considering as a replacement.

From 370 meters to 10 meters.  A circle of a radius of 370 meters represents an area nearly 1500 times larger than the circle of 10-meter radius. 

Now the kill radius of 155mm HE shells is about 50 meters.  If you can put the Excalibur anywhere within 10 meters of the target, you're guaranteed a kill with one shot.

To kill a target somewhere inside a radius of 370 meters, you would have to use a minimum of 55 shells if you could guarantee perfectly even distribution.  That is $110,000 worth of $2,000 shells, at least.  And the obliteration of anything within 370 meters of the target -- like an entire village.

There is also a chance that the target runs away while the cheap shells are missing the mark by 200 meters or more.  Plus the Canadians can't move until they fire all their shells, since moving would require computing a new firing solution, and the delay means the target gets away.  An artillery team that stands still too long is a sitting duck.  Even a cheap Taliban mortar can find the mark if you stay on the same spot long enough, like a Canadian artillery team taking the time to fire cheap shell after cheap shell against the same target.  With Excalibur, you fire exactly one shell, you destroy the target, you move to a new location, and repeat with a new target.  Excalibur saves lives on both sides -- except those of the targets.

It's good that Garth Turner is talking to these people about priorities.  But that sort of discussion needs accurate information.  Telling these folks that the Conservatives are spending $150,000 per shell in order to improve the accuracy by "two dozen meters" certainly sounds like a gross waste of money.  The publicly available information on the accuracy of the Excalibur shell (an order of magnitude better than Garth Turner's figure in terms of radius), coupled with a rudimentary understanding of what the numbers mean and some small ability to do simple math, suggests instead that the money is well spent, not just to improve the effectiveness and personal security of Canadian troops, but to spare non-combatants injury when Taliban positions are attacked.

It is not likely that these faith leaders spent any time researching artillery design or doing the math.  They just took Garth Turner at his word.

Too bad his word seemed to miss the mark when it comes to accuracy in this case.  And besides quantitative accuracy, Garth Turner seems to have neglected to factor in dramatically lowered risk Canadian soldiers in artillery units now face since Excaliber was fielded.

Maybe like Stephane Dion, Garth Turner finds it hard to set priorities.

But as I finish updating this post, we still have his suspect words concerning the sole purpose of these shells, that is, to destroy villages.  What did he really mean, assuming he did not mean what he seemed to say?

Update: Garth Turner thinks the reporter's quote is off in some undefined way:

Actually, my words were a little different, and the village part was suspect, but the reporter was close enough in his coverage that I didn’t bother correcting him. [emphasis added]

Um, the byline to the story reads "By Melanie Cummings, Special to the Champion".  I'm pretty sure Melanie is a woman.

Did Garth Turner meet this reporter?  Did he know there was a reporter there?  Did he even know there was a story printed about this roundtable meeting until now?  He seems to say he had read the story and that then he considered contacting the reporter for a correction, dismissing it after deciding the reporting was "close enough".  Funny that the Garth Turner didn't recall the name of the reporter that made these mistakes in quoting him.

Read more on the question of how accurately Garth Turner is being quoted.

And now read about what the real quote was, and how an apology is offered.