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An Islamic climate activist hijacked a plane in Vancouver, and only the U.S. Air Force was available to help. That’s pretty 51st state-like, don’t you think?

There are about five layers of crazy to this story, but here’s how the state broadcaster, the CBC, headlined it: "Man charged with hijacking one day after flights grounded at Vancouver Airport."

Let’s read a bit of the article:

Shaheer Cassim, born in 1986, has been charged with hijacking and had 'ideological motive', police say.

Is being born in 1986 really the most salient characteristic about this hijacker?

A spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service of Canada said that the hijacking also constitutes a terrorist offence and a terrorist activity under two sections of the Criminal Code. In a statement on Wednesday evening, police said that Cassim allegedly threatened a flight instructor and hijacked the plane at Victoria International Airport.

"Investigators have determined the suspect acted with an ideological motive to disrupt airspace," said Sgt. Tammy Lobb, though she did not specify what the motive was.

And get this part:

A spokesperson for the Canadian Armed Forces told CBC News in a statement that the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) scrambled U.S. F-15 fighter jets in response to the alleged hijacking on Tuesday.

And this:

"NORAD F-15s responded to this incident as they were closest and able to be on scene the fastest," it wrote. "CF-18s were in the process of responding, but the incident resolved before any NORAD assets arrived on station.”

So that's one side of the story. Here’s another side to the story, this time from a CTV report:

The day before the suspected hijacking of a light aircraft triggered a security scare at Vancouver’s airport this week, former commercial pilot Shaheer Cassim posted on social media that he was a “messenger of Allah” sent to save humanity from climate change…

Cassim’s online posts include musings on religion, climate science, and advocacy for tolerance and peace, including a claim “the Angel Gabriel appeared before me and gave me a message from Allah.”

Oh, good. He’s following Greta’s career path — environmental extremist and Islamic extremist.

Funny enough, the CBC hasn’t reported on that. Remember, the most powerful form of bias isn’t how the regime slants the news. It’s what they choose to report on at all — and what they choose to hide. The CBC knows exactly what they’re doing here.

Just remember: being born in 1986. That’s the most important fact to the CBC.

So we’ve got a hijacker who worships Allah and Greta, and says he’s motivated by the climate.

Back to how Canada reacted: we didn’t. We couldn’t. We don’t really have an air force. We have maybe 50 CF-18 fighter jets that are operational — at most.

They’re stationed at precisely two bases: Cold Lake, Alberta, which is right near the Alberta–Saskatchewan border, and Bagotville, Quebec.

And that’s it. Once in a while, some CF-18s visit other places — for example, there’s CFB Comox, which is on Vancouver Island — but that’s rare, and it wasn’t the case this week.

Imagine that. We have so few jets that, most of the time, we have a couple of dozen at the Alberta–Saskatchewan border, and a couple of dozen jets near the Quebec–New Brunswick border. That’s it.

No wonder we couldn’t take down the Chinese hot air balloon, which went all the way across Canada, spying, before it was taken down by the Americans over their land.

So, of course, the F-15s flying up from Washington state were much faster.

This situation merits a very special shout-out to our Liberal friends — the “elbows up” folks. It’s hard to think of anything more emasculating than having a foreign air force come to the rescue for your country’s third-largest city, because the nearest jets — if they even work — are hours away.

You don’t have to call it the 51st state. But having a foreign military come to save you from a Cessna plane? That’s about as “51st state” as you can get.