The best thing about Peter MacKay’s slippery justification for his free ride on the Canadian Forces Cormorant is that it could be true. It probably is true, sort of.There’s no question the defence minister was on holiday at a remote fishing camp. True, he was leaving his holiday to attend government business. It might even be true that he’d been angling for a look-see at the helicopter’s search-and-rescue capabilities — he’s a gung-ho kind of guy, and that’s the sort of thing he’d get a kick out of. It’s also entirely believable that high-ups in the air force recognized the advantages of showing off the Cormorant’s capabilities. So when the minister rises in the House of Commons and tells his version of the tale, he’s probably not uttering a total falsehood. Technically.
Whether it accurately reflects events as they actually unfolded is another story. Thanks to email traffic contained in Department of Defence records, (now you understand why Harper hates making information public?) we know that Colonel Bruce Ploughman, a bright spark at DND, realized right away that this was trouble waiting to happen, and tried to convey that message to his colleagues.
“When the guy who’s fishing at the fishing hole next to the minister sees the big yellow helicopter arrive and decides to use his cell phone to video the minister getting on board and post it on Youtube, who will be answering the mail on that one?” he asks, with remarkable perspicacity.
Col. Ploughman should be recruited immediately to Mr. MacKay’s communications team and given a veto over all future brainwaves. Unfortunately, the people around the minister aren’t as fleet of foot. They ignored the fact that it wasn’t necessary to send a chopper to pluck Mr. MacKay from the fishing camp — it was just two hours to Gander airport via a scenic route over land and water. If the minister had set off by boat, he might have made it before the various military officers involved figured out their cover story. In the end, though, Lt.-Col. Chris Bulls wrote that the Cormorant would be sent “under the guise” of a search-and-rescue mission.
“Under the guise.” That means: “We’re just making this up so we have an excuse to do what the minister wants.” It’s a good guise, because it kind of holds together, and might actually have worked if not for the release of the emails. And the thing is, Col. Ploughman had warned that the emails might get out. The air force, he pointed out, regularly received access-to-information requests “specifically targeting travel on Canadian Forces aircraft by ministers.”
It would be hard to deliver a more clear-cut explanation of the dangers involved than the ones offered by Col. Ploughman. But politics is politics, and Mr. MacKay was the boss, so the soldiers did what the boss wanted, no matter how dumb it might have been, and then helped invent a cover story. And Mr. Mackay is sticking to it.
This is a characteristic of the current cabinet. When Bev Oda got caught in the famous case of the noteworthy ‘not’ — in which a departmental document was altered after the fact, to deny funding to an organization that had already been approved — she stuck to her story in the face of howls of derision across the land. Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s insistence that he had nothing to do with $50 million worth of projects being chosen for his riding during the G20 summit is being considered for a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Utterly Unbelievable. (2nd runner up: The President of Nigeria, for his essay, “There is no corruption in Nigeria.”) But Mr. Clement didn’t flinch from his story and, like O.J. Simpson, is still on the lookout for whoever was really responsible.
The Prime Minister appears unperturbed by the notion that such apparent disrespect for the truth might damage the image of his government. Perhaps because he’s pulled a few fast ones himself in his time. If Mr. MacKay wants to go on pretending he really needed that chopper ride out of the fishing camp, and it was all pre-planned and according to Hoyle, Mr. Harper — judging on past practice — will likely let him go on pretending. People will forget soon enough. It’s not like there’s a principle involved.
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Source: National Post
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