In politics, trust corrodes easily. The damage may not be visible at first, but mistrust will slowly and inexorably eat away at a government’s credibility.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might want to keep this in mind as they flounder their way through the F-35 mess.
The central political issue of the government’s plan to buy 65 F-35 fighter planes is not the quality of the aircraft themselves. By and large, most citizens don’t know — or care to know — the ins and outs of competing fighter jets.
Nor is cost the central political issue. Whether the final cost is $14.7 billion or $25 billion or even more is, in itself, politically irrelevant.
To most of us, any of these sums is a lot of money.
But when voters think governments are lying to them, they do care.
And coming on top of the robocall scandal, the F-35 brouhaha presents a particularly unattractive picture of this government’s truthfulness.
To voters, the revelation that misleading robocalls were made during last May’s election is a personal affront. Directing people to non-existent polling stations is not an obscure matter of parliamentary privilege. It is a direct assault on our right to choose our leaders.
And when the Harper Conservatives responded first by denying the allegations, then by accusing the opposition of engaging in smear tactics and finally by dismissing any misleading robocalls as isolated events, they did themselves no favours.
It just seemed belligerently shifty.
So too the F-35 business.
Here again, the Harper government began with its usual approach. When opposition parties questioned plans to buy the F-35, they were labelled unpatriotic.
When Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page calculated that the real cost of the new fighters would be more than double the government’s $14.7 billion estimate, the Conservatives said he didn’t know what he was talking about.
During last year’s election campaign, Harper personally assured voters that the planes’ cost would not exceed $14.7 billion.
And that remained his story until last week when Auditor General Michael Ferguson revealed the government had long known the real price would be $10 billion higher.
How to explain this?
First, Conservative ministers blamed defence department bureaucrats. That didn’t wash well in the bureaucracy, leading chief of defence staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk — who already feels himself in Conservative gun sights — to hold an impromptu press scrum Monday, in which he said he had always told ministers the truth.
So, over the weekend, the government tried another approach — that the $10 billion gap was simply an honest accounting difference.
Government House Leader Peter Van Loan told CBC Monday that it was, well, like buying a car. When you buy a car, he said, you don’t include fuel and insurance costs in your decision-making.
(Actually, most of us do. That’s why Humvee sales plummeted after gas prices went through the roof. )
We shall see how well these explanations satisfy. In the short term, the F-35 issue is bound to fade. But trust, as former prime minister Brian Mulroney found, is easy to lose.
Mulroney was famously called a liar in June 1985 by an elderly woman angered at his decision to cut back old age pensions. He survived that. He even won the next election handily. But the corrosion had begun.
By the time Mulroney stepped down as prime minister, he was mocked across the land as Lyin’ Brian.
More to the point — and this is something Harper’s MPs might want to remember — in the subsequent election, his Progressive Conservatives were virtually wiped out.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might want to keep this in mind as they flounder their way through the F-35 mess.
The central political issue of the government’s plan to buy 65 F-35 fighter planes is not the quality of the aircraft themselves. By and large, most citizens don’t know — or care to know — the ins and outs of competing fighter jets.
Nor is cost the central political issue. Whether the final cost is $14.7 billion or $25 billion or even more is, in itself, politically irrelevant.
To most of us, any of these sums is a lot of money.
But when voters think governments are lying to them, they do care.
And coming on top of the robocall scandal, the F-35 brouhaha presents a particularly unattractive picture of this government’s truthfulness.
To voters, the revelation that misleading robocalls were made during last May’s election is a personal affront. Directing people to non-existent polling stations is not an obscure matter of parliamentary privilege. It is a direct assault on our right to choose our leaders.
And when the Harper Conservatives responded first by denying the allegations, then by accusing the opposition of engaging in smear tactics and finally by dismissing any misleading robocalls as isolated events, they did themselves no favours.
It just seemed belligerently shifty.
So too the F-35 business.
Here again, the Harper government began with its usual approach. When opposition parties questioned plans to buy the F-35, they were labelled unpatriotic.
When Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page calculated that the real cost of the new fighters would be more than double the government’s $14.7 billion estimate, the Conservatives said he didn’t know what he was talking about.
During last year’s election campaign, Harper personally assured voters that the planes’ cost would not exceed $14.7 billion.
And that remained his story until last week when Auditor General Michael Ferguson revealed the government had long known the real price would be $10 billion higher.
How to explain this?
First, Conservative ministers blamed defence department bureaucrats. That didn’t wash well in the bureaucracy, leading chief of defence staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk — who already feels himself in Conservative gun sights — to hold an impromptu press scrum Monday, in which he said he had always told ministers the truth.
So, over the weekend, the government tried another approach — that the $10 billion gap was simply an honest accounting difference.
Government House Leader Peter Van Loan told CBC Monday that it was, well, like buying a car. When you buy a car, he said, you don’t include fuel and insurance costs in your decision-making.
(Actually, most of us do. That’s why Humvee sales plummeted after gas prices went through the roof. )
We shall see how well these explanations satisfy. In the short term, the F-35 issue is bound to fade. But trust, as former prime minister Brian Mulroney found, is easy to lose.
Mulroney was famously called a liar in June 1985 by an elderly woman angered at his decision to cut back old age pensions. He survived that. He even won the next election handily. But the corrosion had begun.
By the time Mulroney stepped down as prime minister, he was mocked across the land as Lyin’ Brian.
More to the point — and this is something Harper’s MPs might want to remember — in the subsequent election, his Progressive Conservatives were virtually wiped out.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
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