First, they didn’t know shag all about shag all.
Then they said it was some Machiavelli over at DND reincarnated as a sneaky bureaucrat who was to blame.
Now the story is that no one was misled and that things have always been done this way.
Peter MacKay’s latest explanation of the F-35 boondoggle is the death march of chutzpah.
The man who now admits that he knew in 2010 that the public number the Harper government was using for the cost of new fighter aircraft was at least $10 billion shy of reality ($25 billion if the estimable Andrew Coyne has it right) has drawn a strange conclusion. He declared that he has nothing to apologize for and that he operated in good faith. Really, Peter? Honest to God? Hope to die if you tell a lie? Pinky swears? Perhaps David Orchard should be consulted for clues as to how Peter MacKay defines good faith.
Judged by the facts, MacKay is dead-man-walking. As interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said: “The whole basis of our parliamentary system is that people tell the truth and it’s unimaginable to me that there would be no consequences to ministers not telling the truth, the prime minister not telling the truth.”
MacKay’s self-justification is oleaginous. Is there anyone who believes that the best way to equip our forces is to abandon a professional procurement process? MacKay’s latest attempt to reduce bald-faced lying by government and DND to an “accounting” issue is an argument for robotically loyal dolts and near relatives. The minister of defense may be in an Enron state of mind but nobody else is. The books have been cooked and the stench is making its way to the Langevin Block.
Does MacKay really believe that it is the public’s job to find the facts buried in the bowels of the system after the government chooses to mislead – in this case, throughout an entire federal election? Does he really think that the Harper government is above Contracting Policy 2006 as laid out by Treasury Board that requires full disclosure of true costs? Does he honestly believe character assassination politics is in order when the other guys have it right?
Peter MacKay’s bizarre metamorphosis into the Arrow Shirt Man of cabinet, a politician who believes that image is everything and words are nothing, pales beside the real story developing here. It appears that the government is about to follow the same path it did when Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson recently found Christian Paradis in conflict-of-interest. In that case, the Prime Minister pronounced from Thailand that he had reviewed the commissioner’s finding and decided there was no wrongdoing. The Emperor simply trumped the magistrate. It is the tell-tale impulse of the politician who has no place in a democracy – the instinct to be judge in your own cause and operate outside due process.
Having been caught with their costs down, the bottom line appears to be this: Canada is going to get the F-35 without a competition and without the slightest sign of remorse for misleading the public and parliament. We will also get a doomed attempt at better public relations optics – doomed because it will not address the issue building here – a Star Chamber inside DND aided and abetted by an increasingly belligerent government making enormous financial and policy decisions outside the boundaries of accountable governance. Even marketing has its limitations.
Absent the commitment to a real competition to find the best fighter jet to replace the F-18, no one should have any faith in those promised, impartial, technical briefings about the F-35 program from DND. The fix will still be in. The department already decided back in 2006 that it wanted this particular aircraft and wired the specs to get it. All of the good things the military have said publicly about this “flying piano” (American defense expert Winslow Wheeler’s words) came from Lockheed-Martin. So far, the word of the weapons manufacturer has been as reliable as Pinocchio on a bad day.
Nor is the scandal here confined to fifth generation flying boondoggles. Word is now coming from DND auditors that the same guys who ran the out-of-bounds F-35 acquisition have been mismanaging other big ticket equipment programs with little or no accountability. Upgrades to maritime patrol planes and the navy’s frigates are facing expensive delays because of inadequate risk management and control processes. And the strange part? DND has thrown away its only means of encouraging contractors to finish their work on time – the withholding of money. With these hugely expensive programs falling behind schedule, who in their right mind would reduce the holdback by two-thirds? Who is DND working for, the Canadian people or the arms manufacturers?
Interestingly, another dubious military acquisition will be hitting the water in Halifax as you read these words – the HMCS Windsor. The Windsor is one of four used Victoria-class submarines Canada bought from Britain in 1998 for $750 million. After spending just 147 days at sea after the purchase, the Windsor has been in dry-dock since 2007. Imagine if it was the family car. Five years out of water, the Windsor’s refit has come in at an estimated 300 percent over budget – a cool $47 million. Given the record of these subs, if the navy is thinking about taking aboard extra supplies for the sea trials, it might consider duct tape.
The HMCS Corner Brook is out of service until 2016 after striking the ocean bottom last June and the HMCS Victoria is just out of refit on the West Coast after sustaining major electrical damage in 2004. The HMCS Chicoutimi is out of service until sometime next year after catching fire in the North Atlantic as it headed for Canada from Britain in 2004 – a disaster that injured nine sailors and killed Lt. Chris Saunders. The total cost to Canadians of this Liberal era government purchase, including maintenance and repairs, is $3 billion. But don’t worry. None of the subs are in service, but these diesel-electric landlubbers have – are you ready? – stealth capacity. It will no doubt come as a great comfort to everyone that Peter MacKay is open to dumping the dud subs. “In an ideal world,” he said in October 2011, “I know nuclear subs are what’s needed under deep water, deep ice.” What ideal world is that?
Stephen Harper may yet decide to spare Peter MacKay’s political life, if only to satisfy his preoccupation with prime ministerial infallibility. Yet I don’t think so. In the past when big government initiatives went sour in Poll Land, the PM has shown the dexterity to order strategic retreats, if only to re-group for another crack at the objective down the road. That’s what he did with his intemperate comments on Iran when professional diplomats publicly declared how unhelpful such jingoism was in the tinder box of the Middle East. It is also what he did when his thinly disguised attempt to invade internet privacy created a firestorm. The successful control freak must understand that sometimes he is the person that has to be controlled.
In the meantime, the F-35 debacle is a momentous issue of public policy in Canada. Stephen Harper has plans to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars on military armaments because as he puts it, “If you want to be taken seriously in the world, you need the capacity to act.” He seems to have forgotten that encouraging the mystique of the military is exactly why the military has morphed into a government within a government operating on rules of its own making.
The PM is comfortable with an immense wealth transfer from the people who created the treasure to the foreign companies who create weapons. He is comfortable with Canada helping the United States to reduce the cost of modernizing its war machine with the help of Canadian orders that will knock down Washington’s per unit cost of whatever weapon is in the works. He is comfortable with the Chief of the Defense staff flying to major athletic events to weld together the worlds of sports and politics the same way the Americans have – a thoughtless union which appeals to reflexive patriotism, not reason, and makes the selling of otherwise indefensible corporate wars temporarily palatable.
Whether the country will accept the price-tag of this national sea-change – reduced social programs, a warrior image resting on a derivative foreign policy, and ever mounting democratic deficits at home, is Stephen Harper’s bet to place. What he does with Peter MacKay will tell the tale of which way he is leaning.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
Then they said it was some Machiavelli over at DND reincarnated as a sneaky bureaucrat who was to blame.
Now the story is that no one was misled and that things have always been done this way.
Peter MacKay’s latest explanation of the F-35 boondoggle is the death march of chutzpah.
The man who now admits that he knew in 2010 that the public number the Harper government was using for the cost of new fighter aircraft was at least $10 billion shy of reality ($25 billion if the estimable Andrew Coyne has it right) has drawn a strange conclusion. He declared that he has nothing to apologize for and that he operated in good faith. Really, Peter? Honest to God? Hope to die if you tell a lie? Pinky swears? Perhaps David Orchard should be consulted for clues as to how Peter MacKay defines good faith.
Judged by the facts, MacKay is dead-man-walking. As interim Liberal leader Bob Rae said: “The whole basis of our parliamentary system is that people tell the truth and it’s unimaginable to me that there would be no consequences to ministers not telling the truth, the prime minister not telling the truth.”
MacKay’s self-justification is oleaginous. Is there anyone who believes that the best way to equip our forces is to abandon a professional procurement process? MacKay’s latest attempt to reduce bald-faced lying by government and DND to an “accounting” issue is an argument for robotically loyal dolts and near relatives. The minister of defense may be in an Enron state of mind but nobody else is. The books have been cooked and the stench is making its way to the Langevin Block.
Does MacKay really believe that it is the public’s job to find the facts buried in the bowels of the system after the government chooses to mislead – in this case, throughout an entire federal election? Does he really think that the Harper government is above Contracting Policy 2006 as laid out by Treasury Board that requires full disclosure of true costs? Does he honestly believe character assassination politics is in order when the other guys have it right?
Peter MacKay’s bizarre metamorphosis into the Arrow Shirt Man of cabinet, a politician who believes that image is everything and words are nothing, pales beside the real story developing here. It appears that the government is about to follow the same path it did when Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson recently found Christian Paradis in conflict-of-interest. In that case, the Prime Minister pronounced from Thailand that he had reviewed the commissioner’s finding and decided there was no wrongdoing. The Emperor simply trumped the magistrate. It is the tell-tale impulse of the politician who has no place in a democracy – the instinct to be judge in your own cause and operate outside due process.
Having been caught with their costs down, the bottom line appears to be this: Canada is going to get the F-35 without a competition and without the slightest sign of remorse for misleading the public and parliament. We will also get a doomed attempt at better public relations optics – doomed because it will not address the issue building here – a Star Chamber inside DND aided and abetted by an increasingly belligerent government making enormous financial and policy decisions outside the boundaries of accountable governance. Even marketing has its limitations.
Absent the commitment to a real competition to find the best fighter jet to replace the F-18, no one should have any faith in those promised, impartial, technical briefings about the F-35 program from DND. The fix will still be in. The department already decided back in 2006 that it wanted this particular aircraft and wired the specs to get it. All of the good things the military have said publicly about this “flying piano” (American defense expert Winslow Wheeler’s words) came from Lockheed-Martin. So far, the word of the weapons manufacturer has been as reliable as Pinocchio on a bad day.
Nor is the scandal here confined to fifth generation flying boondoggles. Word is now coming from DND auditors that the same guys who ran the out-of-bounds F-35 acquisition have been mismanaging other big ticket equipment programs with little or no accountability. Upgrades to maritime patrol planes and the navy’s frigates are facing expensive delays because of inadequate risk management and control processes. And the strange part? DND has thrown away its only means of encouraging contractors to finish their work on time – the withholding of money. With these hugely expensive programs falling behind schedule, who in their right mind would reduce the holdback by two-thirds? Who is DND working for, the Canadian people or the arms manufacturers?
Interestingly, another dubious military acquisition will be hitting the water in Halifax as you read these words – the HMCS Windsor. The Windsor is one of four used Victoria-class submarines Canada bought from Britain in 1998 for $750 million. After spending just 147 days at sea after the purchase, the Windsor has been in dry-dock since 2007. Imagine if it was the family car. Five years out of water, the Windsor’s refit has come in at an estimated 300 percent over budget – a cool $47 million. Given the record of these subs, if the navy is thinking about taking aboard extra supplies for the sea trials, it might consider duct tape.
The HMCS Corner Brook is out of service until 2016 after striking the ocean bottom last June and the HMCS Victoria is just out of refit on the West Coast after sustaining major electrical damage in 2004. The HMCS Chicoutimi is out of service until sometime next year after catching fire in the North Atlantic as it headed for Canada from Britain in 2004 – a disaster that injured nine sailors and killed Lt. Chris Saunders. The total cost to Canadians of this Liberal era government purchase, including maintenance and repairs, is $3 billion. But don’t worry. None of the subs are in service, but these diesel-electric landlubbers have – are you ready? – stealth capacity. It will no doubt come as a great comfort to everyone that Peter MacKay is open to dumping the dud subs. “In an ideal world,” he said in October 2011, “I know nuclear subs are what’s needed under deep water, deep ice.” What ideal world is that?
Stephen Harper may yet decide to spare Peter MacKay’s political life, if only to satisfy his preoccupation with prime ministerial infallibility. Yet I don’t think so. In the past when big government initiatives went sour in Poll Land, the PM has shown the dexterity to order strategic retreats, if only to re-group for another crack at the objective down the road. That’s what he did with his intemperate comments on Iran when professional diplomats publicly declared how unhelpful such jingoism was in the tinder box of the Middle East. It is also what he did when his thinly disguised attempt to invade internet privacy created a firestorm. The successful control freak must understand that sometimes he is the person that has to be controlled.
In the meantime, the F-35 debacle is a momentous issue of public policy in Canada. Stephen Harper has plans to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars on military armaments because as he puts it, “If you want to be taken seriously in the world, you need the capacity to act.” He seems to have forgotten that encouraging the mystique of the military is exactly why the military has morphed into a government within a government operating on rules of its own making.
The PM is comfortable with an immense wealth transfer from the people who created the treasure to the foreign companies who create weapons. He is comfortable with Canada helping the United States to reduce the cost of modernizing its war machine with the help of Canadian orders that will knock down Washington’s per unit cost of whatever weapon is in the works. He is comfortable with the Chief of the Defense staff flying to major athletic events to weld together the worlds of sports and politics the same way the Americans have – a thoughtless union which appeals to reflexive patriotism, not reason, and makes the selling of otherwise indefensible corporate wars temporarily palatable.
Whether the country will accept the price-tag of this national sea-change – reduced social programs, a warrior image resting on a derivative foreign policy, and ever mounting democratic deficits at home, is Stephen Harper’s bet to place. What he does with Peter MacKay will tell the tale of which way he is leaning.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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