George W. Bush once told his inner circle that Sweden had no army.
The subject came up because one of his foreign policy advisors suggested that Swedish troops would be acceptable to both Israel and Palestine as peacekeepers.
The president demurred. Not only did Sweden have no army, he said, it was also a neutral country and therefore unsuitable for any military mission. After a delicate attempt to inform the commander-in-chief about a wonderful place called Switzerland, which indeed had no army and was neutral, the room of cowed advisors fell silent.
Aura of office is a funny thing. It is excellent camouflage for third-rate minds and shady characters. It can sometimes turn otherwise estimable men into pant-wetting school-boys. It can make conscientious people fall silent over the things that matter to them most – a death rattle for the soul. And it can set the stage for the worst of all possible developments in a democracy – the office used to sanctify the man.
The Harper government now operates in the Sweden-has-no-army universe. These days in Ottawa, saying it makes it so. That’s why after a week of crushing revelations of malfeasance, Peter MacKay is still there to make a mockery of cabinet responsibility and the quaint requirement of telling the plain truth to Canadians. That’s why the prime minister is spouting nonsense about two sets of F-35 figures, offering the underwhelming argument that they measure different things. The only thing the public should be measuring is the length of his nose.
Even Bruce Carson, not the first person who would spring to mind as a moral arbiter in matters of public administration, has asked the great question here. If being caught out in a champion display of dishonest incompetence is not grounds for dismissal from cabinet, what is? Will the government forgive itself for Robocalls if it turns out to be a scheme run out of party headquarters? It should matter, unless, of course, you are dealing with a government for whom the facts are unimportant. The Harper government record shows how far detached it has become from what a Bush-era advisor pejoratively referred to as “the reality-based community.”
The great notion in the Bush 2 era was that the facts didn’t matter at all. Iraq taught the world that much. The United States was an empire which created its own facts when it took action. Objective reality only mattered to the deluded empiricists and prisoners of the Enlightenment, the ones who believed that solutions to the world’s great problems came from a judicious study of the facts. As one Bushie told Ron Suskind while he prepared a piece for the New York Times Magazine, “We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The PM has taken those words to heart. Consider what the Harper government has said about the F-35. The public has never been misled about the true cost of the project. There has been a competition to find the best fighter plane for Canada. The political opposition is unpatriotic and number-challenged. Kevin Page is a bungler. The Minister of Defense has acted in good faith on this brief. The sole-sourcing of this project will actually save Canadians money. The project is on time and on budget. Canada has a contract that guarantees the price. Canada doesn’t have a contract. “Look, we’ve always been clear…”
The objective facts from the reality-based world? The public has always been misled about the true cost of the F-35 project. The Department of National Defense violated its own policies in low-balling by a factor of billions how much Canadians would have to pay for 65 planes. The Harper government broke Treasury Board policies when it chose not to release the true F-35 costs, even though it had them a year before the 2011 election. The F-35 is not now, and never has been, on schedule. The operational claims about the F-35 are not now, and never have been, anything but the brochure bravado of the manufacturer. The F-35 is not a suitable surveillance aircraft for Canada, but an ideal fighter bomber for that branch plant of the U.S. military called NATO.
Back in the Sweden-has-no-army universe, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was gassing away the other day about how the Conservative policy of corporate tax cuts had actually increased corporate tax revenues. So if the government collected $40.6 billion in taxes from corporations in 2007-2008, then the number must have been higher over the next three years, right? Not so. In the reality-based community, the taxes actually fell by about $10 billion a year for each of the next three years.
After the PM mused about a sustainability crisis in Canada’s social programs while in the actual country that doesn’t have an army, Human Resources minister Diane Finley announced that unless the government made economies in the Old Age Supplement, the program would become untenable. But when the reality-based community in the person of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page weighed in, the conclusion was very different. Not only was the OAS sustainable, it could actually be increased.
Even with the glut of baby-boomers passing through the system, financing the OAS would mean going up from 2.2 to 3 percent of GDP, a mere .8 percent, before falling again in the future. So how did the government respond to reality? In exactly the way that Peter MacKay dealt with critics of the F-35 – with personal abuse. Jim Flaherty described Kevin Page as “unbelievable, unreliable, incredible.” Harsh words for the only man in Ottawa who can count, and doubly tough to take from the crowd that doesn’t want to hear from anyone who debunks their confabulations.
But can this political pathology of ideology-minted facts and corruption without consequences triumph? After all, there are people who think insider trading should be legal, that it’s okay to plagiarize from the Internet, and that athletes should be able to use performance enhancing drugs the better to entertain as they cheat. In the political realm, it all depends on the answer to a question posed by Peter C. Newman in his most recent book, When the Gods Changed. Have Canadians become political eunuchs who don’t care what happens in Ottawa? Through much of Stephen Harper’s bullying rise to power, an ascension marked by character assassination, dirty tricks, and anti-democratic measures, the answer would have been yes. But something is afoot. Could it be silence fatigue?
On March 22, 2012, Professionals Serving Canadians, a coalition of six unions representing over 75,000 white collar professionals in the public service, joined forces against policies they say are going to hurt the health, safety and security of Canadians. This claim comes as the Harper government is cutting jobs in border services, food inspections and public science. Public servants openly questioning government policy is not the normal drill. They justified their initiative with the argument that secrecy around the cuts themselves had cut off debate before the March 29th budget. In other words, they fear that the public doesn’t know what’s happening.
Professionals Serving Canadians weren’t the only ones speaking up. An open letter dated March 22, 2012 from a coalition of 625 respected scientists across Canada called on the Harper government to protect fish habitats after a leak that the Tories were planning to remove such protection from section 35 (1) of the Fisheries Act and hand over the power to the provinces. The feared provision never materialized.
Could it be that things are beginning to shift in this Sweden-has-no-army universe of ours?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
The subject came up because one of his foreign policy advisors suggested that Swedish troops would be acceptable to both Israel and Palestine as peacekeepers.
The president demurred. Not only did Sweden have no army, he said, it was also a neutral country and therefore unsuitable for any military mission. After a delicate attempt to inform the commander-in-chief about a wonderful place called Switzerland, which indeed had no army and was neutral, the room of cowed advisors fell silent.
Aura of office is a funny thing. It is excellent camouflage for third-rate minds and shady characters. It can sometimes turn otherwise estimable men into pant-wetting school-boys. It can make conscientious people fall silent over the things that matter to them most – a death rattle for the soul. And it can set the stage for the worst of all possible developments in a democracy – the office used to sanctify the man.
The Harper government now operates in the Sweden-has-no-army universe. These days in Ottawa, saying it makes it so. That’s why after a week of crushing revelations of malfeasance, Peter MacKay is still there to make a mockery of cabinet responsibility and the quaint requirement of telling the plain truth to Canadians. That’s why the prime minister is spouting nonsense about two sets of F-35 figures, offering the underwhelming argument that they measure different things. The only thing the public should be measuring is the length of his nose.
Even Bruce Carson, not the first person who would spring to mind as a moral arbiter in matters of public administration, has asked the great question here. If being caught out in a champion display of dishonest incompetence is not grounds for dismissal from cabinet, what is? Will the government forgive itself for Robocalls if it turns out to be a scheme run out of party headquarters? It should matter, unless, of course, you are dealing with a government for whom the facts are unimportant. The Harper government record shows how far detached it has become from what a Bush-era advisor pejoratively referred to as “the reality-based community.”
The great notion in the Bush 2 era was that the facts didn’t matter at all. Iraq taught the world that much. The United States was an empire which created its own facts when it took action. Objective reality only mattered to the deluded empiricists and prisoners of the Enlightenment, the ones who believed that solutions to the world’s great problems came from a judicious study of the facts. As one Bushie told Ron Suskind while he prepared a piece for the New York Times Magazine, “We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The PM has taken those words to heart. Consider what the Harper government has said about the F-35. The public has never been misled about the true cost of the project. There has been a competition to find the best fighter plane for Canada. The political opposition is unpatriotic and number-challenged. Kevin Page is a bungler. The Minister of Defense has acted in good faith on this brief. The sole-sourcing of this project will actually save Canadians money. The project is on time and on budget. Canada has a contract that guarantees the price. Canada doesn’t have a contract. “Look, we’ve always been clear…”
The objective facts from the reality-based world? The public has always been misled about the true cost of the F-35 project. The Department of National Defense violated its own policies in low-balling by a factor of billions how much Canadians would have to pay for 65 planes. The Harper government broke Treasury Board policies when it chose not to release the true F-35 costs, even though it had them a year before the 2011 election. The F-35 is not now, and never has been, on schedule. The operational claims about the F-35 are not now, and never have been, anything but the brochure bravado of the manufacturer. The F-35 is not a suitable surveillance aircraft for Canada, but an ideal fighter bomber for that branch plant of the U.S. military called NATO.
Back in the Sweden-has-no-army universe, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was gassing away the other day about how the Conservative policy of corporate tax cuts had actually increased corporate tax revenues. So if the government collected $40.6 billion in taxes from corporations in 2007-2008, then the number must have been higher over the next three years, right? Not so. In the reality-based community, the taxes actually fell by about $10 billion a year for each of the next three years.
After the PM mused about a sustainability crisis in Canada’s social programs while in the actual country that doesn’t have an army, Human Resources minister Diane Finley announced that unless the government made economies in the Old Age Supplement, the program would become untenable. But when the reality-based community in the person of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page weighed in, the conclusion was very different. Not only was the OAS sustainable, it could actually be increased.
Even with the glut of baby-boomers passing through the system, financing the OAS would mean going up from 2.2 to 3 percent of GDP, a mere .8 percent, before falling again in the future. So how did the government respond to reality? In exactly the way that Peter MacKay dealt with critics of the F-35 – with personal abuse. Jim Flaherty described Kevin Page as “unbelievable, unreliable, incredible.” Harsh words for the only man in Ottawa who can count, and doubly tough to take from the crowd that doesn’t want to hear from anyone who debunks their confabulations.
But can this political pathology of ideology-minted facts and corruption without consequences triumph? After all, there are people who think insider trading should be legal, that it’s okay to plagiarize from the Internet, and that athletes should be able to use performance enhancing drugs the better to entertain as they cheat. In the political realm, it all depends on the answer to a question posed by Peter C. Newman in his most recent book, When the Gods Changed. Have Canadians become political eunuchs who don’t care what happens in Ottawa? Through much of Stephen Harper’s bullying rise to power, an ascension marked by character assassination, dirty tricks, and anti-democratic measures, the answer would have been yes. But something is afoot. Could it be silence fatigue?
On March 22, 2012, Professionals Serving Canadians, a coalition of six unions representing over 75,000 white collar professionals in the public service, joined forces against policies they say are going to hurt the health, safety and security of Canadians. This claim comes as the Harper government is cutting jobs in border services, food inspections and public science. Public servants openly questioning government policy is not the normal drill. They justified their initiative with the argument that secrecy around the cuts themselves had cut off debate before the March 29th budget. In other words, they fear that the public doesn’t know what’s happening.
Professionals Serving Canadians weren’t the only ones speaking up. An open letter dated March 22, 2012 from a coalition of 625 respected scientists across Canada called on the Harper government to protect fish habitats after a leak that the Tories were planning to remove such protection from section 35 (1) of the Fisheries Act and hand over the power to the provinces. The feared provision never materialized.
Could it be that things are beginning to shift in this Sweden-has-no-army universe of ours?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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