Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

John Baird: The Next Minister of National Defence?

I don’t normally follow Canadian politics closely enough to play the parlour game of predicting the winners and losers of the next cabinet shuffle, but sometimes you get a hunch worth wagering on, and this is one of those times. I’d bet a whole dollar that John Baird will be moved from the Department of Foreign Affairs to National Defence this summer.

Look at it from the prime minister’s standpoint. He needs a minister of defence who can weather the political storm that’s gathering around the department. Projected costs of the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will probably continue to rise, which is terrible news for the Tories, who have attempted to build their brand on fiscal discipline. Further, as Postmedia’s Lee Berthiaume reported yesterday, even the enormous price tag on the F-35 acquisition is dwarfed by the government’s $35-billion shipbuilding plan, which is already behind schedule. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is too smart not to see the great political risks.

John Baird is the toughest minister in Harper’s lineup. Yet, the prime minister’s loyal consigliore has been over at the Department of Foreign Affairs doing… well, it’s not entirely clear what Baird has been doing. His big project – a new Office of Religious Freedom – has been delayed, but will presumably be launched very soon, liberating him to perform more challenging tasks elsewhere.

This would be reason enough to consider Baird a leading candidate for minister of defence, but there’s more: Harper seems to think a conflict with Iran is possible, and he surely knows the situation in Syria is unpredictable. If the prime minister believes there’s any chance that the Canadian Forces will go into action in the Middle East, he will want a rock-solid defence minister in place.

Now for the clincher: As foreign affairs minister, Baird has been following the Syrian and Iranian situations closely, and he has been the government’s chief interlocutor with Israel. He would need little preparation to dive into the job of defence minister. If anything, his appointment to the Department of National Defence would communicate continuity in Canadian foreign policy. Critics of the government’s foreign policy would find little comfort in this continuity, of course, but from the prime minister’s standpoint, it would make sense.

So, who would replace Baird as foreign affairs minister? Well, that would require another bet – and one dollar is all the skin that I’m willing to put into this game.

Original Article
Source: uottawa.ca
Author: Roland Paris

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