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.]

Friday, December 14, 2012

Why, oh why, is Peter MacKay still in cabinet?

Given his record, if Peter MacKay were a moose, his head would be gracing the space above the mantlepiece, impressive rack and all.

He would be stuffed, his eyes would be made of glass, and the taxidermist would already be working on the next large, dead animal.

But MacKay is not a moose. He is political big game surviving in a government that has a soft spot for company men. He still has the chauffeur, the seat around the cabinet table, and the chutzpah to hang in.

By my count, there have been 150 ministerial resignations from the federal government in Canadian history. Despite a series of political train wrecks, the man who posed with Jack the Dog after Belinda Stronach dumped him is not one of them.

By any rational, even humane measure, he should be. Has anyone ever died of embarrassment before being put out of their misery? And it’s not as if no one gets booted off Harper’s island. People have been ditched for orange juice extravagance (Bev Oda), rank carelessness (Maxime Bernier) and false rumours (Helena Guergis).

But when it comes to using language to create an alternate universe, (sometimes called lying, or its principle variants, prevarication and confabulation) there is no known penalty in the Harper government. Mendacity seems to confer staying power. I will shortly explain why.

But back to that moose still thrashing around in the political underbrush, Peter MacKay. No one in Canadian history has told a bigger whopper to Canadians than the minister of defence did on the true cost to taxpayers of the F-35 program.

Even those who still believe in the Accountability Act and the Tooth Fairy will admit that there is a lot of cheese between the $16 billion figure doggedly promoted by MacKay and the $45.8 billion figure released this week by accounting firm KPMG. Don’t be dazzled by the obfuscations, the hair-splitting, the metaphysics of punditry. The government is and was obliged to provide all the costs of the project, not just the ones that minimized the reality check. Instead, it practiced fact-suppression.

Here’s the skinny. The F-35 was an acquisition that broke all the rules of procurement. First, the decision to acquire the jets in 2006 was followed four years later by the Statement of Requirements, a process known in most places as ‘ass-backwards’. Second, by making this a sole-source contract, the government automatically added 20 per cent to the price, as experts like Alan Williams have repeatedly pointed out.

Third, the fundamental rule in awarding mega contracts was broken here: never buy developmental aircraft. Put out requirements, get bidders to build prototypes, hold a competition and then, and only then, pick the winner. And never, ever go into production before testing.

MacKay seems to believe that devotion to the troops is a reasonable explanation for getting it all wrong, all the time on the F-35. But even if he is baffled by the mysteries of the abacus, MacKay had lots of people around him who know both basic math and the rules of procurement. How did the minister respond to the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Auditor General?

Short of siccing Jack the Dog on them, the minister leveraged every ounce of government influence to discredit Kevin Page and Michael Ferguson as incompetent alarmists. Knowing better, he vigorously disputed their honest estimates. Knowing better, he went into the 2011 general election aware that the government’s public figure for the F-35 program was at least $9 billion short of the true number — and in fact (as everyone now knows) much, much further from the mark than that.

In trying to bully and disgrace the people savvy and, yes, plucky enough to reject the government’s phoney numbers, MacKay disgraced himself and the government. To be sure, delusional generals and sneaky senior bureaucrats had a heavy hand in all this. But as C.E.S. Ranks said in a submission to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in 2004 on the subject of where the buck stops in Canada’s parliamentary system, “responsibility and accountability belong to the office and its current holder.” And that would be one Bullwinkle J. MacKay.

It ought to be noted that the F-35 fiasco is not the first time the man from Nova Scotia has jiggled the pop-machine. It was Peter MacKay who lowballed the costs of the dubious Libya mission. He first reported that the operation cost $50 million. That figure grew to $103.6 million, a fact we learned not from the minister, but from documents obtained by the Rideau Institute. Add the “victory” fly-by and say goodbye to $347 million, the full cost of bombing the regime of Moammar Gadhafi out of existence to support a rebel group which may yet turn out to be even less democratic and less friendly.

It was under MacKay’s stewardship that the Department of National Defence secretly awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a German company, FFG, to build armoured vehicles. On the same day that the minister issued press releases about painting DND buildings and renovating a military garage in Newfoundland, there was no press release about the $105 million contract awarded to FFG. Although there was a notice of the contract on an industry website, the deal was described as being about “transmission components”, not 13 armoured vehicles, as Postmedia’s David Pugliese reported at the time.

When you throw in getting hauled out of a Newfoundland fishing camp on the public dime in a Search and Rescue chopper, spending $47,000 on a photo-op posing inside a plywood F-35, and not seeming to know how much anything costs when it comes to military hardware, MacKay would seem to be toast. So why isn’t he?

Very simple; Peter MacKay has done no worse on this file than Stephen Harper. In fact, he has merely followed the core of Stephen Harper’s communications strategy: the Conservatives aren’t bound by the facts, they create them. What they say is fact becomes fact. Here are a few examples from the Boss himself on the subject of the F-35.

“A lot of the developmental costs you’re reading in the United States, the contract we’ve signed shelters us from any increase in those kinds of costs. We’re very confident of our cost estimates and we have built in some latitude, some contingency in any case. So we are very confident we are within those measures.”

“Our DND experts have put out their detailed briefings, and everything we’ve seen is within those figures and their contingencies, the contingencies that have been allowed.”

Thirty billions worth? Really?

For people who have watched the prime minister closely since 2006, these sorts of confabulations are nothing new. Just this past week, after taking heat for the multi-billion dollar Nexen deal, in which a Canadian resource company became a Chinese asset, the prime minister told the House of Commons that the “vast majority” of Canadians approved of the transaction.

That wasn’t true, as multiple national polls inconveniently pointed out. How did the PMO explain it? Well, turns out the PM meant that the vast majority of Canadians who called his office liked the idea of China taking over part of Alberta. Of course.

There is only one universe in which such nonsense works, and that is a place where an empowered group believes people are just too stupid to get it — they’re dumber than a bag of hammers and you can tell them anything. And who knows, maybe the boys in blue are right.

But really smart people, even people who temporarily hold all the cards, sometimes trip over their own sense of power. The not so elegant face-plant follows.

A cautionary tale for Stephen Harper from the world of culture. There was nothing writer Truman Capote liked better than High Society. It made sense. If you see yourself as a poodle, the way Capote did, you need a lap to sit in.

When Capote wrote Answered Prayers, his devastatingly unflattering roman a clef about the mavens of America’s financial aristocracy, he was warned that even though he had changed the names, people portrayed in the book weren’t going to be happy about it. As reported in this month’s Vanity Fair, Capote wasn’t worried.

“Nah, they’re too dumb,” the famous author quipped to a friend. “They won’t know who they are.”

Stephen Harper is counting on Canadians not knowing who they are when the time comes.

As for Capote, after publication of Answered Prayers, he was never allowed into the charmed circle of old money again. Some say that’s really what killed him.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris

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