That’s Stephen Lecce’s new assignment as Julian Fantino’s chief of staff in the besieged Department of Veterans Affairs. Lecce has done some of the PMO’s fancier stick-handling in crafting media lines during the government’s gravest crises — including the Wright/Duffy Affair. This time, he’ll have to channel Karl Rove to get the job done.
Julian Fantino is a political problem child for Stephen Harper. According to how he’s been portrayed in the media, Fantino has gone hog wild in the 17 months he’s been at Veterans Affairs. He single-handedly alienated one of the most important elements of the Conservative base and misled veterans and Parliament about the scope of assistance available to wounded soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. His attitude is supercilious, condescending, contemptuous.
Fantino has stood up, insulted, accused, lectured and backhanded veterans and critics alike. Whether dealing with seniors, soldiers or war vets, the facts have never mattered much to him. Facts are for the “reality” community; the Harper Empire creates facts when it acts. Who can forget Fantino’s immortal line on CTV’s Power Play when the F-35 debacle was making headlines?
“Yes, there’s a plan A, there’s a plan B, there’s a plan C and there’s a plan Z … and they’re all F-35s.”
When the government reversed itself, Fantino no longer spoke about the holy mission to acquire 65 of these flying pianos from Lockheed Martin. New media lines landed on his desk with a thud and that was that; the Batmobile had been thrown into reverse.
Fantino has been caught so many times with his facts down, his bungling has lost its ability to shock. The Harper government was disgraced when Auditor General Michael Ferguson confirmed what veterans already knew — that the wounded and damaged men and women returning from Afghanistan, where 40,000 served, have to wait for months and even years in some cases for benefits. Filling out the byzantine application forms is like doing your taxes blindfolded.
The government pre-responded to the AG’s report through the hapless Fantino. He announced $200 million in support of mental health initiatives for veterans. This was slyly done the day before Ferguson reported on how deeply flawed the existing system for delivering mental health services actually is — vacuous claims to the contrary from Fantino notwithstanding.
There was just one hitch with that $200 million investment, pointed out by Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail: the fine print. Peel away the weasel words and you learn that the bulk of the money — $140 million — is to be spread out over 50 years. You get the message. Delay, deny, die.
For a couple of days, the government’s cynical ruse sort of worked. It was widely reported, even by the Canadian Press, that the whole $200 million would be spent over six years. But journalists quickly caught on and tried to get confirmation of the true spending timelines from the minister. Sadly, Fantino had flown the coop and wasn’t answering any questions from Italy. He did put out a statement bloviating about improving “the already strong continuum of mental health supports and services.”
So what do you do when you’re caught with your facts down — again? If you’re Harper or Fantino, you make up new facts. It’s called ‘advertising’ by people with a sense of humour — propaganda on the public dime, crafted to protect the Conservatives from mounting criticism of their treatment of Canada’s veterans.
To that end, the same department that shuttered nine VAC offices to save $3.8 million dollars is about to spend $5 million on a new advertising campaign. You know, like the TV ads they did last year around the NHL playoffs — the ones that cost $4 million — boasting about what a great job they were doing with veterans.
Those ads will have to be pretty good this time. They’ll have to make people forget all about the unspent $1.13 billion the Harper government has siphoned from Veterans Affairs since 2006. They’ll have to convince Canadians to overlook the fact that Harper has cut 25 per cent of the workforce at Veterans Affairs in the past five years. As reported by Paul McLeod of the Chronicle Herald, half of those cuts were made to a program called Health Care and Re-Establishment benefits. Hmmm.
The obvious way out for Stephen Harper (assuming the ads don’t work) is to fire Julian Fantino.
But here’s the irony: Fantino doesn’t run his department. No Harper cabinet minister runs his or her department. Fantino does what every other cabinet minister does — exactly what he’s told to do by the PMO. He did what he was told as minister of state for Seniors, as associate minister of Defence, as minister for International Cooperation, and as the dud champ of the vets. A click of the heels, a salute — and then its off to fire another snowball made by Stephen Harper.
Harper doesn’t fire people for doing what they’re told — which is why Fantino still has his job. Nor has the PM ever had a problem with sending a bricklayer to repair a Rolex. In fact, Harper has used Fantino’s tough-guy/ex-cop image in every one of his postings to “scare the ‘crats” internally, as one insider put it — the “‘crats” being bureaucrats. Since Harper is still persuaded the public service is an enemy, Fantino performs a very useful service.
But Stephen Harper does fire people when they become liabilities. It can be one glass of orange juice too many, the embarrassing antics of a spouse — or simply having worn out one’s credibility by telling too many whoppers on behalf of the boss. Fantino has reached that place where what he brings to the feast is far less than what he devours.
The great mistake here would be to think that the fix for Veterans Affairs, now rudderless and adrift, is to fire this calamitous yet essentially sycophantic minister. That would be only the start. The fix in this case would be for the man who wrote Fantino’s mandate letter — the prime minister — to change the mandate for Fantino’s successors.
It’s Harper who is downsizing Veterans Affairs. It’s Harper who removed $226 million from VA, or nearly 30 per cent of its operational budget, in just two years. It’s Harper who thinks massive job cuts at VA — 1,000 so far — amount to nothing more than the culling of backroom nobodies.
Finally, it’s the PM who has such a shallow understanding of the nature of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he thinks any vet suffering from it can get help at Service Canada Centres — the places you go to apply for Employment Insurance or maternity benefits.
So when you see those slick ads on TV praising the government’s treatment of vets, keep in mind that Harper government lawyers are in court in British Columbia right now. They want the court to throw out an action brought against the government by seven veterans disabled in Afghanistan. They’re arguing that past political promises from former prime ministers created no binding obligation on the current government to care for returning soldiers.
That’s a pretty big pig to perfume.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment