No, not the economy — that Rubik’s Cube of BS all politicians manipulate at election time to torment the masses. Not the Trans Pacific Partnership final deal — which you can expect to see announced in the closing days of the campaign, with all the details kept as secret as the formula for Coke. And certainly not making the country safe from women in niqabs. No, the issue I’m thinking of is rather more old fashioned, reliable and widely understood: trust.
This week has seen another trainwreck for CPC credibility. How funny is it that the guy who campaigns in sweaters with ‘Canada’ on the back hires an Australian Svengali to fix his campaign? Or touts a public endorsement from an ex-hockey player and de-facto American who can’t even vote thanks to his political hero’s changes to the rules?
Wayne Gretzky thinks so much of this country that it took him 14 years to pick up his first Order of Canada. Four years ago, Gretzky got a promotion; he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada, the top echelon of the honour. He still hasn’t picked that one up. Too busy. But not too busy to schmooze with Harper during an election campaign.
And can anyone believe the transparent, cynical and deplorable attempt by Steve the Marketer to use Terry Fox as a campaign prop? Harper’s wife Laureen and Industry Minister James Moore announced that a Harper government would match Canadian donations up to $35 million for the annual Terry Fox run.
Moore, who had enough sense not to re-offer (but not enough to keep his mouth shut), made it up as he went along, declaring that the plan had the support of the Fox family. Pure Pravda.
God love Terry’s deceased mother, who for decades maintained the purity of his work by not accepting any private or political sponsorships. Despite Moore’s hot air, the Fox family made clear that they had not enthusiastically endorsed the Conservative party’s attempt to use Terry Fox as electoral bait. In fact, the family never knew about the matching pledge caper until James and the other Great One’s Missus dropped the bomb.
But here’s the thing. After the family registered its displeasure over this classless opportunism, Stephen Harper doggedly insisted that he was asked to set up the $35 million matching plan. In other words, it was the family that had it wrong. Sounds a little like his answer to vets when they complained that the closure of nine Veterans Affairs centres would hurt them. The PM said at the time that their service levels would actually improve. Then again, he wasn’t the one missing limbs — just a heart.
The most unbelievable stretcher of the week came with Harper’s return to his old lies about the F-35 fighter program. You remember this one: the government lied about the price, lied about the contract, and simply hoped people would forget that the Harper cabinet knew the real cost but suppressed it during the 2011 federal election.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau drew Harper into this lose-lose debate by vowing to walk away from what has proved to be a ruinously expensive and operationally dubious experimental aircraft. That was a wise call; who could possibly believe that a sole-sourced deal worth $35 billion was the responsible way to go?
The best the Conservative leader could do was to pass out the same baloney sandwiches he slapped together years ago. There’s only one problem. Both the former parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, and current Auditor General Michael Ferguson outed Harper on the real costs of controversial jet as a matter of public record. This is not staying on message — this is putting your hand in the blender and expecting a manicure.
Canadians have yet to hear a word from Harper on the incredible story out of National Defence Headquarters about a plan under Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance to launch what is being called the “weaponization of public affairs.”
In a profoundly important story, David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen tells us that DND intends to reward “good” journalists and target “bad” ones. In other words, the ass-kissers who toe the military line will prosper with leaks and access. The diggers — the ones working on stories about the shortcomings at Veterans Affairs, or foolish and dishonest acquisition plans for ships and planes — will get the full treatment.
And what does that entail? Calls from the military brass to media bosses, maybe even an investigation into ‘trouble-makers’ like CTV’s Bob Fife — the guy who, you’ll recall, reported that then-chief of the defence staff Walter Natynczyk blew a million dollars on government aircraft attending important military events like … hockey games. He even took a government jet to the Caribbean for a vacation. Write a bad story about the government and you get investigated? Say what? Harper’s silence speaks volumes. This stuff is right up his totalitarian alley.
It could be worse. A new manual for the Pentagon describes journalists as potential “unprivileged belligerents” subject to killing on or near battlefields. The former CIA officer who wrote about that in the American Conservative, Philip Girardi, also reminded everyone of the extent to which public officials in both the military and the intelligence worlds will fiddle the public record to save their own skins. Girardi was writing in particular about the CIA’s defenders of torture, but managed to include this stunning detail:
In what is being called a “revolt” by intelligence analysts in the U.S. military’s Central Command, fifty officers have formally complained that their intelligence reports on ISIS and al Qaida’s branch in Syria have been “altered” by senior officials into “happy talk” about how well the war is going. This is a reprise of an old story, about how the Bush invasion of Iraq was justified by “cherry picking” intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
The relevance to Canada? While the U.S. Senate conducted an exhaustive investigation of the torture issue in the war on terror — concluding that the CIA did indeed engage in torture of detainees — the Harper government shut down three separate investigations into questionable Canadian detainee transfers in Afghanistan.
To this day, no one knows if the Canadian military handed detainees over to torture at the hands of Afghan authorities or not — a war crime, if true. The reason? The Harper government refused to produce information on the issue to a parliamentary committee, triggering a contempt of Parliament finding by then-House Speaker Peter Milliken.
Not a bad subject for the Munk foreign policy debate next Monday. After all, the relevant phrase is “trust but verify” — a process Stephen Harper has yet to experience. There will never be a better time.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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