F-35 fighter purchase shaky from the start

The F-35 fighter jet affair is a scandal that should, by rights, bring down the Harper government. Not only is it huge — in terms of taxpayer dollars, 100 times the size of sponsorship scandal that destroyed the former Liberal government — it is laced through with lies, deceit and ministerial incompetence.

Seduced by the sales pitch of the shiny toy’s American manufacturer, the defence department misled its political masters about the true cost of the 65 F-35s. Even after it knew better, the Harper cabinet used that lowball number — $16 billion — to mislead Parliament and the public.

When Kevin Page, the independent parliamentary budget officer, reported a year ago that the true cost would be at least $29.3 billion, the Conservatives vilified him. They put their figure-fiddlers back to work and came up with new number — $14.7 billion.

Desperate to get the new fighters, the military pulled the wool over the eyes of the cabinet. Desperate to win their majority in last May’s election, the Conservatives could not afford to admit they had been conned. So they hid the truth.

I take a certain grim satisfaction from seeing the F-35 scandal unravelled, thanks to last week’s report by the new auditor general, Michael Ferguson, who has done what his predecessor, Sheila Fraser, did so superbly on the sponsorship file — bared the facts and let the chips fall where they might.

Jets and subs: It’s high time for accountability at DND

Something isn’t right at the top of the Department of National Defence, where two multibillion-dollar acquisition projects have gone badly off the rails. Living in a province expecting to benefit from the mega-acquisition of naval ships, Nova Scotians should be concerned about the problems at the top.

The auditor general’s scathing report on the shambles that is the proposed $9-billion F-35 jet fighter program is just the latest and most pointed of DND’s troubles. It has forced the Conservative government back on its heels for its all-out support for an expensive project that the military brass seems ill-equipped to manage.

Finally awake to the problems with the F-35, the Harper government has put the Department of Public Works in charge and promises to do a better job reporting to Parliament.

But it’s not just jets. The shambolic submarine program, now in its 12th year of rust, repair and reconstruction and still incomplete, should have raised alarms long ago.

A department spending billions on equipment hasn’t shown a lot of accountability so far.

It’s a fair question: If the military can’t manage the F-35 contract and can’t keep subs in the water, how confident should we be that federal authorities will be able to manage $25-billion worth of ship contracts?

Alberta Tory stalwart Ted Morton at risk in rise of Wildrose

For a sense of how quickly the hearts of Alberta’s staunch conservatives have shifted, one need only stroll through Chestermere, a booming town just east of Calgary.

Small, southern-Alberta communities like this were once the heart of Progressive Conservative support. It’s where Ted Morton – Energy Minister, former finance minister and the stalwart of the party’s right flank – is running and, before the right-wing Wildrose Party hit the scene, it would have been a slam-dunk for the PCs.

This time, they’re barely putting up a fight.

Mr. Morton’s seat is in peril, with several sources saying he’s on pace to lose to Wildrose candidate Bruce McAllister, a former news anchor. It certainly seems that way in Chestermere, the hub of the newly created riding that includes nearby rural areas, where green Wildrose signs line the lawns of homes. Morton signs are a rare sight on private land.

The PC campaign says it expected the race here to be a battle – but if anyone might have been immune to the Wildrose surge, by flaunting right-wing credentials, it would have been Mr. Morton. That hasn’t been the case.

As Wildrose soars, no seat is a sure thing.

Harper’s tough talk on Windsor bridge backed by real action, Doer says

WINDSOR – Stephen Harper’s tough talk on getting a second bridge built between Windsor and Detroit is backed by real action, according to Canada’s ambassador to the United States.

The long-delayed project may look stalled to the casual eye, but Gary Doer has been hard at work south of the border, hammering out the details necessary for officials to announce an agreement.

“We’re working on all the elements of getting it done,” Doer told iPolitics.

The fine print includes what falls under Canada’s authority and what falls under Michigan’s; who gets the contracts and how they work; the permits required on the U.S. side to build an international crossing; and how the custom plazas and the tolls would work.

You never put your hands in the air until the puck’s in the net, Doer cautioned.

“Until you have a full agreement, you don’t have an agreement,” he said. “We still have a few more items to get resolved, but we’re working diligently to get it done.”

Doer is one of a number of high-level officials now striking a confident tone when it comes to finalizing a new public bridge at the busiest trade point between Canada and the United States. It would be constructed two miles downriver from the aging, privately-owned Ambassador Bridge.

Toppling Alberta PCs would be historic – but Wildrose might not rule for long

Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith is on track to defeat Alberta’s incumbent Progressive Conservatives, who have governed the province since 1971. If she can pull it off, it would end one of Canada’s longest provincial dynasties and mark one of the greatest upsets in Canadian political history. But electoral king-slayers (or, in this case, queen-slayers) rarely get to sit on the throne for very long.

After 11 election victories and 41 years in government, the Alberta PCs under rookie leader Alison Redford hold the record in electoral longevity among Canada’s current provincial governments. In the country’s history, they rank third behind the Liberal dynasty in Nova Scotia that governed for 43 years between 1882 and 1925 and the PC dynasty that ran Ontario for 42 years between 1943 and 1985. Only those Ontario Tories won more consecutive elections than the Alberta Tories, with 12 (13 if you count the 1985 election, where the PCs won the most seats but were replaced in government by the Liberals).

A victory by Wildrose in the Apr. 23 election, then, would be of historic proportions. The enormity of a Wildrose upset is further amplified by just how far the party will have come since the last vote in 2008. In that election, the Wildrose Alliance (as it was then called) captured less than 7 per cent of the vote and placed fourth behind the NDP, Liberals, and Progressive Conservatives. Under Ed Stelmach, the Tories took almost 53 per cent of ballots cast.

Ontario Liberals get FIT but may still nuke green energy

At the end of March, the Ontario Liberals received their two-year review of the Feed-In Tariff Program (FIT). The FIT was a component of 2009's Green Energy Act that aimed to procure renewable energy at a fixed, contracted rate that would both spur the renewable energy sector in the province and facilitate the shutdown of coal power generation.

Liberal communiqués around the proposed revisions highlighted five recommendations, including reducing the purchase rate for wind and solar energy and implementing a point system to encourage more community, Aboriginal and municipal involvement.

The Ontario Sustainable Energy Association, a province-wide not-for-profit focused on community and commercial sustainable energy in Ontario, has come out in support of the FIT revisions.

"Our roots are in the community power sector," said Kristopher Stevens, OSEA's executive director. "The thrust around greater municipal engagement as well as the prioritization of projects based on community and aboriginal participation in them is a real success story for us."

The FIT has been a repeated target for Ontario's PC party, which continues to call for the scrapping of the program in its entirety. In a Toronto Star article, Conservative Energy Critic Vic Fideli accused the FIT of crowding nuclear and hydro off of Ontario's grid.

Comox, B.C. speaks out against Northern Gateway Pipeline

Speaker after speaker poured out their passionate pleas to an impassive panel at the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline hearings in Comox, B.C., on March 30 and 31. Some described in loving detail their oceanside worlds and the terrible weather on the north coast. Others discussed the economics (risk versus benefit) of the 1,170-kilometre pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat, B.C., where the diluted bitumen would be loaded on tankers to travel the narrow passages of B.C.'s west coast Great Bear Rainforest. A few short-term construction jobs, no royalties, and the enormous financial and ecological risk of oil spills on land and sea, in order to provide oil to Asia do not add up for British Columbians of most walks of life.

Brian Voth, a forest worker from North Island, described the beauty of San Josef Bay. "If it was fouled by an oil spill, that would break my heart," she said, and concluded, "If there was an oil spill, the broken hearts would be piled higher than high."

Wildrose promises private health care on public dime to shorten waiting times

The Wildrose Party has reignited the debate over two-tiered medicine in the province, embracing private health care for certain procedures as a way to alleviate long waiting times.

The party, which has soared into the lead in multiple polls, promised to allow patients the right to use private clinics – inside or outside the province – on the public dime if they have to wait longer than a set time for procedures, from cancer and cardiac care to diagnostic imaging and orthopedic surgery as well as cataract removal.

Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith said it would cost an estimated $180-million a year to implement.

Private health care has always been controversial topic in Alberta, but private clinics have long performed some procedures for patients who are referred to them, which are paid from the public purse. A proposal from former premier Ralph Klein to use more private-health operators to ease backlogs in the public system sparked a heated debate, and was ultimately shelved.

“The zombies of private-health insurance keep coming back,” said Avalon Roberts, an Alberta board member of Friends of Medicare. “The public health-care system should be improved. There will always be people trying to bring it down.”

Following Poem, Israel Bars Entry To Guenter Grass

JERUSALEM — Israel on Sunday declared Guenter Grass persona non grata, deepening a spat with the Nobel-winning author over a poem that deeply criticized the Jewish state and suggested it was as much a danger as Iran.

The dispute with Grass, who only late in life admitted to a Nazi past, has drawn new attention to strains in Germany's complicated relationship with the Jewish state – and also focused unwelcome light on Israel's own secretive nuclear program.

In a poem called "What Must Be Said" published last Wednesday, Grass, 84, criticized what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel's nuclear program and labeled the country a threat to "already fragile world peace" over its belligerent stance on Iran.

The poem has touched a raw nerve in Israel, where officials have rejected any moral equivalence with Iran and been quick to note that Grass admitted only in a 2006 autobiography that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS Nazi paramilitary organization at age 17 in the final months of World War II.

Grass' subsequent clarification that his criticism was directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not the country as a whole, did little to calm the outcry.

Tunisia Ennahda Party Emails Hacked: Anonymous-Linked Group Says It Compromised Messages

TUNIS, April 8 (Reuters) - A group claiming affiliation with activist hacker collective Anonymous says it has hacked 2,725 emails belonging to Tunisia's ruling Ennahda party, including those of the prime minister, in the latest challenge to the Islamist-led government.

In a video posted on a Facebook page belonging to Anonymous TN, a hacker wearing the trademark activist "Guy Fawkes" mask, said the emails were released in protest against Ennahda's alleged failure to protect the unemployed and artists who were attacked by Salafi Islamists during a recent protest.

The activist said the emails include phone numbers, bank transactions and invoices paid during Tunisia's election campaign in October, in which Ennahda won more than 40 percent of parliament seats, going on to lead the government.

One of the emails was from Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali, a senior Ennahda official, to the Turkish embassy, attaching Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesslem's CV.

"To the Tunisian government, we have kept a large part of your data secret. If you do not wish to see these published on the internet we ask you to work to the best of your ability to avoid internet censorship and to respect human rights and the freedom of expression in Tunisia," the activist said.