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, April 04, 2012

Holy parliamentary democracy, Batman! What about ministerial responsibility?

The F-35 fiasco just keeps getting uglier. Has it become the FU-35 program?

For the second time, the message has been delivered to the Harper government that Parliament doesn’t issue blank cheques.

Parliament itself first served notice of that quaint reality of a democracy. In March 2011, the House of Commons found the government in contempt of Parliament for failing to disclose the costs of building new prisons and procuring the F-35 stealth bomber.

Yesterday, the Auditor-General of Canada announced that rogue procurements running into the billions of dollars and falsely reported to the House of Commons don’t qualify as sound financial management or democratic governance. How distraught David Frum must be after arguing just a few days ago that we were the best-governed country on the planet. Oh well, what are speechwriters for?

Judging from the reaction, the Harper government is about to see how far up the Stupid Meter it has led Canadians since it came to power in 2006. When they entered a guilty plea for cheating under Canada’s election laws, they claimed it was just an administrative matter.

They now want everyone to believe that miscreant generals over at the Department of National Defence were responsible for the biggest governmental boondoggle in Canadian history – the planned acquisition of $30 billion of fighter jets without a valid process and without their political masters knowing the true cost. They did this apparently by failing to run anything that looked like a fair and open competition to replace the CF-18, fudging the actual procurement costs, and making key decisions without required approvals. In fact, the decision to buy the aircraft was made four years before the department even published its requirements. All the lambs in cabinet were simply led astray. Sounds a little like a coup, yes?

And having asked Canadians to choke down that baloney sandwich, “the bureaucrats made us do it”, the Harper government is poised to offer another – persuading voters that this spectacular mismanagement of the public purse is best resolved by stripping DND of the procurement process. A commitment to a true competitive bidding process would have been more to the point.

It should be noted that in the Ad Sponsorship Scandal, the Conservatives advocated prison sentences for the perpetrators and a full refund of wasted public dollars. Now, four years too late, the prime minister hopes the public will have faith in a committee of deputy ministers inside the Department of Public Works, overseen by Treasury Board, to right all the wrongs and do things according to the book.

If the Air Force were replacing its gazebos, Tony Clement’s oversight might be more comforting. Who in their right mind would put Public Works minister Rona Ambrose in charge of this file, having failed to guarantee the integrity of the process the first time around? Under the government’s tactic of send-the-fool-further, no one actually pays with his job for this monumental mismanagement of tax dollars. Didn’t Maxime Bernier get dumped for forgetting his briefcase? How could it possibly be that the DND officials, who supposedly hoodwinked their civilian masters on the largest single purchase in our government’s history, are not being cashiered by the platoon?

My humble opinion? Of course the government knew about what was happening, and what’s more, strongly approved of it. Why? Because the F-35 was the handy way for the Harper government to expand a role for Canada’s military that the country has never debated let alone endorsed. If instead of auditing the procurement process, Michael Ferguson had audited the plane itself, that would have become painfully obvious. The F-35 is not a peace-keeper’s surveillance aircraft designed to protect Canadian airspace, including the Far North. It is a close support fighter designed to take part in U.S./NATO foreign wars like the recent Libya mission. The kind of missions the Harper government thinks are worth an $800,000 fly-over celebration of something yet to be established.

This is the most disgraceful damage control in Canadian history – and another test of how gullible Canadians have become. The Harper government, which has squeezed every drop of political benefit out of Canada’s military, has now thrown DND under the bus. Not a single, cheerleading member of the government will be walking the plank, in part because the Auditor-General was too timorous to make a finding on the signal issue of who bears responsibility for this mess. Consider this: for several years, Peter MacKay has earned his government pay-cheque for climbing in and out of the cockpit of the F-35 while the shutters clicked. He told stretchers about how much the plane would cost. The government says he and others were misled.

Holy parliamentary democracy Batman, what about the doctrine of ministerial responsibility? If a government department deceives the people, who but the minister is ultimately responsible? In that lovely phrase in the law, MacKay knew or ought to have known what was going on under his watch – particularly when he was chief pitchman for this travesty of sound management and democratic practice. The fact that he failed on both counts ought to be a hanging offence. After all, Canadian cabinet ministers Maurice Lamontagne and Rene Tremblay once resigned their posts over a few sticks of furniture. This is 15 percent of the entire federal budget, give or take a few retro-fits.

It is worth remembering that every senior member of the Harper government, including the Prime Minister, is responsible for duping Canadians over the true cost of the F-35. It was Mr. Harper who bemoaned during the 2011 election that it was “sad” that the F-35 was even being raised as an issue. It was sad alright, but not for the reasons the PM had in mind.

Just last year, it was Mr. Harper who talked of a “contract” that guaranteed the price per plane for Canada of $75 million. It was also Mr. Harper who repeatedly gave parliament funny figures when the real ones were in the possession of government. He finally gave up the charade when the Comptroller for the U.S. Department of Defense released a report on February 13, 2012 which stated that the 2012 cost for the F-35 was $197 million per plane. Justice delayed is said to be justice denied. I don’t know what honesty delayed is, but it isn’t honesty.

The first apology from the Prime Minister ought to go to Kevin Page. It was Canada’s parliamentary budget officer who first concluded that the government numbers for the F-35 acquisition were straight out of Disneyland. His reward for prudent analysis was a chorus of slurs from the government side that he didn’t know what he was talking about. This was the same treatment meted out to other public servants before him who didn’t tow the party line – people like Linda Keen and Richard Colvin. And this despite the fact that the government was in possession of a figure for the acquisition of the F-35 that was $10 billion higher than the one they released to parliament. Has anyone in Canadian history ever told a $10-billion stretcher?

And don’t forget how the Harperites slagged every single opposition member who raised questions about this thinly disguised raid on the public purse. Remember what Peter MacKay said about then Industry critic Marc Garneau when he dared to ask about the cost of having to modify the F-35 to allow for mid-air refueling?  Mr. Garneau, who doesn’t have to rent his flight jacket for photo ops, was described as a man “who was working against those men and women he used to serve with.” This from the minister who kicked the tires for countless photo-ops but never thought to question the sticker price – or so the government would have you believe. Missing in action yesterday was the minister of defence. Perhaps he was practicing climbing in and out of the F-18 Super Hornet.

In a just political universe, Peter MacKay would have had his last helicopter ride, Rona Ambrose would have overseen her last project, and Julian Fantino would have stumbled over his last set of screamingly funny speaking notes. In MacKay’s case he has not only led the chorus of those who would have Canadians believe that everything was hunky-dory with this project, he is also the minister whose story changed from week to week on matters of momentous importance. This was the guy who told Parliament that there would be a competition before Canada chose a replacement aircraft for the F-18, and then just a few days later announced with a straight face that the government had chosen the F-35.

The last victim of this sad story is Parliament itself. Since the finding that the Harper government was in contempt of parliament, it has all been downhill. The committee system is now like a perpetual meeting of the Skull and Bones society. When asked a question, no member of the government front bench seems to understand either of the official languages. When ministers are found in conflict of interest, the prime minister blows it off as unimportant. And now, after six years of stonewalling over the same issue that led to the contempt of parliament finding, the facts show that the government continued to mislead parliament on the F-35 file. Of course, it was somebody else’s fault. This government has not only politicized public servants, it has turned them into cannon fodder.

So far, the Tories have managed to convince the country that attack ads are deep political discourse, that grant applications self-mutate, that hyper-partisanship makes for sound foreign policy, that an electoral mandate confers full ownership of all public information, that deregulating a sector that employs 1 percent of the Canadian workforce is the way to prosperity for all, that running the largest deficits in history is proof of sound economic management, and that robocalls went out to Liberal voters by sheer coincidence. Everyone else on the political scene is congenitally incapable of running one of the wealthiest countries on earth. As 22 Minutes put it, the political opposition is three parts Hitler, one part Kim Campbell, and a beard. Amen.

The man found in contempt of parliament in 2011 for holding back financial information from the House of Commons was rewarded with a majority government. That may say all that needs to be said about the public’s interest in democracy, at least back then. It is fitting to remember the words of the man who engineered the defeat of Stephen Harper’s last minority government, Michael Ignatieff: “When a government spends money, the people have a right to know what it is to be spent on.”

At least it was so once upon a democracy.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris

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