Airbus and the Ghost of Brian Mulroney

A blast from the past. A German-Canadian huckster. A former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister. A dodgy prime minister. A European aircraft giant with a reputation for handing out easy money.  Karl Heinz Schreiber, Elmer MacKay, Brian Mulroney and Airbus.

Schreiber went into a German jail cell. Elmer, late father of Peter, took his secrets to the grave. Brian went to a coffee shop to collect envelopes stuffed with cash. And Airbus - well it's still at it.

Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace multinational, is to pay a record £3bn in penalties after admitting it had paid huge bribes on an “endemic” basis to land contracts in 20 countries. 

Anti-corruption investigators hailed the result as the largest ever corporate fine for bribery in the world after judges declared that the corruption was “grave, pervasive and pernicious”. 

The planemaker agreed to pay the penalties on Friday after reaching settlements with investigators in the UK, France and the US to end inquiries that started four years ago.

Like that horrible TV show where they're constantly trying to recover pirate treasure from Nova Scotia's Oak Island, the 'commission' Airbus admits it paid to cinch the Air Canada deal but never divulged to whom remains a deeply buried secret.

Tories Look to Make Death With Dignity a Wedge Issue for 2015 Elections

Well, that didn't take long.  Just days after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the criminal prohibition on physician assisted suicide, Harper justice minister Peter MacKay let's slip the Tories see it as a possible election issue.

[MacKay] noted the court provided a calendar year to deliver its answer, but said the government will be taking "the time we need" after describing it as an important and far-reaching issue for Canadians.

He acknowledged the decision's timing ahead of a federal election expected in October and said input from a broad array of people will help inform and instruct the government's path forward.

"How it will impact or how it might impact on an election I suppose depends on what happens between now and October, if anything, and how people view this as moving their vote."

For a prime minister like Harper, nothing that can be turned into a wedge issue is off limits.  Nothing.  And if there was ever an issue to pique Harper's basest fundamentalist instincts this is it.

Politicizing death and suffering - Conservatives at their finest.  They'll turn anything and anyone into a political football, even the terminally ill.

That'll Be the Day When Pigs Swim

Everyone knows, deep down, that pigs can't fly but we may discover that pork floats just fine even in Canada's Arctic waters.

Stephen Harper would have us believe that he's all about the Arctic.  He can't get enough of the place.  Visits every summer.  He's especially fond of watching the local Rangers fire their WWII-vintage Lee Enfield rifles at imaginary Speznatz storm troopers, a powerful demonstration of Canadian sovereignty.

Steve will also tell us of the perils of Vlad Putin's bomber patrols and those Russkie's schemes to grab the oil, gas and mineral-rich Arctic seabed right out of our fingers.  After all, that's why Sideshow Steve promised that Canada would deploy eight, or at least six, Arctic patrol ships.  Real Made-in-Canada warships courtesy of Nova Scotia's Irving Shipyards.

Yes, that Irving.  The same bunch that run most of the media plus the oil refineries, lumber mills and just about everything else that, to mega-millionaires, is worth owning in the Maritimes.

From the get go the Arctic patrol vessel programme has, in standard Harper style, been short on details and long on doublespeak.  In May of last year there was a kerfuffle about then defence minister Peter MacKay's "hole in the ocean" when it was announced that the federal government would pay Irving $288-million just to design - not actually build - the patrol vessels.

What made the Harper government's largesse especially jaw dropping was that Canada was basically going to build ships (see above) along the lines of a Norwegian design which the feds had already purchased from the Norse for just $5-million.  It got worse from there when it emerged that Norway had built the original, Svalbard (see below), for under $100-million all in, design included.  It got even worse when it was learned that Denmark bought two similar patrol vessels in 2007 at $105-million for the pair.

Norwegian "Svalbard" - Look familiar?

When CBC went after MacKay/Ambrose brain trust for explanations, Rona Ambrose went full Michelle Bachmann and said speak to her officials who, in turn, couldn't explain it.  ...Ambrose got completely spinney, babbling on about the new, Conservative way of designing ships.

"We are implementing what's called a design and then build strategy," the minister told CBC News.

Not surprisingly, Ambrose was unable to cite any other country that fails to design first and build later.  At that point reporters were interrupted by government media handlers who cut off further questions.

Flash forward a year and a half.  The numbers still don't add up.  If anything, they're worse.  The budget for those Arctic patrol vessels is now $3.1-billion. That's right, with a "B".  And, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Jean-Denis Frechette, we won't be getting the promised 8-patrol vessels for that money.  We won't even be getting six.

Frechette said that's only enough money to pay for four Arctic patrol ships - and even then, there's only a 50 per cent chance the vessels get built on that budget.

The PBO went on to warn that, if the project is delayed for more than a year, we might be lucky to get three patrol ships for that.  In other words, about a billion apiece for the same ships everyone else can build for under $100-million per copy.  That's ten times more, on the nose, than everyone else is paying for similar patrol ships.

This iteration of a government naturally disputes Frechette's conclusions, arguing he got the data all wrong.  Frechette responded that any inaccuracies were the result of Harper & Company, true to form as we've seen so many times before, refusing to give the PBO information needed to do their work.

Now it turns out that, two days before Harper Enterprises inked the deal with Irving Shipyards, it received a consultants' report questioning Irving's numbers.

The report, by International Marine Consultants of Vancouver (IMC), ...commissioned by the Department of Public Works ...says the number of man-hours quoted by Irving Shipbuilding of Halifax was 'very high and considerably more than we would have expected for a shipbuilding program for vessels of the size and complexity of the [Arctic offshore patrol ships].' 

Update:

To put the Arctic offshore patrol vessel fiasco into perspective, it might be helpful to compare costs with those being incurred by the US Navy for its state-of-the-art,  armed to the teeth, littoral combat ships.  While designed for different roles and, hence, not fully comparable, the USN is getting the LCS for under $470-million apiece and it's a genuine warship.

And now, a video depiction of the Harper government's amphibious defence spending policy:

Who Will Lead the Tories into the 2015 Election?

If there was just one thing that Tories learned from Monday's by-elections it was that they're up against a resurgent Liberal challenge with Justin Trudeau at the helm.  They probably didn't need the by-elections to tell them that, by contrast, their own leader is becoming increasingly unpopular if not outright toxic to Tory fortunes.

Stephen Harper has said he intends to lead the Conservatives into the 2015 election but that decision might not be his to take any longer.

The party establishment isn't going to want a wounded leader going up against a popular, energized Liberal contender.  There are rumours of two, possibly three, latter day Dalton Camps already operating in the wings.

At this stage it's hard to imagine too many Tories willing to risk all by rallying to the side of Stephen Harper.  He's just not the sort of guy who makes a lot of friends.   He doesn't earn loyalty.  If anything he's a nasty little shit.

What happens next depends on whether Harper has not only taken himself down but has taken down the Reform wing with him.   The conditions might be ripe for a PC reformation.

There's not a lot of depth from the Tory front bench to answer the call for a new leader.  MacKay might have aspirations but he's something of a spent force and then there's the little matter of how he sold out the PCs.   Jason Kenney?  Possibly, but I think he has a "no wife, no babies" problem with the social conservative base.  He's also a westerner.  And, besides, Kenney- MacKay et al have  all logged years of  loyal service to the Grand Corrupter, the Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub himself.   With an election less than two years away and a party in need of rehab, Tories might well be looking for a new, fresh face.

Did I mention Jim Prentice?  No?  Well he's said to be weighing his options.  Although he's a Calgarian, he has lengthy Progressive Conservative credentials.   He was generally seen as moderate (at least compared to some of his colleagues), sophisticated (not a faith-based mouth breather) and he's been out of Harper's cabal long enough for the taint to wash off.

There's another name that's surfaced on the rumour circuit.   Now brace yourself.   How 'bout Jean Charest?   Some Tories think Charest could be a viable contender in a race to replace Stephen Harper.  Charest stepped in before when the party was in extremis.  He's affable, fairly well known and liked across Canada, and he's from Quebec.   Those are attributes the Tories could use in a leader right now.

Who knows, maybe Harper will find some way to hang on.   Maybe the Tories will answer the Liberals' prayers and go into the 2015 election behind this prime minister.

Another MacKay-Fantino Love Child?

They could've stuck with the ships Paul Martin had on the books when he left office, but nooooo.

The ships, three of them, were to replace the navy's 45-year old supply ships only they were to be supply ships and more.    That deal was scrapped by the Tories.

Now we're told to expect an announcement that the navy will get two, possibly three, replacement ships but they won't measure up to what was promised.

What followed, (after Martin's plan was scrapped) according to the series of internal briefings, was a drastic scaling back of the navy’s design concept, overseen by senior civilian defence and political officials.

The $2.6 billion program relaunched in 2010 is expected to deliver two — maybe three — ships.

But with the program delayed until 2018 and accounting for inflation — currently running at seven per cent in the shipbuilding industry — it will likely cost taxpayers more than if the government had stuck with the original plan.

The new proposal will see the joint ships carry fewer helicopters, drastically less cargo, no space for a joint mission headquarters or a full-fledged hospital, as mandated in the original concept.

The Harper government has assigned the task of building the ships to Seaspan Shipyards in Vancouver and is expected to select from two specific designs sometime this year.

Unlike the troubled F-35 fighter proposal where capabilities such as stealth were hardly questioned, the briefings on the joint support ships suggest civilians played a large role after 2008 deciding what the military could live without in the new vessels.

...The initial concept was for a joint ship that could act as floating supply base for the navy, carrying vast amounts of army equipment to trouble spots, and act as offshore command post and hospital for humanitarian missions. It was well-researched and thought out by the navy.

...The ships, as they are envisioned now, almost entirely give up the sealift role.

CBC's Brian Stewart Casts Bones & Reads Entrails - Stephen Harper's Bones and Peter MacKay's Entrails

It seems Brian Stewart has been a CBC defence wonk since the days of muzzle loaders and black powder.   That makes his take on the F-35 fiasco all the more notable.

"The who-knew-what about the real costs of the F-35 fighter jet Canada wants to purchase is worrisome enough. But at the heart of the fiasco is a far more serious concern about what public honesty means to this government.

"... we need to see if this current mess is part of a pattern of official "misstatements" on defence matters. If so, we've got a serious national problem.

" ...Remember when the prime minister was never going to "cut and run" but then suddenly switched 180 degree to launch the 2008 election with the promise of a full pullout in 2011.

"The defence department was stunned, and so was his minister Peter MacKay.  "I don't know," MacKay told reporter Murray Brewster when asked how the historic shift came about. "I heard about it the same time you did."

...Throughout the war, inquiring journalists found our military to have become increasingly secretive and at times even untrustworthy, as National Defence and PMO communications staff snatched control of information away from officers in the field.

For long periods Canadians were denied information on the number of Afghan detainees that Canadian soldiers handled, the tally of fire-fights our soldiers were involved in, the number of attacks on Canada's main base in Kandahar, even the full number of our wounded.

What's more, they were constantly assured the Taliban was being battered into weakness, despite quite contrary evidence.
As for the total cost of the Afghanistan adventure? That was, and remains, as murky as the cost overruns of the F-35 program.

...We see layer after layer of weak political leadership, jealous bureaucratic infighting, and a complete lack of strategic insight from the top on down.

The prime minister's office has not only rigorously controlled every aspect of government communications, muting the military's own voice, but it seemed determined to give Canadians as little information as possible on the war, the study said.

In the historians' words: "The prime minister may have concluded that the war could not be won, was politically costly and, therefore, the less said of aims and objectives the better."

The same attitude, of saying as little as possible, seems to have been at play again during this long process over the F-35 purchase, with the government simply refusing to retreat from its predictions that these next-generation jets would cost only $15 billion over a 20-year period.

That is quite a gap from the $25 billion lifetime cost that others, including the parliamentary budget officer (and even some DND officials, the auditor general has now revealed) felt was reasonable.

...I'd like to think our top soldiers would refuse to go along with misleading Parliament. However the public relations domination of National Defence has been eating away at even some core ethics of our military for some years now. The way it did in the RCMP.

Think of the number of events where misleading stories are put out there. Defence Minister Peter MacKay uses a search-and-rescue training flight to prolong a fishing trip. Any waste is denied, until the media shakes out the details.

Then, as payback, military officials tamely sent over information on opposition members' flights to the minister's office, so he could throw these back at his opponents in Question Period.


The lack of "strategic insight" Stewart finds in the Harper government is chronic and is certainly not limited to Canada's military either.  It pervades virtually every aspect of Harper's authoritarian rule and betrays the person Stephen Harper trusts least, himself.  It's a crippling lack of self-confidence compounded by an acute awareness of just how facile is his grasp of even mildly-complex realities that drives Harper to padlock the doors that separate the public from their government.  He is out of his depth, unfit to govern, incapable of leading.  Parliament is Harper's Emerald City that he manipulates from behind a curtain.

Stephen Harper is of the-faith based world of religious superstition and gut instincts trying to rule a government of a reality-based world of knowledge and facts.  He is a fish out of water forced to rule with an iron fist and compelled to cloak himself in a curtain of secrecy to conceal his true nature.

Did Stephen Harper not know the true cost of the F-35?   How could he not have known unless he chose not to know or, worse, chose to be fed fantasies suiting his superstitious bent.

And what does this say of Peter MacKay and the other munchkins in Stephen Harper's court?   They must have known the true nature of their master all along.  They had to have known he was intent, constantly intent, on betraying the Canadian people by feeding them a rich diet of falsehood and nonsense.  Yet we heard not a peep from any of them.

In more honourable times past these people would have thrown themselves on their swords in disgrace, the lot of them.  But these aren't honourable times and these aren't honourable people wielding the levers of power.

Harper Cons - Sucked In Again by DND

A Con conned?  Say it ain't so.  But it's now emerging that those grifters at Canada's Department of National Defence knew a couple of marks when they saw them and pulled the wool over the eyes of Steve "Rambo" Harper and his boy child/DefMin "Meathead" MacKay on the supposed merits, cost and performance of the F-35.  As Gordon Lightfoot said, "That's what you get for loving me." 

Now the former head of military equipment purchases, Alan Williams, says he has no doubt the Canadian military intentionally distorted the facts on the F-35.

"This is the first case that I can recall of a clear and unambiguous hijacking of the process."

So now Steve "the brightest man in the room" Harper has been transformed into DND's bitch.   And he can't blame anybody but himself.   Two years ago then Auditor General Sheila Fraser sounded the alarm when she slammed the armed forces for misleading the government in order to push through purchases of  Cyclone and Chinook helicopters.

Fool me once, shame on you.   Fool me twice, shame on...   oh, how does that go?

Sorry, George, but Steve sure can. 

The Perversion of Canada's Military

Since he clawed his way into power, Steve Harper has wasted little time turning Canada's public and armed services into political agencies of the prime minister's office.   He began by gagging the public service and the armed forces.  Under Harper's iron fist communications policy, the public were not allowed direct contact with public servants or members of the military.   Communications commissars in the PMO were appointed to ride herd, filtering requests for information, deciding what could be or wouldn't be answered, and then doctoring the response to ensure it conformed to Stevie's message.   Undemocratic?  You bet your ass.  Authoritarian?  Ditto.

Now further evidence of the political perversion of the armed forces has emerged.   When Harper defmin Peter MacKay ran into controversy for his personal use of an armed forces Cormorant helicopter, he instructed military officers to dig up dirt on a Liberal MP, Scott Simms.

The Toronto Star got its hands on some military e-mails from Major Byron Johnson in Gander, MacKay's appointed sleuth.    The first e-mail reported that, “Staff continuing search but nothing found thus far placing MP Simms aboard Cormorant. Will advise if something located.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Gumshoe Johnson exclaimed "Found it."  He noted that Simms had in fact spent a whole day aboard a Cormorant.  Johnson then sleuthed into who requested the flight and whether Simms had reimbursed DND for its costs.

It has now surfaced that Simms was aboard the helo at the suggestion of MacKay's office in order to learn about the search and rescue role of the Cormorant.  He wasn't using it as an aerial taxi to ferry him from a luxury fishing resort to a political appearance.

Was Major Johnson acting on behalf of the RCAF or the Conservative Party in trying to get the goods on Simms?  It's pretty obvious it wasn't the RCAF that had a dog in that fight.   And Johnson's "found it" exclamation seems to bear that out.

Byron Johnson crossed the line.  It is a cardinal rule that military personnel must never, ever dabble in political matters.   They serve the country not some political party.   Was Johnson (and his staff) serving the country?  No.   Was he serving the RCAF?  No.   Was he serving his minister and the Conservative Party?  Yes, on both counts.

We need a zero tolerance approach to this sort of thing.   What's going on today in the United States makes that plain.  We've seen American generals like Petraeus and McChrystal freely intrude into the political sphere, even to the point of challenging their Commander in Chief, president Obama.   The impertinence these two clowns displayed played no small measure in the failed fiasco that is Afghanistan today.

We've had our taste of that too.   Now safely retired general Dick Hillier, the architect of Canada's hapless Kandahar mission, used his celebrity to slag the Liberal Party.   Under Harper, Hillier talked about the restoration of the Canadian Armed Forces and made pointed reference to the "dark days" of cutbacks under the Liberals.

What the Rancid Cod deliberately overlooked is that Canada was in a fight back when the military budget was cut.   It was a fight, by Chretien and Martin, to wrestle the country's finances back under control, to restore balanced budgets, to pay down the national debt.  Everybody in Canada felt some effects of that, made some sacrifices, and there was absolutely no reason that the military should have objected to doing their share too.  But, with Harper constantly patting his back, Hillier felt quite comfortable getting into politics and taking his cheap shot.

Professor, author and retired US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich has chronicled the politicization of his own country's military in The New American Militarism.   He reveals how, in a very direct, political manner, America's military leadership has forged a compact with the radical right, the bloated military-industrial complex, and radical Christian fundamentalists.   Bacevich contends that, with this political, industrial and religious backing, top generals at times even challenge their Commander in Chief to implement political policy of their own making.

The Canadian military increasingly appears to be emulating their American counterparts.  That's hardly surprising given that we train with the Americans, we follow common procedures and tactics and we equip our forces with their weapons.  And, more importantly, when we do get to use all that training and all those weapons, it's always in conjunction with the much larger American military, sort of as America's Foreign Legion.  It's as though Canadians are embedded with their American Big Brothers.

We don't need a politicized military in Canada.  If we don't want that we need to ensure that the American military contagion doesn't sweep north.  One way to do that is to make damned sure that officers like Major Johnson understand the line they must never cross and that nothing good lies in store for them if they forget it.

NATO's Last Secretary General a Canadian?

DefMin Peter MacKay is said to be in the running to replace the ineffectual Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Given all he did for the Progressive Conservative Party, MacKay should have no trouble presiding over the demise of NATO too.