The Sixth Estate

It’s a comparatively minor case, but for those who are hoping Canada’s various white-collar crime units will protect us from lawbreakers, this doesn’t exactly bode well:

Corporate Research Group… pleaded guilty today in an Ottawa court to a criminal charge of bid-rigging. The company is also under a court order that prohibits it from engaging in any conduct contrary to the bid-rigging provisions in the Competition Act.

Here’s the backstory: CRG and one of its “competitors” colluded to rig bidding for a real estate contract with Public Works Canada. Bureaucrats noticed that their paperwork was sloppy, and an investigation was launched, leading to CRG pleading guilty in court. It turns out, according to CBC, that they actually won the contract in question, and consequently received a $312,000 payment from the government.

In exchange for which, they are now paying a $125,000 fine, plus — quelle horreur! — they’re going to be subject to a 5-year court order that orders them not to break the law again. Um, what? I realize I’m an ignoramus when it comes to legal matters, but I kind of thought the law was a standing order in and of itself. Why should a company be “punished” with a court order saying it is not allowed to break the law? It’s not allowed to break the law anyways.

New prisons for the blue-collar criminals, new tickets out of jail for the white-collar criminals. The Harper government may be tough on crime, but at least they respect the class system, right?

The National Post has an interesting article arguing that over the past couple of years CSIS has been monitoring relationships between the First Nations and the government of China. The evidence is flimsy but plausible. The major Chinese corporations now active in the oil patch are part-owned by the Chinese government. If you were sinking tens of billions of dollars into the oilpatch, you’d want to gauge the extent of Aboriginal opposition to your export plans, wouldn’t you?

What’s really interesting, though, is that this article gave a chance for the more unhinged of the Post’s readership to come out to play. I offer the following gems of wisdom from the Internet crackpot community. This is more than just some cheap humour at the expense of some right-wing ideologues, however. The fact that my fellow Canadians feel this way is a little disturbing. The fact that they think it’s appropriate to discuss this sort of crap in the open is even more disturbing. These are the people voting for the Conservatives because they’ll scrap the human rights tribunals. Turns out that’s because they’re worried about being hauled in front of the tribunals themselves.

Anyways, as I say, I have a more worrying point here. Exactly how big a fringe do these comments represent? It’s hard to say. In between the right-wing crackpots and the apathetic “all politicians are corrupt so I’m not going to waste my time,” there’s probably enough people that I’d be very interested in seeing the results of an opinion poll on the question of whether electoral democracy is centrally important to the well-being of Canada.

Anyhow, we’ll start off light:

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Another day, another Canadian oil company swallowed up by its foreign competitors. Oh well, right?

Here’s a fun fact from history: Stephen Harper used to be a Liberal activist, even after he moved to Alberta. He abandoned Trudeau over the National Energy Policy, and the NEP still provokes howls of outrage from right-wingers across the country. No National Energy Plan for Canada. On the other hand, if the Chinese approach us and offer to buy out the oil patch to serve their National Energy Plan? Well, full steam ahead! The mind boggles.

And it’s not just Harper. Here’s John Ibbitson, who would join most of his colleagues in even louder howls of outrage if the government ever, ever, ever nationalized an industry, or, just for example, started up a state-owned oil company:

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The media is understandably perturbed that Stephen Harper’s deputy chief of staff, Derek Vanstone, has been hired as a new executive and lobbyist by Air Canada. Vanstone and Air Canada will be using a loophole in the current lobbying regulations to get around a legal requirement that senior political staffers wait five years before becoming lobbyists. There are many such loopholes in the legislation, but the one they will use, I expect, is the one that says that anyone who spends less than 20% of their paid time meeting with government isn’t a “real” lobbyist and therefore doesn’t have to wait five years.

However, what you may not take away from reading about the Vanstone affair in the news media is that this is precisely the way this government works. Why would we expect an apology, or an ethics inquiry, or anything of that sort, when this is standard operating procedure for the Harper regime?

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There’s been a great deal of nonsense in the press about the ongoing price-fixing scandal in the banking sector — in which, in case you haven’t heard yet, there is mounting evidence that for the past several years somewhere between 2 and 20 of the world’s largest banks colluded to manipulate a key interest rate index called the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). And it seems everyone has an opinion on what to do about it. But National Post columnist Terence Corcoran takes the cake: Corcoran says that to prevent future manipulation, we need a genuine “market-driven alternative” in place of the LIBOR, which is too closely connected to “the tacit approval of central bankers and regulators.”

There’s really only one problem with this idea: the LIBOR is already set and administered privately. In his last column on the subject, Corcoran proposed “fixing” the LIBOR problem by passing new laws making it illegal to discuss LIBOR without paying a licensing fee to whatever new private bodies will be trusted with coming up with LIBOR’s key rate, or rather with LIBOR’s new “private” successor. The mind boggles. Corcoran should have stuck with one key comment in his piece, which I think speaks volumes: “I don’t pretend to understand the game, but here’s the explanation.” Yes, indeed. Maybe you shouldn’t write about it then? No?

Anyhow, let’s review the problem.

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Canadian nationalists can allow themselves a brief moment of unabashed exhilaration at the news that the British Columbia government is, finally, after many long and patient years, going after private surgeon Brian Day’s Cambie Surgery operation in Vancouver, B.C., for illegal billing of patients. It’s about damned time. The victory is not complete. The Medical Services Commission apparently will not be attempting to secure refunds for all the patients who paid illegally (which they presumably won’t mind too much), nor it will be attempting to fine Cambie Surgery to recoup the funding lost. But at least, apparently, public money will no longer flow to operations at clinics engaged in illegal double-billing.

And now for the heavier and more depressing part of this story. It’s an opportunity to go back into how “universal healthcare” works in this country, and I hope it will be useful to many Canadians (like me) who are passionately proud of our increasingly strained universal healthcare system, but not totally sure how it works on the ground level. (Aside, of course, from the fact that unlike Americans we don’t have to swipe a credit card on our way out of the hospital.)

This story begins with the major cuts to medicare that governments across the country put into place 20 years ago, during the early 1990s. One of the “victims” was Dr. Brian Day, a Vancouver surgeon. In 1996, apparently after his hours in a public operating room were cut, Day headed off into the private sector, creating the Cambie Surgery Centre where he offered patients a chance to queue-jump off the public sector waiting list — provided, of course, that they were willing to pay him a substantial amount of money.

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What else can one say?

“I get on my knees every day and I’m saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it,” [U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack told reporters revealing that 78 per cent of US corn and soybean crops had been hit.

Honestly, the stupidity is breathtaking. Vilsack’s policy is to pray urgently, by any creative means imaginable, to a deity who (if he believes what he’s saying) Vilsack also thinks caused the drought in the first place, in order to get us out of the drought through a miraculous act of divine mercy.

And if by some chance the rains do start tomorrow, no doubt Vilsack and his cretinous gang will be the first to thank God for his mercy, too.

This sort of Stone Age ignorance is going to kill us one of these days.

Several days ago I posted an analysis of the latest procurement travesty at the Department of National Defence: the replacement of the army’s medium-weight transport trucks under the Medium Support Vehicle Systems project. I pointed out that there appeared to be a minor financial boondoggle in the making: although the publicly estimated cost of the project was $1.1 billion, so far the estimates of just three of its four individual components were $1.3 billion. Something didn’t add up, I said.

And it seems that I was right, or rather that the situation was worse than I had suspected. Sources are telling Postmedia that the reason the bidding for the massive contract was abruptly terminated — three minutes before deadline, like a delinquent child racing into school with his homework from the night before — was that DND bureaucrats tried to tack $300 million in costs onto the project without telling the Treasury Board. It seems that the publicly cited $800 million figure for the military trucks (the rest of the $1.3 billion comes from a separate order for non-military trucks, and then various special equipment to mount on all the trucks for particular missions) was not quite in keeing with the $430 million which DND told the Treasury the trucks would cost.

This is yet another example of the deceitful scoundrel and Defence Minister Peter MacKay attempting to defraud the taxpaying Canadian public through dishonest bookkeeping related to his out-of-control procurement activities. Once again I expect we’ll be told — as we were with the F-35 fighter — that the fault lies with a platoon of rogue bureaucrats in DND (or maybe rogue officers within the Canadian Forces) running amok with taxpayers’ dollars. Nonsense. The fault lies entirely, squarely, and rightly with MacKay. He is the minister responsible, and if this report is true, once again he has been caught attempting to sneak hundreds of millions of dollars of our money out the back door without submitting accurate cost estimates to the public in advance.

In my head, I’m writing the press releases already.

As I pointed out in a recent post on the botched purchase of new medium-weight trucks for the military, the supposedly militarist Harper government is long on praise for the Canadian Forces, but very decidedly short on getting the military the equipment they need to do their jobs (rightly or wrongly). Mark Collins, whose blog makes for highly recommended reading on this subject, makes the point much more directly:

This government has been in office for well over six years, longer than Canada’s participation in World War II. It did purchase urgently required equipments [sic] for the Army’s Afghanistan combat mission… [and] two other major procurements now in service: the RCAF’s C-17 and C-130J transports…

Otherwise: zip, zilch, nichts, nada, nista, rien de flipping tout. No fixed-wing SAR aircraft; no U(C)AVs; no new Maritime Helicopter in service (previous Liberal governments have a lot to answer for on that one also); no contracts for new RCN ships; no contract for the Army’s Close Combat Vehicle; and a botched Army truck (!?!) order. I may have omitted something.

Sixth Estate’s position on the military is probably a lot more hostile than Collins’s, but there is an important point to be made here. Whether Canada should have a large and internationally active military is essentially an ideological question. But the question here isnot ideological. Since entering office, the Conservatives have made quite clear that they are the military party: they are the party that will stand by the Canadian Forces and do right by them, where Liberal budget-cutters and NDP anti-war activists wouldn’t. And by their own measure, the present government is failing spectacularly to do its duty.

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Today’s MLVW, ©Tyler Benoit Creative Commons

The Harper regime is developing a wonderful ability for horrendous timing. A few days ago, corrupt President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement went on a Twitter-fuelled rampage against Canadian aid workers in Cuba because they were “choosing to live in a communist country.” Then, this week, he opened a new national historic site museum (in his own riding) dedicated to Canadian communist doctor Norman Bethune, who chose to live in China and practice his art for the good of the communist revolutionaries. Absurdly, Clement said that the exhibit celebrates Bethune’s “entrepreneurship.” So Canadian aid workers who choose to live in communist countries are evil traitors, but Canadian aid workers who actually are communists and choose to live in communist countries are national heroes!

The military has not been spared this sort of ironic timing. Just a few short days ago, Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who uses the nation’s search and rescue force as his personal taxi service, announced that the overdue and over-cost Sikorsky Cyclone deal — first started by the Liberals — is “the worst procurement” in Canadian history. A comparison to the much more overdue and over-cost F-35 deal instantly leaps to mind, but even more ironically, shortly after MacKay made his announcement, he cancelled outright a billion-dollar truck purchase that was billed as “urgent” six years ago, has been wending its way through the procurement bureaucracy for six years, and has now been sent all the way back to square one again. Just so we’re clear: these trucks are so old that they’re basically the ground logistics equivalent of the Sea King helicopter.

The last time I waded into the morasse of Harper regime military procurement, the kind folks at the Galloping Beaver said I “didn’t know a RCEME from a tank transporter,” which is true enough, and that my incompetent mashup would make modern armour crews’ stomachs “tie up in knots.” But they did say my conclusions were right. So I’m going to charge into the breach again, and if you’re worried about your stomach, you should get some Gravol before you continue reading.

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