The Sixth Estate

No substantive post today. I’m in the middle of writing up a series of posts on military procurement which should be fairly interesting (predicting what I think will be the next, bigger scandal after the F-35), and I think I’ve said all that needs to be said with respect to the racist nonsense that is increasingly being spouted in the media in reaction to Theresa Spence’s hunger strike.

It’s a disastrous state of affairs. If Stephen Harper was going to meet with her, he would have done so over Christmas, while the hunger strike was still in its early stages and he could have been seen as being full of charitable feelings thanks to the holiday season. At this point, we’re down to brass tacks: whether Spence is actually willing to die here or not. It’s clear that Harper either thinks she is not, or simply doesn’t care. Which, judging by the media’s reaction to the affair, was a correct calculation on his part.

In addition to the media commentary I’ve already discussed (here, here, and here), it’s worth pointing out the Toronto Sun‘s official position on the matter, taken in a Christmas Eve editorial:

Pack up both Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, and raze both communities on the way out.

Yeah! That’ll do it!

Sixth Estate will continue to cover Spence’s hunger strike, and will continue to hope for a resolution that doesn’t end with her death, but at the same time we need to be realistic about this. If Spence means it when she says the choice is between death and a summit with Harper, right now I think the odds favour her death. This is an incredibly callous calculation on the part of the government, which could have dispensed with the matter a week ago by giving her an entirely unproductive but symbolic afternoon-long meeting with Harper and the Governor-General.

But it’s also a rational calculation on the part of the government. If Spence dies, it will be a serious problem for aboriginal affairs in Canada for the next 20 years. If more aboriginal leaders join her in her hunger strike, Harper might just concede, because if even more people die, that serious problem will become a catastrophe as well as a considerable embarrassment to the Conservatives on the international stage. But as long as Spence is alone, and as long as the Conservative base appears to be generally in favour of taking a hardline position, then Harper may feel he suffers very little from this, whatever the outcome. He’s learned that he only needs around 35% of the Canadian population to maintain power. If you’re not in that 35% and you’re very angry with his policies, well, that isn’t really a problem for him, is it?

I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised to read this weekend that the Globe & Mail has officially joined Postmedia’s Christie Blatchford in denouncing the ongoing hunger strike in Ottawa by Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence as an act not just of protest but of violence against the lawful order of the country:

Spence should not risk her health with a hunger strike, nor is coercion a reasonable or responsible tool to be used in making a request to meet with the Prime Minister.

The idea that a hunger strike is “coercive” would be hilarious in itself, if a person’s life wasn’t at stake here. I realize that most of my fellow Canadians are more angry at Spence than at Harper over the present state of affairs, but please do yourself the favour of being brutally honest about your feelings on this. What these people are saying is that they would rather Spence die than that Harper “concede” to a meeting. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we don’t negotiate with hunger strikers.

It’s not that the government isn’t bothered. It’s reached deep into its ranks to trot out one indigenous MP and Senator after another to urge Spence to give up the hunger strike and “trust the process” by meeting with Aboriginal Affairs minister John Duncan. The media generally agrees with this position. I’ve already noted the Globe’s position. The Ottawa Citizen has similarly announced, by the usual official means of an anonymous editorial, that it is not “valid” for Spence to demand a meeting with the Prime Minister.

I want to point out a disturbing contrast here. With increasingly disturbing regularity, Tibetan monks commit suicide by fire in order to draw the world’s attention to the plight of their homeland, occupied by China. When this happens, I can’t help but notice that virtually no white Canadians ever declare that these people are trying to “coerce” the Chinese government, or that self-immolation is basically equivalent to terrorism, or that there would be far better results if they just trusted the duly constituted government and followed its duly established processes. No one says it’s just an attention grab, or queue-jumping, or any of the other silly ways that white Canadians have tried to rationalize Harper’s failure to respond to Spence over the past two weeks.

Instead, when Tibetan monks commit suicide, the Globe & Mail says things like the following (again from an official editorial, this one from March 2012):

There is no weapon that can stop these fires from spreading, only the low-tech approach of dialogue, of easing up, of permitting freedom… But the hubris of a powerful state and long habit prevent China from seeing the answer…

(The government of China) needs to relax its repressive grip…, respect the religious practices of the Tibetan people…, and open negotiations with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

Fascinatingly, the Globe’s advice to the government of China is the polar opposite of its advice to the government of China. Spence’s claim to talk to the prime minister rests on the assertion that First Nations should get to speak with the federal Crown on a government-to-government basis. Almost to a (wo)man, our professional media doesn’t agree: they say that it would be inappropriate to agree to meet Spence as long as she claims any such privilege, and that, in place of this “nation to nation” basis, the chief should address herself to the responsible minister the way any other special interest group might do.

But the Chinese government have already taken the Globe’s advice on this one. They can’t accede to the Globe’s demand that they “open negotiations with the Dalai Lama,” because they’ve already agreed with the Globe’s counsel that indigenous “governments” don’t have sovereignty and can’t operate on a “nation to nation” basis.

There’s nothing like some Injuns getting uppity and demanding political rights, etc., to draw out the kooky, paranoid racism from their fellow Canadians, including those who write about politics for a living. To wit, I give you Postmedia’s version of General George Custer, Christie Blatchford:

Already, there is much talk of smudging ceremonies, tobacco offerings, the inherent aboriginal love for and superior understanding of the land, and treaties that were expected to be in place “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows”… It is tempting to see the action as one of intimidation, if not terrorism: She is, after all, holding the state hostage to vaguely articulated demands.

Yes, you read it at Postmedia first: Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence might be a terrorist! Hunger strikes are like hostage-taking!

As I write these words, Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence is starving to death in Ottawa. Her hunger strike was sparked by a year’s frustration and resentment after the Harper government attempted to impose a third-party dictatorship in place of the duly elected government of her band last winter, and since then refused to grant her a meeting with Stephen Harper to discuss her people’s admittedly desperate poverty. We’re a couple of weeks into that hunger strike now, and Stephen Harper is presently testing the theory that one more dead Indian won’t make much of a difference in this country. Not enough of a difference, in any case, that he ought to take a few hours out of his very busy schedule to meet with her, duly elected prime minister to duly elected chief.

Even Blatchford seems to realize that Harper’s theory is wrong here. She closes with a comparison to the Irish hunger strikes of 1981 — which resulted in the deaths of the men involved, a wave of Irish republican terrorism, a corresponding wave of British military suppression, a near-successful assassination attempt against the British Prime Minister, and the rise of Sinn Fein. That was the result of another rather headstrong right-wing prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Food for thought.

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Every December, the government of Canada has two main functions. First, they spend an as-yet-unknown amount of taxpayer dollars granting a CF-18 fighter escort to Santa Claus, just in case some Al Qaeda sympathizers are lurking in the Barren Grounds with Stinger missiles. (A couple of years ago, Minister Jason Kenney even held a ceremony to reaffirm Santa’s Canadian citizenship, which was a blatantly illegal and seditious act on the part of Mr. Kenney, given that he was very well aware at the time that Santa did not have a Canadian citizenship card to begin with. (It wasn’t Kenney’s last fraudulent citizenship ceremony, either, and the latter one really was an attempt at deception.)

The second job is to issue a statement celebrating Christmas. Two such statements are issued: one from Stephen Harper stressing Canada’s economic performance (just to remind us that he’s an insufferably narrow-minded git) and another from Jason Kenney stressing the religious dimensions of the occasion. It’s the latter one I’ve always found particularly troubling. I have no problem with the government marking the holiday season. But exactly how much is too much when it comes to official proclamations on religious subjects from the government? Is officially proclaiming Christian theological claims to be historical facts too far for the government of a secular country?

Following the spiritual preparation and reflection of Advent, and nine months after the Incarnation, this holiday commemorates the long-awaited birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the city of David.

Every year, Christmas unites families, friends, communities and cultures in hope and prayer for peace on Earth, and in celebration of the birth of a child whom the prophet Isaiah called the “Prince of Peace.”

In just two sentences, our dear Immigration Minister, who in reality is a jumped-up Catholic anti-abortion activist and (for God knows what reason) publicly self-proclaimed virgin, manages to establish as the official policy of the Canadian government all of the following: the composition of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the actual birth of Jesus (not as easy to prove as you might think), the fact that it occurred in Bethlehem (ditto) to a virgin (also ditto), and the prophetic status of Isaiah, who, the Canadian government would have us believe, correctly predicted the birth of Christ centuries before it happened.

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It’s Christmas time, and even Margaret Wente was feeling unusually charitable in Saturday’s column (and pretty much plagiarism free, for the time being). So if you’re hoping to get your regular dose of venom and bile from the chattering classes, you’ll have to settle for me.

I’d like to juxtapose a couple of stories from today to demonstrate the sad spectacle of Canadian democracy as it now exists. First of all, there’s the relative non-story of a First Nations chief slowly starving to death in protest that the Prime Minister and Governor-General of the country refuse to meet with her. This would seem a fairly paltry demand, but both men are reluctant to do so. Earlier this week, the Governor-General absurdly explained that he did not have the authority to meet anyone without approval from the Prime Minister.

He does not, apparently, need any such authority to write simpering nonsense in a national paper about how Canada is busy converting the heathen natives of Mexico to the wonders of adversarial common-law court systems, which, he says, are the absolutely necessary bedrock on which democracy is built. (This will no doubt come as something of a disappointment to the residents of Quebec.)

There’s still a possibility, but I really hope that Theresa Spence has second thoughts. I don’t want her to die, and it’s a safe bet that some cynical young partisan activist in the Prime Minister’s Office has already drafted a suitable speech for the occasion. (“Like all Canadians, I was shocked and saddened. But let me be clear: this government is working as hard as ever to solve the Indian problem, which was caused by the Liberals.”)

And our second story: the state broadcaster, aka the Conservative Broadcasting Corporation, has for some reason found it necessary to explain in excruciatingly painful detail the government’s plan to provide Santa Claus with a CF-18 fighter escort on his upcoming trip across Canada. The CBC isn’t the only media company to waste time on this utter propagandistic drivel, but unlike all the others, I own the CBC. So my comments are directed specifically to them.

For as long as I can remember, NORAD has “tracked” Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. But in recent years they’ve steadily upped this story. This year, it comes complete with a promotional video, a lengthy interview with one of the pilots, and specific details of Santa’s sled and flight pattern.

I know Santa occupies a special position in families where children are normally taught that they must tell the truth at all times, but at some point we’ve got to call a stop to this nonsense. There is, obviously, no CF-18 escort. There are no fighter pilots providing such an escort. At a time when the nation’s democracy is in crisis, surely we have better things to do than to trot out an increasing number of people to spread an increasingly detailed series of blatant untruths over the public airwaves. And I’m not stupid, either. This is a blatantly obvious attempt to insert the military into a jovial family celebration at a time when the military’s multi-billion-dollar plans to appropriate our taxes and spend them on unnecessary American fighter jets is front and centre in the news. Nicely played, assholes.

To add insult to injury, the military provided CBC with a graphic of the schematics of Santa’s sleigh. The graphic states that the sleigh’s emissions are classified (how can they be classified when Canada doesn’t even own the sleigh?) and its speed, which is “faster than starlight.” But not, apparently, light from other sources, which as we all remember from high school physics is much, much faster still — if it wasn’t so, why would it take so many years for light from most stars to reach our telescopes?

Apparently, CBC made a show of calling the minister’s office for comment on the planned escort mission, to which the minister responded with a poem. The only question they should have asked is how much money the military spends on this ridiculous public relations charade every year. And they should have noted that the minister’s office refused to answer that question.

I only ask because a few days ago the government released a transparently self-serving “response” to a request from its own MPs, showing that it costs as much as $150,000 to respond to a question tabled by an opposition politician in Parliament, and therefore that opposition politicians should not be permitted to ask questions of the government.

This is yet more evidence of the fantastic fiscal competence of “Canada’s responsible majority government,” I must say. The British government says that the average written response to a question costs just £164.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Sooner or later, after any incident in which a large number of people die, a preacher who thinks he has some sort of grand insight into human nature advances something like the following claim: evil events are happening because liberals have turned their backs on God. Sometimes God is the perpetrator of the action (in the case of natural disasters), other times it’s the liberals themselves who facilitate the violence (when it’s a massacre).

Usually this claptrap is peddled by a third-rate far-right-wing club like Fox News. This time, sad to say, it’s the Globe & Mail, which, on the subject of gun violence, could apparently do no worse than to consult a rabbi:

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Once one has been a blogger for even a little while, one learns to develop a pretty thick skin when it comes to blasé incompetence from our paid professional betters. You see, the difference is that blogs are peer-reviewed. Commenters and other bloggers jump on us when we make an egregious mistake, and call us names. That doesn’t happen in the professional media. Instead, they circle the wagons, print a barely noticeable correction notice, and carry on.

Our exhibit for today is an almost unbelievable litany of errors from Postmedia’s Matthew Fisher. Seriously unbelievable, as in, of Wente-ian proportions. Mr. Fisher is “Canada’s most experienced, well-traveled foreign correspondent.” Today he had the following to say about the F-35. We’ll run through all of Mr. Fisher’s claims, because I think it’s important to celebrate a journalist’s successes, not just denounce their failures.

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In my last post, I estimated that under Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s controversial new plan, the total cost of the F-35 Lightning fighter comes out to around $127,000 per hour. We’re kind of back in medieval territory here, where several lowly peons must labour for an entire year just to get the plane into the air for a single flight. Something’s been bugging me ever since I wrote that: how the hell could things have got so screwy?

F-35 per-hour costs were never low. I’ve also inflated them somewhat: various American estimates say the actual operating costs per hour are around $30,000 to $50,000. That’s for the pilot, the fuel, the maintenance, etc. Then you tack on all the other costs and average them out over the life of the plane to get my number. But here’s the problem. The flight cost per hour is far higher than it used to be. It looks way higher than it should be — in fact, it’s an extra $330 million a year, by my math. What gives?

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I have to say, it’s pretty depressing that not one of the many, many professional journalists in Canada is literate enough to read a government report. To their credit, some are trying. But they also had a whole press briefing slash lock-up slash sleazy play-time with the people they’re supposed to be holding accountable. It doesn’t seem to have helped them anyway.

Here’s the thing I tried to make clear in my long meander through the report, I tried to make clear that the real story here was that DND appeared to be fudging the usage numbers and life cycle expectations for the F-35. Somehow the media appears to have blissfully blown right by this fact. (I do hope readers can point me to an exception; they’ll get a gold star.)

Some did notice that the headline figure “$45 billion over 42 years” didn’t quite square with the fact that DND’s $45 billion estimate actually included 30 years of actual flight time. (The other 12 years are development and delivery time, and DND claims the clock is already running on that; more on that in the next post.) Andrew Coyne did a good job of trying, for instance. He still missed the main story. Even that was too much for some of his readers, who, judging by the comments section, fear that the whole thing has been cooked up by Liberal sympathizers to make Justin Trudeau look good.

Anyhow, here’s the real issue: in addition to playing dirty with the estimates, Minister Peter MacKay and the Department of National Defence have massively slashed the lifetime they plan to use the F-35s for, massively slashed the amount of flight-time they say the F-35s will see during that lifetime, and massively slashed the simulator budget. The only important thing they haven’t slashed is the number of planes we’re buying. It’s worth asking why, if we’re going to use them less often and for less time, we actually need 65 of them in the first place. How was this number picked? By a random number generator, perhaps?

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I was almost tempted to let the matter rest, but then DND said this:

In 2010, the Department calculated that… the estimated cost for acquiring, sustaining and operating the [F-35] fleet… was $25.1 billion.

Ha! Here’s what their website says DND’s original public estimate was:

the total estimated cost and sustainment of Canada’s 65 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters is $14.7 billion.

They’re not lying, exactly. It’s just that the $25 billion figure was an internal one shared with the minister and Cabinet. $14.7 billion was the number which the Minister of National Defence, Peter MacKay, decided the pubic was better off knowing.

And sadly, with the latest round of reports, it seems that the government is still trying to play fast and loose with the numbers. I’m afraid this is going to get rather complicated, because we’ve had quite a number of different cost estimates for the F-35. A full analysis of all of them will have to wait. For today, I’m just going to concentrate on what’s happened between the Auditor General’s spring report, Replacing Canada’s Fighter Jets, DND’s new “annual update,” and KPMG’s independent review (which is basically just a re-analysis of DND’s new figures).

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