The Sixth Estate

The only reason the preposterous announcement that Santa’s sleigh will be receiving an armed escort by CF-18 fighters doesn’t win the Flack Award this week is because the same announcement has been made for several years now. Why does Santa need a military escort through Canadian airspace? Is the government worried he’ll veer off course and deliver the best presents to a Liberal child? Are they perhaps concerned about Muslim terrorists lurking in the barren lands with a surface-to-air missile launcher?

And of course, there’s the $30 billion question: are the CF-18s really enough to keep Santa safe, or will he only truly be safe once we get our new F-35s?

But that is not new. No, the most unnecessarily excited shill this week was surely Greg Rogers of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, whose boss is minister Bernard Valcourt. On Monday, Rogers announced breathlessly that

Boats are not normally made to be sunk, but manufacturing a vessel to do just that has propelled 70-year-old A.F. Theriault & Son Ltd. from traditional boat building into cutting edge innovation, and helping to train navies around the world in the process.

For those who don’t speak Propagandese or Newspeak, I’ll parse that into English for you: ACOA is subsidizing the Theriault shipyard to manufacture target ships which will be shot at by the navy for training purposes. I’ll bet no one has thought of that before! In an alternative version of the press release, Rogers also makes the following painfully unsuccessful attempt at sounding clever and cutesy:

All in all, it’s just another reason to believe this is one longstanding company that will continue to sail the waters of success for years to come.

Unlike the company’s boats, which will be sunk in short order.

I’m going to break my usual one-post-a-day rhythm because something mind-numbingly stupid just crossed my screen and I feel I need to respond to it. In the National Post, a newspaper already known for hosting columnists a few bricks short of a load, Conservative Party hack Keith Beardsley is actually claiming that the Libya crisis discredits those of us who believe Canada doesn’t need the F-35 jet fighter.

Before dissecting this pretzel logic, let me congratulate the Post for finally doing their job and giving a gloss that calls it like it is: Beardsley has decades of experience in the Conservative Party, most recently as an adviser to Stephen Harper. Now he’s a lobbyist for True North, incidentally. Thank you, National Post. Now, to the story.

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One of the long-forgotten old WikiLeaks documents, which can no longer be easily found on the organization’s front page, is an unclassified promotional presentation prepared by Boeing for the government of Denmark in December 2008. As the F-35 controversy continues in Canada, the points raised in it seem worth considering. At the time, Boeing was plugging the F/A-18 Super Hornet, an older but still capable fighter. The Super Hornet costs $55 million, less than half the cost of the F-35 Lightning that the Canadian government is committing to. On the one hand, it lacks some of the more advanced features, including stealth. On the other hand, it’s proven technology, evolved from the current CF-18 fighter, and it’s worth asking why Canada actually needs the most expensive fighter jet on the market, something which has never been a priority before.

Of course, this is Boeing’s biased perspective. I imagine Lockheed Martin, which will produce the F-35, would have a somewhat different perspective. Still, Boeing claims that

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In the past year, Canadians have variously been informed that there would be a public competition for our next-generation jet fighter, that there was a competition (the American one which resulted in the F-35 in the first place), and that there couldn’t be a competition because there was only one competitor. The last of these is now the standard line from the military but, of course, is patent nonsense: if there is only one competitor, then presumably Lockheed Martin would have no trouble going through the formality of a competition. It’s only the largest military acquisition in Canadian history — why make it an exception to the rules on this?

It’s that last myth I’m going to take on here. Now, the F-35 is an election issue. But I have some bad news for people who are hoping that means we’ll back out of the deal. You heard it here first: we won’t. I don’t want the thing, either, but the WikiLeaks cables make clear what I think most people already knew: public competitions for large-scale purchases in the defence sector, even when they are held, are usually shams and pretences. Several of the major WikiLeaks cables make that clear, and they also make clear that the sort of PR blitz we’ve seen recently, with generals and military-funded lobby groups like the Conference of Defence Associations taking to the op-ed pages, is a common strategy which the American government supports as a means of subverting the democratic process in allied countries. Again and again, it is stressed that purchasing countries will make much money from contracts related to construction. Of course, it can’t be true that every country will get out of the F-35 more than it puts in.

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Scott Taylor is upset about an op-ed on the merits of the F-35 Lightning jet fighter in the Ottawa Citizen a couple of weeks ago which failed to disclose that one co-author was a former Lockheed executive (and therefore that he would seem to have a financial conflict of interest which the paper failed to disclose). It’s true — but at the same time, and Impolitical, and the Rideau Institute (which also complained about the matter) missed an even more important connection. Both authors, retired generals Angus Watt and Paul Manson, now have positions at the Conference of Defense Associations, a military lobby group which is co-funded by the Department of National Defence.

Interestingly, our society requires that lobbyists be registered, corporations publish truthful (and audited) financial statements, and scientists disclose conflicts of interest in their articles (at least in some disciplines). It does not require politicians to publish truthful statements, nor does it require advocacy groups to declare their (or rather their donors’) financial stakes in the issues they advocate on. These two holes are shamelessly exploited by one organization after another, and I have discussed it in a number of recent posts, relating to Bell Canada and the CRTC metered billing ruling, and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce saying businesses should have lower taxes. But the problem in this case is even more serious. It’s what Dwight Eisenhower once referred to as the “military-industrial complex.”

Canadians are not particularly familiar with this lingo. The Canadian military is far smaller than its American counterpart, and the Canadian defense industry is even smaller, proportionately. Most major acquisitions come from American companies, with a minority of the work done here in Canada. But we’re also lurching, one dishonest step at a time, toward the largest acquisition in our country’s history, the multi-billion-dollar F-35 Lightning II fighter jet. So it’s time to take a look at this corner of the federal political arena — and especially towards a pro-fighter jet lobby group that not only lobbies but is paid by the Department of National Defence.

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