The Sixth Estate

In one recent discussion of the Ottawa lobbying industry, I noted that political access is a commodity that is peddled seamlessly across party lines. However, it’s important to know that there is another important dimension: contacts between industry and the bureaucracy. Some wealthy purchasers of government influence take this tack, whereas the firm I looked at — Earnscliffe — is geared towards political party coverage. Sometimes you want to talk with other parts of government.

CFN Consultants, for instance, specializes in providing access to military bureaucrats. That’s something of interest to their list of clients, which is flush with defence contractors like Lockheed Martin (maker of the controversial F-35 jet fighter), General Dynamics (our current CF-18 Hornet fighter, amongst other deadly products), Norwegian missile producer and F-35 subcontractor Kongsberg, Swedish air giant Saab, German tank company Rheinmetall, helicopter maker Sikorsky, American military contractor Raytheon, and SNC Lavalin, friends of soon-to-be-former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi.

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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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