Hooooo boy.

It’s times like this that I wish my former blogmate Mark Collins was still here because while the F-35 fiasco is well above my pay grade, he’s been dubious of the entire procurement since day one. And while I have to admit that I don’t know enough about fifth generation fighter jet technology to produce more than a few crudely drawn words on a cocktail napkin, it doesn’t take much expertise to realize the defence department just stepped into a Jurassic Park-sized deposit of dino waste.

I’ll be the first to admit it’s rather confusing. I mean, the NDP are asking for defence minister Peter MacKay to resign for not knowing what he should have known, unless in fact he did know, which is much worse, though he claims he absolutely didn’t. Or as one Macleans magazine pundit put it, if a massive abuse of procedure and accountability falls in the forest, but no one is named, blamed and shamed as the culprit, did it ever really happen?

Clearly, somebody, somewhere in the government is due to take a very short walk off a long pier. Do you fire the military commanders who clearly did everything they possibly could to acquire the F-35s without undergoing proper procurement procedures and then fabricating a list of things they needed in a fighter jet so that the list dovetailed nicely with the specs for the F-35?

Or do you fire the people in the defence department who didn’t tell their superiors about the impending mountain of aforementioned dino doo doo about to fall on their heads? Or do you expect the defence minister to accept Thomas Mulcair’s suggestion that the loonie stops at the minister’s desk, and offer his resignation so that Stephen Harper can shuffle him some place else?

Or do you turf Julian Fantino, the man who is currently backing away from the spotlight as quickly and unsubtly as a man wearing orange at a St.Patty’s Day parade? Please don’t look at me, I just work here. One gets the sense, however, as one reads through older news articles quoting Fantino, that the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, and the language of the minister for military procurement had been evolving from certainty about the necessity of F-35s to one very much ambiguous that they might be jets at all, and not flying ponies or something.

The bad news is the Auditor-General’s report puts a giant cannon-sized hole in the F-35 procurement and its budget. The bad news is that the procurement appears to be manipulated to ensure a sole-sourced, untendered contract with Lockheed Martin which has or has not been signed, depending on which part of the government you ask at a certain part of the day.

The bad news is that the defence minister and the procurement minister had no idea about any of this, depending on which part of their mouths you believe when they’re speaking. The bad news is that the defence department itself told the House of Commons that cost data provided by US authorities had been validated by US experts and partner countries, which was not accurate at the time.

Ok, that’s all the bad news. Well, probably not, but it’s probably enough for now. On to the not-so-bad news. The Conservative government, while deservingly drowning in its own arrogance for shouting down those who suggested the whole deal was rotten from the start, is not really complicit in this scandal so much as it is woefully negligent. At the very least they seem to be taking some responsibility now, have frozen spending on the program, spanked the defence department, and handed oversight over to a committee of deputy ministers.

Is it at all ironic that the man whom was hired as part of transparency and accountability legislation brought in by the Conservative government was the one who foreshadowed all of this long ago by saying the government’s numbers on this contract were wrong? And does it make it even more ironic that this same man who estimated the costs were nearly $10 billion greater than the government was saying gets by on a departmental budget of $1.8 million? Perhaps the feds should cut Kevin Page’s budget to $49 and give him coupons to Tim Hortons so he won’t cause so much trouble in the future.

The only actual good news I can pull from all this is that the money for these jets hasn’t yet been wasted, which saves Harper his Airbus A320 moment in power. Which is sort of like finding a wooden plank to float on after stepping off the Titanic. And as Harper is to Rose, who will play the role of Jack, slipping quietly into the deep blue sea?

By now many people are likely aware of the comments made by NDP leadership hopeful Thomas Mulcair about his pride in being a dual French and Canadian citizen, mainly because of the ensuing comments from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In his most classically irreverent “just visiting” manner possible, Harper indiscreetly took a shot at Mulcair by stating his Canadianness greatly exceeds that of Mulcair’s.

“Just to be clear, these cases have come up in the past, and obviously it’s for Mr. Mulcair to use his political judgment in this case. In my case, as I say, I’m very clear. I’m a Canadian and only a Canadian.”

On the surface it might seem innocent enough. He was asked a question by the media, who are wont to stir the pot whenever the opportunity arises, and the Conservative leader obliged to take the spoon and furiously stir. But as we’ve learned over the years that the highly intelligent Harper has been a politician in this country, nothing he says or does can really be described as innocent.

This is a man for whom the word “relax” has no meaning. Scarcely a year since winning a majority government in Ottawa, the Conservatives have been busy running attack ads on enemies who are largely powerless, frustrating them in the House of the Commons at every opportunity, and continuing to the fundraise, presumably in the hopes that when the next election comes along they can destroy all traces of political opposition in Canada.

Harper is a shrewd and remarkable man, for he’s able to play on divisive issues with unparalleled talent. He deftly turned aside support for Michael Ignatieff by preying on issues largely irrelevant to his competence. He suggested Ignatieff was too aloof, an erudite intellectual taken to long absences from Canada, a country he could hardly understand or have any love for.

And it worked, in part because it did bother Canadians to think that Ignatieff had spent so many years outside of Canada. There was a genuine agreement that he had returned to Canada not for public service, but to lead the country. While some would rightly say that’s a laudable thing, others would say it was presumptuous and elitist.

But let’s not lose sight of the issue here. Harper criticizes a great deal of things in Canada that he makes no real attempt to change. The best example of this might be the Senate. But he does this purely for political gain. So when he was asked for his opinion on Mulcair, realizing the man could become the next NDP leader presented the irresistible chance to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of Canadians, and the groundwork for a smear campaign at a later date.

Having said that, Harper doesn’t say or do something unless he’s relatively convinced it’s going to resonate with Canadians. And to tell truth, the fact Canada has dual citizenship allowances is something that bothers a lot of people. Note that Harper would never seek to challenge the law itself, removing the right to hold two citizenships, since that doesn’t serve his political aims.

At the heart of every citizen of a country is a patriot, and we like to believe we love our country. Those Canadians who immigrated here from other countries were never forced to give up their old loyalties and swear allegiance to one land. Some believe that’s a strength, but I think many people, the people who might vote for Stephen Harper, find it a little bothersome. Not so much for the ordinary citizen, since our country is made up of many naturalized citizens, but for those who would lead us and speak for us.

There’s a reason that a rule exists that the President of the United States must be born on American soil to serve in office. It’s because people believe that loyalties can be divided, particularly if a person was born and grew up in another country. The idea that the leader serves only one people is a comforting one.

But even that isn’t the point of the Harper-Mulcair milieu. Stephen Harper isn’t Canadian by choice as he suggests. He was born here, just as I was, and so naturally he’s a Canadian and only a Canadian. What else could he possibly be? It’s meaningless for Harper to state an obvious fact. It would be more impressive if he had been born in Kenya and then renounced his Kenyan citizenship and stated his one true loyalty is Canada.

For Mulcair, there’s no genuine fear that his loyalties are divided. The term “Canadian of convenience” doesn’t apply to him. It applies to those citizens who might live abroad, but still return to Canada once in a while to keep their affairs in order, perhaps take advantage of health care or some other universal service. Or the ones who become Canadian suddenly when their country is besieged by war or natural disaster. Then they become Canadians in a hurry.

If anything, Mulcair is a Frenchman of convenience, becoming a dual citizen for the same reason many Canadians do. They keep some of the perks and benefits of membership. Hey, if you could get a free passport to the United Kingdom, wouldn’t you take one?

In the end, both politicians were just playing politics. Mulcair was appealing to his multicultural NDP base, while Harper was appealing to his. And citizens, dual citizens or otherwise shouldn’t really care one way or another.

The CBC’s Brian Stewart has an introspective piece about Canada’s role in Afghanistan, and although we haven’t officially left the country yet, it’s a post-mortem of sorts. I don’t have a problem with much of his article, including his commentary about the lack of communication about the real war in Afghanistan, the problems within the government and the bureaucracy, and the lack of real understanding about the culture and history of the country.

I’m also inclined to be more lenient on Stewart than I would a lot of CBC journalists, since he made the same media familiarization tour I did, directly before me, which means a great deal more than simply writing about it from Ottawa. Stewart is also fair in his dispersal of the blame of mission failure on both the Harper and Martin governments, particularly the latter, who made decisions about Afghanistan quietly and before the Canadian public’s attention was really on the mission.

Indeed, Martin carries much of the failure for Canada’s miscommunication on the mission, including but not limited to the dreadful handling of the detainee agreement with the Afghan government. Originally drafted by Martin’s government with General Rick Hillier, it was the lack of oversight within the arrangement that led to the catastrophic media coverage, which in turn sapped all vim and vigour for the mission. The Harper government hurriedly overhauled the agreement in 2007, but also did so quietly and in secret, leading to the false appearance of torture complicity and cover-up.

And yet, what Stewart’s article is really missing is a fair appraisal of his own employer’s role in destroying the country’s morale, when from 2008 through to 2010 it wrote innumerable articles hinting at, digging for, and alleging the Canadian military was playing a complicit or even direct role in torturing Afghans. The tenacity with which the CBC attacked this issue was unparalleled by any other media source, releasing documents like it was some kind of publicly funded WikiLeaks, heedless to the implications of its allegations.

The media assault on the Canadian Forces and the Harper government led to a fairly predictable and blatant blackout on the issue, which Stewart refers to as “cabinet secrecy.” This is surely unsurprising. When the CBC diverted attention from reporting on the war itself and invested the tremendous weight of its resources into broadcasting the great torture scandal, it closed any door it might have had on open and transparent leadership.

And the more the media attacked the Harper government on the issue, the less inclined it seemed to want to fight the political battle that the predatory and purely hypocritical Liberals and NDP were happily exploiting. It could be argued that the CBC’s wanton sabotage of the moral integrity of the Afghan mission led to the opposition being forced to cast itself as the official voice for the “torture-rendition-war crimes” movement, which led to the capitulation of the Harper government on this political issue.

The odious hypocrisy of the NDP in the Afghanistan mission could not be more apparent or more collusive with the CBC either. The same people who called for the open release of all and any information related to the mission in Afghanistan in the hopes it could politically destroy the Harper government, have protected the CBC in its refusal to release documents to other media who have made freedom of information requests. I do not go as far as Sun Media in referring to it as a state broadcaster, but it’s certainly a public company that has no right, no excuse not to release any and all documents to us, the taxpaying shareholders.

The NDP never had a dog in the Afghan fight anyway. Jack Layton suggested we simply make peace with the Taliban from the first day and after successfully helping to self-sabotage Canada’s effectiveness in its mission, took credit when the NATO leadership began murmuring about a potential peace deal with the terrorist organization. This is surely like Brutus casting the last, lazy stab wound into a dying Caesar.

It’s preposterous for Stewart to say that Harper fed the Canadian public as little information for “reasons still unknown.” The obvious answer is that the media vultures, led by the CBC itself, was less interested in the war itself and more sniffing for any blood in the water at all that might lead to a political feeding frenzy. This led to the PMO clamming up on the mission, which saddened both opponents and proponents of the mission there, but the PMO can hardly be blamed for not wanting to aid and abet its own destruction.

There are many lessons to be learned about the Afghan mission, but we would be remiss to ignore the media’s role in distorting the importance of events there. And though torture has surely taken place in Afghanistan just as ubiquitously as it happens elsewhere in the region, Canada did not go to Kandahar to rid the country of torture. We went there to provide security to the people that they would otherwise not be able to receive on their own.

Photograph by: Chung Chow, Delta Optimist

The BC Conservatives have gone nearly two years without a leader, but even before their new one has been anointed he’s almost become damaged goods. John Cummins, a 69-year-old former Reformicon, left his job as federal Conservative MP in order to revitalize the politically irrelevant provincial Conservative Party in B.C. But he was forced to apologize Sunday for controversial remarks he made about homosexuality on radio that left many people aghast.

Cummins, who will be sworn in as party leader on May 28, suggested during a CFAX radio interview last week that sexual orientation is a choice that does not require specific protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act.

“I’m not a scientist [but] some of the research tells me that there’s more of an indication that that’s a choice issue,” he said, adding that he voted against adding sexual orientation protection for homosexuals during his time as a federal MP.

The statement he released yesterday not only backtracked from the suggestion homosexuality is a choice, it took an about-face:

“My comments on CFAX radio this past Wednesday may have been misinterpreted and may have offended some. I apologize for that. To clarify, my use of the word “choice” was unfortunate, because it confused the meaning of my statement, which was that I believe anyone can live their life in the way they want.”

Before I continue, I just have to say that I agree, in general, that there doesn’t doesn’t need to be specific protection for homosexuals under the CHRA. I think the laws are sufficient and clear enough, and have been since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was implemented, to protect anybody from every walk in society. When Cummins says everyone should be given the same opportunities and protections, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, I’m in agreement.

It’s difficult, however, to infer that Cummins meant anything other than what he said in the first instance, that he actually believes homosexuality is a sexual preference. It’s even worse that Cummins made this error during a critical juncture when the people of B.C. are just beginning to learn about the political party and its new leader.

It’s also one thing to apologize for the mistake, but to then suggest he actually meant that sexual freedom is a choice, not orientation, reeks of damage control PR. It’s fairly clear what he meant when he said what he said, and the unfortunate thing about that is the defunct Reform party continues to make mainstream Canada uncomfortable.

That’s why Stephen Harper had to unite the federal elements of the rightwing movement in Canada, mainstream the social issues into a more liberal focus, and extinguish any socially conservative agenda. Strangely, it was the fiscal confidence Canadians have in Harper that gave him his majority, but the fact he didn’t scare Canadians with socially conservative issues also played a part.

It isn’t even that Cummins’s comments are socially conservative either, as the mentality that homosexuality is a choice is a fringe opinion even within the conservative movement itself. For evidence of this one need look no farther than the revulsion and shock among supporters of the party in the province.

This is the last thing the party needs as it attempts to present itself as a serious mainstream alternative to BC Liberal members who don’t like their new leader Christy Clark.

Photo: Peter Hilz

I don’t usually read the ravings of Warren Kinsella that QMI, with baffling determination, continues to syndicate throughout their collection of right-leaning news agencies. Although he is occasionally prone to making sense, or at least as often as a stopped clock tells the right time, the number of times he is wrong usually overwhelms these fleeting moments of lucidity.

His latest rant is aimed at the Harper Government for allowing a “Muslim-hating white supremacist” into Canada while barring “kooky” George Galloway. For those who don’t start drinking hard liquor at 9 o’clock in the morning, you’re forgiven for not immediately recognizing he means Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a man who received 1.4 million votes and 15.5 per cent of the popular vote in the 2010 elections. Somebody had better let the Netherlands know they’re infected with white supremacists.

Kinsella’s intellectual dishonesty is just so frankly absurd it belongs in the same dustbin of propaganda peddled by Heather Mallick and her equally appalling lies in the U.K. Guardian. The latter newspaper having a better excuse for allowing such drooling brain damage on its pages since at least one ocean separates it from Canada.

Wilders has a small contingent of followers here in Canada, but it’s certainly not as large as the Intifada-supporting free-Palestine screaming Galloway lovers who cried and moaned when the Canadian government wouldn’t allow him into the country on his first try. That bothers Kinsella, too, not because Galloway was denied entry, but because Wilders wasn’t.

People like Kinsella like comfortably numb expressions of free speech that are generally consistent with the popular views of the day. It makes political discourse so much more agreeable and less prone to the necessity of scouring bathroom walls for closet Nazis.

It’s easy to call Wilders an Islamaphobe, just as it’s easy to call people racists for criticizing the sacred cow of multiculturalism. And Kinsella can call him that if he wishes, which is his right as a free citizen. If only the man could see the irony of complaining about Wilders speaking at a taxpayer-funded building while Canadians are force-fed the opposite views on the taxpayer-funded CBC on a per-minute basis. But he is either unable, or unwilling.

A weak attempt at profundity to conclude his article by quoting Orwell’s Stalinist allegory of Animal Farm notwithstanding, this isn’t about Wilders being welcome in Canada and Galloway not being welcome. It’s about the fact that liberals seem to think that free speech is contingent upon that which makes people feel comfortable or is agreeable with what the majority of reasonably thinking people believe.

But the realm of public opinion an ever-shifting and changing dynamic and often minority unpopular opinions become held by the majority through a gradual evaluation of those views. The only reason Canadians are unlikely to ever galvanize around Wilders is that, unlike the European countries currently electing politicians like Wilders, we don’t have a unifying homogeneous identity whose culture is threatened by a pervasively hostile influence.

I’m not sure what Kinsella’s point winds up being anyway, since he concludes Wilders didn’t win any new supporters except those among the Harper Government he believes already sing his praises. Yet in immigration policy terms, the Conservatives are responsible for allowing the largest number of Muslims into the country in Canadian history. So, it would appear the article is little more than a smear by association, topped off with the sort of hyperbole that belongs in a speech about soldiers, with guns, in our cities. I’m not kidding.

John Ivison is an often underrated political columnist who really hits the nail on the head every once in a while. His Saturday column on Ignatieff needing to stop talking about Ignatieff is one perfect example of his perceptive proficiencies.

As every political poll, survey and focus group has told him, Michael Ignatieff has failed miserably to build his image and brand as successfully as Stephen Harper. In fact, he’s failed so badly that only fringe party leader Elizabeth May has a less alluring leadership brand.

And of all the things that have hampered Ignatieff, nothing has been so pronounced as his expatriate days when Canada was little more than a vacation home to return to and renew his membership card. As Ivison writes, “it reminds voters that here is a man who is not like them,” in any way shape or form. Regardless of how many times the man tries to explain it in soft light video with archival footage of Harvard, he only serves to further validate the “just visiting” charge from the Conservatives.

But that’s the fault of the Liberal war room. They don’t seem to be able to perceive that the greatest asset of the Liberal leader isn’t what he provides, but what he doesn’t provide: the cult of personality that Stephen Harper has built around himself.

The Liberals are never going to match Ignatieff with Harper in some political gladitorial showdown, as the prime minister is going to win that match every single time. It isn’t about intelligence or experience or wisdom. Some people just “have it” and with Ignatieff, baby, you don’t have it.

What they’re missing, however, is the chance to juxtapose the Liberal brand as precisely the opposite to what many Canadians have come to dislike and distrust about the Conservatives. Instead of promoting the Liberal leader as the central brand, focus on branding the political party as a group of people all working equally toward some common goal.

Instead of the centralizing power of the Conservatives where all political messages have to be filtered through the PMO and Party HQ, where party candidates and workers have to be vetted for common media interviews, the Liberals could focus on being what the Conservatives are not.

The contrast could be remarkable if done properly. Ignatieff could step back and say that it isn’t about him, it’s about Canada and the kind of vision all 308 candidates have for a Liberal vision of the country. The Liberal brand is obviously enduring enough that it can hold a quarter of the electoral loyalty, despite having a weak leader for much of the past half decade.

Of course, that will never happen. Because part of the reason the Conservative strategy works is that it’s true. Ignatieff didn’t come back to Canada to stand out of the spotlight and campaign for a better Canada on ideas alone. He came back to be coronated as the returning monarch of Canada by virtue of his superior human qualities.

And even if that can’t be articulated on a perfectly logical plane of thought, it is the gnawing instinct of mistrust that is what most likely provides the negative feedback loop the Liberals are receiving in polls.

The exclusion of two apparent Liberal party supporters from a Conservative campaign event in London, Ontario is being blamed on a sinister plot by the PMO to screen out opposition supporters. The story has even led Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to directly accuse Stephen Harper of demanding more rigorous background checks on people showing up at his campaign events than advisers he hires to work for him.

Ignatieff went on to tell reporters during a stop in Newfoundland that “you are in a very un-Canadian place” when people get barred from public meetings for being friends with him on Facebook. One of the women who said she was barred from the event had to pre-register for the rally and that’s how the Conservatives screened her out.

First off, it’s an obvious bit of turnabout being fair play for Ignatieff, who is taking the opportunity to mock Stephen Harper for his party’s own campaign against Ignatieff’s own allegiance to Canada. And it’s clear that he’s exploiting the situation to create his own media spotlight, happily granted by the mainstream press.

Second, it seems to be taken for granted that this was deliberate, and further indicative of the sort of contempt for democratic practices that the Conservatives have displayed in this country’s most hallowed institutions. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

But does it seem logical, or even practical, to screen every person who pre-registers for a campaign event, and then exclude them if they’re seen to belong to another party? Wouldn’t it seem more likely that the party would be less interested in the decided Conservative voters who will do little more than wave banners, and more interested in the kind of people who might be pursued to abandon Ignatieff and add a vote for the Conservatives?

Lost in the narrative of this whole exclusion story is the fact the Conservatives are on a campaign to win over the soft Liberal support that will grant them the majority government they so desperately covet. The idea that Stephen Harper is ordering the PMO to draw up lists of political enemies to exclude them from campaign rallies is about as ridiculous as it gets.

And if these women were excluded because of the Quixotic decision of one or more Conservative staffers, then it seems a little overdone to continue belabouring the point long after the party has issued a statement of apology and indicated it was a mistake. Assigning motives from the highest tiers of power to exclude potential voters from rallies is pretty much the textbook definition of Harper derangement syndrome.

Of course there is another, albeit equally implausible, version of events to this story. As ridiculous as it is to suspect the prime minister of trying to exclude voters from a campaign rally designed to gain more voters, is it at all possible the Liberal party hired young students to go to these rallies in order to make the claim they were denied entry?

I mean, is it at all possible that given the political fodder that has been made over the claims of two people in the entire country of Canada, that a calculation was made somewhere in Liberal party headquarters to further the conspiratorial theories that Stephen Harper’s anti-democratic government is out to be mean and nasty to young, innocent students?

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No. But neither is the sort of claims that are being given serious consideration by people who pretend to have serious minds in organizations that pretend to be serious dispensers of news.

The current selection of ideas being proposed by the usual faces in Ottawa has to be among the most deluded I’ve heard in quite some time. The only party that appears to be displaying any fiscal common sense is the Conservatives, and that’s only because they’re not going to open the floodgates again until 2015.

It’s positively bizarre, actually, to listen to the Conservative proposals for the 2011 election, since they all take place in 2015, or the year that Canada’s deficit will magically be balanced. From the announcements he’s made, one would think Stephen Harper was actually running in a different time period than the others. A $500 fitness tax credit and income-splitting are just two of the big ticket items voters can expect a half decade from now.

Whatever spending promises have been made by the Conservatives, however, they pale in comparison to those made by the “Nanny State Professor”, with $8 billion in big-ticket social spending over the next two years. And they’ll somehow be paid for without raising income taxes (which isn’t exactly true, since they plan to raise corporate rates back up to 18 per cent).

The Liberal plan is big on the party’s attempt to corral the family vote from the Conservatives, adding $8 billion in new spending. $1 billion would go toward Registered Education Savings Plans (which personally appeals to a parent like myself, since my RESP isn’t tax-deductible while RSPs are), $1.2 billion would go to daycare, $700 million to better GICs and $400 million to energy retrofits (which is a bit of a policy lift from the Conservatives).

To say the Liberal budget is unaffordable is an understatement, although this seems remarkably similar to the same sort of pie-in-the-sky promises made by the Ontario Liberals when Dalton McGuinty reached out to put a chicken in every pot that was hard done by the Harris era.

It would be one thing if we were running large surpluses for Ignatieff to make these kinds of spending promises, but during a deficit it is frankly irresponsible. The sheer enormity of it all suggests the platform is aimed more at election racketeering than good policy-making. The last thing we need are more social programs that can be expected to balloon in cost over the next decade.

As for Jack Layton, he’s mostly out-to-lunch as usual. He’d create a jobs program that would be funded by returning the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent, proving once again that socialists don’t understand the fundamentals of economics.

There is one aspect of the NDP spending platform that deserves a closer look. His $103 million promise to improve benefits for military veterans is admirable, and certainly affordable when compared to the fact the Conservative government is willing to spend $100 million on the commemoration of the war of 1812.

Not that Layton is really in this two-horse race. Nor is Ignatieff, if you look at the polls lately. But Harper is taking some deserved heat for saying today that he wouldn’t meet the Liberal leader in a man-to-man showdown in front of the cameras (though it has been pointed out that Sun TV is willing to accommodate when they launch in late April), giving CBC reporter Terry Milewski the opportunity to call him a chicken to his face.

The Conservatives are also constrained by the fact that they have said on the record they won’t change their budget, so the amount of vote-buying they can manage is limited to things that extend beyond the current budget projections, hence the reason for their bizarre tax promises in 2015.

Perhaps the best thing to hope for is a majority government, not because I believe the Conservatives deserve one, but because it would test once and for all the argument that the government’s fiscal credibility has been compromised by the demands of the opposition. That, and the fact we wouldn’t have to hear about unaffordable universal programs until sometime in 2015.

Photo credit: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press

I have a feeling that Friday evening went down something like this. Michael Ignatieff got back to Liberal Party headquarters after standing in front of the media and equivocating about a coalition and was quite literally yelled at for being the smartest idiot in Canada.

Perhaps realizing the political damage of his faux pas, Ignatieff got up before the media on Saturday morning and made clear that he wouldn’t be forming a coalition should an election restore us to the same debilitating status quo of the past seven years. But it was too late.

The coalition is on the table now, and the Conservatives will use it to their utmost advantage. In the chess game of politics, Ignatieff left a pawn hanging and the Conservatives have happily gobbled it up to enjoy a material advantage.

That isn’t to say that Ignatieff doesn’t want the Liberals to win a minority government of their own, as unlikely as such a prospect might be at this moment. But I think it’s safe to say that Friday’s press conference told us everything we really needed to know about the possibility of a backup plan if the election goes anything like the polls are currently indicating.

Curiously, the talk in the media today has nothing to do with the Ignatieff coalition gaffe, but an obscure moment in the ancient history of Canadian politics, back when the Liberals were in power and Stephen Harper seemed open to overthrowing the Liberals with a power-sharing agreement.

The discussion surrounding Harper’s own “coalition of 2004″ is dominating the journalist gossip stream, as though something Harper considered seven years ago has any relevance to what he believes today. Actually, one would be hard-pressed to find some relevance between what Harper said in October 2008 and what he believes today.

Seven years is a lifetime in politics. What Stephen Harper, or anybody else for that matter, wanted to do in 2004 has nothing whatsoever to do with the present political situation. Why, seven years ago we had an entirely different political makeup in Ottawa. The Liberals were on the wane of a decade-long power-drunk majority that had sapped the enthusiasm of Canadians. The Conservatives were a new amalgamation of formerly fractured elements of rightwing movements and political parties. Michael Ignatieff was a professor at Harvard University.

The truth is that whatever Stephen Harper was considering in 2004 has little to do with the present-day reality of Ignatieff’s “Plan B” coalition with the NDP and Bloc Quebecois. And it might sound like so much Conservative war room propaganda, had it not been for Ignatieff’s press conference slip-up.

There are those who get angry at the maligning of the idea of cooperation, saying that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a coalition in a parliamentary democracy, and that is precisely what Harper was aiming at in 2004. But this is a distortion of the facts.

The only political parties that ever agreed in writing to a coalition involving a separatist party is the NDP and Liberals, and Michael Ignatieff’s signature exists on that document. And even ignoring the unpleasantness of aligning with a separatist party in a greedy bid for power, there’s the fact that such an alliance presented a de facto majority against the Conservatives, who had actually won the most votes of any other single party. In most coalition governments — but certainly not all — the party with the most votes aligns with another from the opposition.

The reason the Conservatives can’t do that is they are already a coalition government, though nobody seems to recognize that. The party is made up of broad elements of social and fiscal conservatives, former Reformers, Alliance Party and Progressive Conservatives. The big tent party was forced to come together in order to avoid the problem faced by the current crop of leftwing political parties all striving for a piece of the 65 per cent of Canada that doesn’t vote Conservative.

Since the country is always likely to be divided between the unified right and the majority of left-leaning voters, there are only two logical options. One is a similar amalgamation of the political left into one party that can bridge the numerous differences present in the NDP, Green, Liberal and even Bloc Quebecois voters. The other is simply the coalition, which seems the most likely given the fact the writ has been dropped yet again.

The intentions of the Conservatives in 2004 remains a bit historically ambiguous, and though I’m sure it’s a fun talking point today for some people, it remains irrelevant. There is only one coalition of any importance, and it’s the one that Ignatieff seems destined to form after the Liberals lose yet another election to a minority Conservative government.

You might have seen this little blurb in the Toronto Star about Tommy Douglas’s daughter claiming that Stephen Harper is eroding the health care system. She reportedly said that while Harper would never admit he’s against the system, the evidence shows that the system is “being starved to death.”

First of all, let’s get some facts straight on this story. Total spending on health care in Canada reached roughly $191.6 billion in 2010, up by $9.5 billion (5.2 per cent) from 2009, according the Canadian Institute for Health Information. This represented a year-over-year increase of $216 per Canadian, bringing total health expenditure per capita to an estimated $5,614. As recently as 2008, Canada was fifth in the OECD for health care spending per capita.

When Tommy Douglas’s vision of Medicare was brought into being in 1962 by Woodrow Lloyd, the federal government offered a plan to fund 50 per cent of hospital costs. By 1966 that became a 50-50 arrangement between the federal government and the provinces. Since that time, and most notably during the Liberal majority governments during the 90s, health care transfer payments has dropped to about 16 per cent.

Spending as a per cent of GDP increased most between 1975 and 1992, rising from seven to 10 per cent in that time. Liberal cutbacks and changes to provincial transfer payments, particularly with the creation of the confusing Canada Health and Social Transfer system in 1996, resulted in a decline in spending.

Put into historical perspective, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in 1975 spent $12.2 billion on health care, or roughly $527 per person. In Brian Mulroney’s second year in office that number had increased to $49.8 billion ($1,541.70). At the Liberal handover of power in 2005, total health care spending was $140 billion ($4,333.30). So in just four years the Harper government has increased year-over-year spending by $10.32 billion, or an additional $1,280.70 for every man, woman and child in Canada.

I’m far from one to defend Stephen Harper’s spending habits, but it would seem to me that 27 per cent increase to the total health care spending in Canada over five years is a rather significant improvement, and far from being “starved to death.” Starving the system would have been to increase spending by a nominal increase in the inflationary adjustments.

Let’s not forget that the Canada Health Act is very clear in keeping health care a provincial jurisdiction. How the provinces manage their money is entirely up to the financial responsibility of the provincial leadership at the time. In 2007, the largest cost of health care spending was in hospital costs, eating 28.6 per cent of the whole; physician salaries took up 13.1 per cent; and prescription drugs accounted for 16.5 per cent.

According to the 2010 federal budget, $24.8 billion went to the provinces in the form of health transfer payments, second only to social security. An additional $2.9 billion was transferred in provincial program expenses. (It might be worthy to note that Canada spent $20.9 billion on national defence).

Health care spending accounts for between 37 per cent to 50 per cent of provincial budgets now, and that number continues to rise as the provinces depend on larger transfer payments from Ottawa. The logical solution, then, would be to amend the Canada Health Act to allow for a more flexible delivery of health care at the provincial level and remove the dependence on the federal government to control the problem.