Party of One (19 page)

The Harper government was apparently going to hit the “reset” button and begin the process all over again in the proper way— slinking away in political bedroom slippers from any responsibility for the brewing procurement fiasco and the cover-up. Canadians would finally find out the real costs of putting the maple leaf on Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter, and program funds would be frozen until they did—or such was the latest messaging from the political wizards in the Land of Oz.

Besides the historical revisionism on the F-35 program, the government’s damage control had a second feature. The prime minister, his minister of defence, and senior bureaucrats at the DND moved heaven and earth to turn the F-35 affair into a difference of opinion on accounting methods, an honest disagreement between the government and the auditor general over interpreting the rules—the same defence the Conservatives resorted to when they were caught cheating on election expenses in the “in-and-out” scandal.

It was the lowest point in the F-35’s ongoing saga of deceit. The obligation to supply the “full life-cycle cost estimates” was not an optional requirement. It was and is a central plank of Treasury Board guidelines. It is also a well-known and accepted principle of cost-estimating inside the DND. Neither the military nor the Harper government abided by the rules of the Treasury Board, or of the Department of National Defence itself, which had agreed in writing with a previous auditor general that full life-cycle costs would and should be factored into the department’s
procurement process. After all, that’s how it worked in every other NATO country. As former auditor general Sheila Fraser, the federal bureaucrat most trusted by Canadians during her tenure, told me, “The truth is, this mess was self-inflicted. All the policy and systems were there. They just weren’t respected. It’s a bit like the sponsorship scandal.”

Despite the well-established rules, neither the government nor Peter MacKay’s department initially included “operational costs” in their public estimates. When they finally did, they shortened the base number of years in service for the aircraft to reduce, at least optically, the actual costs. In the United States, the F-35 was supposed to take care of the military’s needs for fifty-five years. The Harper government worked out its operational cost numbers for the JSF acquisition based on twenty years of service.

Hopelessly entangled in a web of contradiction and conniving, the government shunted the F-35 issue into a fog of shifting bureaucratic responsibilities, independent outside audits, expert panels, seven-point plans, and token questionnaires to other companies in the fighter-jet business. Soon, some in the media were talking about the F-35 being cancelled and about competition for Canada’s new jet heating up. Meanwhile, as the belated audits ordered by Stephen Harper came in, the government’s numberfudging became a national embarrassment.

According to accounting firm KPMG, the cost of the F-35 was $45.8 billion over forty-two years—not even in the same postal zone as the government’s $15-billion figure. As for the PM’s original claim that the aircraft would cost Canada $70 million to $75 million apiece, the accounting firm Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton reported in August 2013 that the number was closer to $95 million. But according to a DND internal report obtained by the
Hill Times
, the worst-case scenario was that the cost for the F-35 fleet could top $70 billion. It was clear why the PM had
said that he didn’t want to get into a long debate on the numbers for the F-35 during the 2011 election: he was out to lunch—and dinner—on the facts.

But there was one thing the government’s ever-whirring public relations machine—a tool calibrated for optics rather than accuracy—couldn’t hide: despite a freeze on F-35 program spending, the DND would still not be going to a competitive bidding process to replace the aging F-18s—the only course correction that could turn a procurement travesty into a rational process. Doomed Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff ’s comment during the 2011 election was true: the program was a sham, the government’s numbers were false, and the whole thing should have been cancelled in favour of the established process for making such huge acquisitions.

For self-styled masters of financial management and champions of transparency, the Harper government received a bleak report card. The government had decided to make the most expensive military acquisition in Canadian history without a competitive bidding process, had misled an officer of Parliament, and had concealed the true cost of the F-35 program from Canadians during an election. On top of that, a federal minister, Peter MacKay, walked away from his ministerial responsibility with barely a blink, enjoying the full support of a complicit prime minister. Now that the facts were at last in plain sight, the F-35 fiasco was not so much about the Harper government anymore, but about the people of Canada. Were they watching? Had they noticed? Did they care? The Harper government wasn’t sure. It is unlikely a decision about the F-35s will be made before the 2015 election.

“It is about whether ministers speak for their departments, or can disown them when it suits them,” columnist Andrew Coyne wrote in the
National Post
. “And it is about whether we, as citizens, are prepared to pay attention, and hold people in power to account when they lie to us.”

While the country may have been dazzled into indifference or confusion over the true costs of the F-35, one group of Canadians stood up firmly against the government’s attempt to invent the facts. Canada’s scientists publicly opposed Stephen Harper’s attempt to muzzle them and to dismiss independent information that might form an obstacle to the government’s agenda.

seven

THE DEATH OF EVIDENCE

I
t was a perfect July day. Tourists milled around Confederation Flame in front of the Parliament buildings, snapping each other’s pictures and tilting their faces upward to take the sun. Office workers spread out picnic blankets on the wide lawns, oblivious to the seagulls patrolling overhead. The Peace Tower climbed into a cornflower sky. At its pinnacle, the Maple Leaf rippled in the breeze. It was a quintessentially Canadian moment in high summer in the nation’s capital.

And then they came into sight. They advanced west along Wellington Street like a sea of Halloween ghosts dressed in white. They filled the broad avenue with signs and banners still too far away to read. At first, the tourists on the Hill didn’t know what to make of the procession. But as the line of marchers wearing white lab coats reached the main gate to Parliament Hill, where an RCMP cruiser was parked broadside across the entrance, the spectators finally saw the coffin. Behind it, a banner read: “No
Science, No Evidence, No Truth, No Democracy.” The pallbearers were preceded by a hooded figure in black holding a scythe across its chest. With a deft change in costume, the figure transformed itself into a young woman in a black dress and dark glasses; the Grim Reaper had become the grieving widow. There had been a death in the national family: they called it the Death of Evidence.

The event that triggered this theatrical protest by Canadian scientists, a profession not known for taking to the barricades over public policy, began two months earlier at Winnipeg’s Freshwater Institute. The regional director of science, Michelle Wheatley, had called an emergency meeting to deliver some bad news. The Harper government had decided to close the research facility at the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a system of fifty-eight lakes in northwestern Ontario, where some of the most important freshwater research in the world has been conducted.

Wheatley’s message was as bleak as the first road that was slashed into the remote site outside Kenora back in the winter of 1968. The ELA would be shut down by March 2013, and no further research would be permitted—even though that would mean the loss of invaluable scientific data from ongoing experiments that could not now be completed. It was hardly a theoretical problem. One group of university researchers was deeply involved in examining the environmental impact of silver nanoparticles, which, because they kill disease-causing bacteria, enjoy widespread use in everyday products such as toys and clothing. But engineered silver nanoparticles have also been found in waterways, where they can be toxic to ryegrass, algae, and fathead minnows.

When word of the closure came, the investigation of silver nanoparticles at the Experimental Lakes Area was well underway—financed, ironically, by an $800,000 research grant from the federal government. Gary Goodyear,
¹
the coy creationist Stephen Harper had chosen as his science and technology minister, was
dismissive. He advised the Trent University team to complete their research at another facility—even though it might mean losing a year of research. There was just one problem. No other whole-lake facility remotely like the ELA existed.

As for the seventeen scientists working at the ELA, they were told to clear out their personal belongings and remove their scientific gear from the labs at the remote site as soon as possible. If a new operator could not be found in the next ten months, the entire operation would be mothballed. In the long term, if no takers for the ELA came forward, the lake system would have to be “remediated”—put back into pristine condition at a cost to taxpayers of as much as $50 million.

Forty-four years of scientific accomplishment, much of it achieved under renowned Canadian freshwater scientist David Schindler, were coming to what the Harper government hoped would be a quiet end. Few Canadians knew that the ELA, a vast outdoor laboratory created out of a pristine lake system, was a scientific enterprise on the magnitude of the Hubble Telescope. Where else could scientists perform whole-lake experiments? Investigating subjects ranging from the deadly impact on freshwater of phosphorus in detergents to the effects of artificial estrogen on fish populations, the ELA had blazed a trail of scientific glory—which explains, perhaps, why the facility received the First Stockholm Water Prize and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.

Schindler and his fellow scientists also came up with irrefutable proof that industrial pollutants from the United States were killing Canadian lakes. Their evidence ultimately resulted in regulatory changes in the US to control atmospheric emissions from coal plants. It was a long journey from an American president’s statement that trees caused more pollution than cars, to the Acid Rain Treaty between Canada and the United States: the immense
gulf between Ronald Reagan’s credulity and the facts was bridged by ELA science.

The Metallicus Experiment at the ELA also produced remarkable data, establishing a link between atmospheric mercury deposits and mercury in fish—a deadly threat to human health. So why would any government want to close the facility, particularly when just three years before, Ottawa had spent a million dollars on a new fish lab and the local Conservative MP, Greg Rickford, had lauded the ELA as “extraordinary”? Now he was calling the facility “passé.” The excellence of the ELA’s research had not changed, just the Harper MP’s marching orders.

An official reason for the closure was on offer, but no one was buying it. It was left to an acting Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) regional director, David Burden, to supply the flapdoodle. In a letter classified as “Protected,” and sent on May 17, 2012, to federal scientists at the Freshwater Institute, Burden wrote that the decision “was part of the government’s efforts to reduce the deficit, aimed to modernize government, to make it easier for Canadians to deal with government, and to right-size the costs of operations and program delivery.”

This was worse than the usual departmental gibberish, coming as it did from a science ministry. The emptiness of the explanation was not lost on anyone, federal scientists least of all: the ELA had a meagre budget of $2 million a year. The Harper government spent nearly fifteen times that amount to commemorate the War of 1812, and twenty-five times as much beautifying the Muskoka riding of Treasury Board president Tony Clement. Apart from the private pleasures of patronage, there is no study, scientific or otherwise, establishing a public benefit from the proliferation of government-supplied gazebos in cottage country.

This was not about austerity; this was about information control and employer thuggishness—and the scientists knew it. Nor
had the DFO itself made the decision. In fact, the department had been busily handing out science grants for the ELA when the shocking news came from on high that the Harper government was closing the facility. The question was whether Ottawa would be able to overrule scientists on a matter of science without an outcry from the scientific community or the public. It all depended on closing a lot of potentially damaging mouths.

How else could the directives from the DFO be interpreted? ELA scientists were strictly forbidden to speak to the media about the closure. The DFO “communications” branch would take all questions, and information officers would supply all answers. As it turned out, the DFO turned down all media requests to interview federal scientists, and denied permission to all federal scientists to speak to their fellow citizens directly. After some budget information relating to the ELA leaked into the media, the reaction from the DFO was swift, as an insider’s email to me made clear:

When a DFO employee questioned [director general] Dave Gillis about why they have not received some promised correspondence about the ELA, he responded that all communication about anything to do with Budget 2012 must be spoken, not written in an email. This is a blatant and despicable strategy by Harper to avoid accountability. No email correspondence equals no tracking record, making access to information requests, audits, and other means of holding government transparent and accountable for decisions completely useless.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the DFO was busily at work advancing the government’s damage control operation. In a series of by-invitation-only conference calls accessed by a pass code, the DFO reached out to three groups of potential critics: university vice-presidents and the Friends of the Experimental Lakes Area; internal scientific staff at the DFO and Environment Canada; and
university-based scientists who worked at the ELA. Those three calls, one on June 25 and two on June 27, 2012, were arranged by the director general of the Ecosystem Science Directorate, David Gillis.