Earlier today I made the case that "The Government of Canada" shouldn't be renamed on whim or even deliberately, and using "Canada's New Government" (technically correct in a very narrow sense) or "Harper Government" (mirrors vulgar usage, but inappropriate) rests on dangerously misleading semantics.¹

The next of at least 36 reasons to not vote Conservative in May is one facet of their treatment of our press. This will emerge as another theme—the CBC will get its own post, later.

Before that, though: the names of things are important. Juliet, in a famous passage, laments:

…Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

But of course the two can't escape their names, and perish. Other authors have made explicit the magic in the power of names.

The lesson is that, despite the difficulty, we ought to make an earnest effort to call spades, spades. You won't see 'Harpo,' 'Iggy,' 'Jack' or 'Liz' in this space, nor 'C(L)O(W)Nservative,' 'LIEberal,' 'Dipper' or any of the endless epithets that appear in newspaper comment threads. To me, their usage signals an unwillingness to confront the complex reality of the things the actual names refer to. They are one-word caricatures.

Likewise, if we use reductive proxies for information of real importance, we run a strong risk of making bad policy.² Good policy is difficult even with full and correct information. As electors, our votes and inter-election communication with MPs present a mandate to enact certain policies, so we need access to the same information.³ Hence the importance of CAIRS; hence also the important of a free and independent press. In a list of tactics used in malfunctioning democracies to pervert elections, muzzling the press (or state control of media) would be up top with voter intimidation and ballot stuffing. Sunshine, as they say, is the best disinfectant.

A 2006 event typifies the Conservative actions on this point. In news conferences⁴ with the Prime Minister, a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery used to pick which others would get to ask questions. The government decided that they, instead, would make that decisions. When the gallery walked out of a subsequent conference to protest, Stephen Harper falsely conflated press scrutiny with the activities of the Official Opposition, and then claimed that "It ain't no thang anyway." Journalists being journalistic, others have written at length on this topic, and a timeline is available. The Prime Minister's Office went on to do similar things with news photography, and reportedly the press accompanying Mr. Harper during the campaign are—like children—expected to be seen, but not heard unless spoken to.

In our daily lives, we may find ourselves in conversations where there is an elephant in the room. Between equals, we can choose indirection, but in others cases we are on the weak end of a power relationship. When bosses, supervisors, significant others or parents ask questions, we must answer regardless of our discomfort with our inadequate answers, or the perceived unfairness of the questions.

Our elected officials govern at the behest of the people. When the press asks questions of the government on their behalf, there is no ambiguity in where the power lies, or who ought to be able to compel answers. The Conservatives' treatment of the press in Ottawa is an inexcusable effort to subvert or reverse this relationship, and yet another reason to reprimand them when you cast your vote.

Tomorrow (today?) I will solicit accusations of anti-Semitism, despite my best efforts not to do so.

1. Intentionally misleading? Again, plausible deniability applies, but then there's no strict need to prove mens rea.
2. This applies also to the long form census…another future topic.
3. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We also need help interpreting the information.
4. Contrast conference with announcement.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am writing a series of daily posts on ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative this Election Day. This was supposed to be yesterday's post, but was delayed by work.

The matter here is fairly simple: for almost two years at the beginning of their time in office, the Conservatives forced public servants to use the phrase Canada's New Government in the place of Government of Canada. More recently, they resurrected the tactic with the phrase Harper Government. Harper's magazine¹ covered a related incident in typical (cheeky) fashion.

(Images: take a wild guess)

Often we use "government" to denote departments, ministries and agencies and the people who work in them. I usually call this the public- or civil service. Alternately, "government" can mean something very different: the Prime Minister, the members of Cabinet and the other MPs in the governing party. Sometimes this is capitalized—e.g. "the Official Opposition asked the Government…" The two are unlike each another in many ways—for instance, one is elected; the other is not.

In the United States there is separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary; but in our parliamentary system the executive is drawn from members of the legislature, and is responsible directly to it. In Canada, agencies are granted authority directly by Parliament; they answer to Ministers who are usually MPs. In the United States, agencies are granted authority by Congress, but their directors are unelected appointees of the President (executive). These are important distinctions with important ramifications, and you sat through a Civics course in middle or high school that was supposed to help you understand how our system works.

We all recognize the logos above as identifying the public service (government-as-organization); not the government-as-elected-ruling-party. They contain the text "Government of Canada". I don't deny that this is branding, nor that it is an important way of ensuring people value, recognize and respect the public institutions which do so much work on their behalf. But we might expect that this brand should be stable.

To replace "Government of Canada" with some other phrase is re-branding, which is unnecessary and makes little to no sense. When the re-branding is occasioned by a change in the elected government, but the "new" label is applied to the permanent government, it creates confusion by effacing the distinction between the two.² Unless one is paying close attention—and stayed awake in Civics—it was quite possible to miss this change this entirely.

This is, I assert, wrong—at the very least because it deeply undermines our education system. I would also be extremely interested in a comparative study of press releases and other government communications which did and did not use the label. A casual search reveals ministers galore using the label in press conferences and policy announcements, but one wonders: did the elected government also appropriate credit due to the public service when it produced bad news? Did anyone ever release language like, "Canada's New Government has published data showing an increase in the unemployment rate"?

The newer label ("Harper Government") is even worse, because it was not even ordered at the juncture of an election, and because it introduces further confusion with presidential systems in which the head of government is also the head of state.³ It pains me that I must repeat it, but we do not have a presidential system.

More generally, government is not easy work. There are more important, worthy issues to be dealt with than there is time or money for; this is the thing that necessitates difficult value judgements about policy priorities. Even if you wanted and tried to please everyone, you couldn't. That the Conservatives chose to work on a misleading re-branding exercise instead of insert-any-real-issue-here is an insult to the electorate, and my fourth reason to not vote for them on May 2.

Follow-up: The Globe and Mail has a guest column covering the same argument I made about the F-35 in my first post. It's better written.

Next: "No comment."

1. One of my favourite periodicals. The name similiarity is a coincidence. harpers.org↗
2. It also raises the secondary question of what name the next government would use, if it repeats the Conservatives' mistake. Canada's Next Government? At that rate, we will run out of synonyms for "new" before too long.
3. Not so here. Pop quiz: name our head of state.

Twice is coincidence—thrice, a trend!¹ This post continues a list of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the 2011 Canadian federal election.

In a footnote to yesterday's item on Abousfian Abdelrazik, I lamented that we might never know who was behind denying him diplomatic aid. The failure of Lawrence Cannon to reverse that action was bad enough in itself, but it's still natural to want to assign blame for the initial decision. However, it's unlikely that information could be obtained on who made the call; in its absence there is frustrating "plausible deniability" for Minister Cannon or whomever we suspect was at fault.

Consider two ideas about governments. One: they are secretive, jealous, and the civil service always covers its tracks in ways which are at odds with the public interest, including limiting public knowledge of their mistakes. Politicians use the same cloak of darkness to cover all kinds of dastardly deeds. Two: government should be completely open, and the public must be able to, at will, walk in and peruse any work being done on our behalf. Our servants ought to quickly and fully comply with our requests for this information.

Obviously these are both caricatures. Compared to private business, government is subject to much more varied and more intense scrutiny. We might guess that, given a government and large business with the same number of employees, less is known by outsiders about major and minor mistakes made by the corporation. Considering what each is required by law to disclose reinforces this point. Government is not, in short, a particularly good secrecy machine, and we know quite a lot about what it does.

On the second point, complete transparency is not desirable. We are concerned when a website has its database raided for hundreds of thousands of credit card records, or a government loses a large number of medical records, because we consider such information private, and we share it only on the expectation that others will guard it. Government, inasmuch as its activities touch all citizens at some point in their lives, needs to be good at protecting the private information it collects about them.² There are several other good reasons for secrecy; for example, premature disclosure of regulatory decisions might be confer unfair market advantage; or enemies who obtain military plans could lay deadly ambushes.

Where am I going with this? The point is that there is a balance to be struck between openness and necessary confidentiality,³ one that can't be painted in broad strokes but must be instead carefully considered and decided in each new situation. Most crucially, rather than a laissez-faire approach,⁴ we establish officers like the Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner who have somewhat conflicting purposes. Their role, much like the defence and prosecution in criminal law, is to articulate detailed arguments for and against secrecy (or disclosure), so that informed decisions can be made.

When this adversarial approach yields a decision rule or guideline that is useful in a well-defined set of situations, we enshrine it as best practice and create procedures or systems based on it. These avoid endless rehashing of the same debates, and bring me to the substance of today's item. The Coordination of Access to Information Requests System was one such embodiment—until the Conservative government shut it down. Originally created to allow government departments to act in concert on related AIRs,⁵ it was also ripe for allowing the public to view that information online. Because the chief obstacles in filing AIRs—the small fee, the paperwork, and the delay while the information is assembled—were bureaucratic, and not often privacy-related, CAIRS offered a rare opportunity to greatly increase transparency with little downside risk.

Why was the order given to stop using it? Did it have some faults we might have fixed while preserving its benefits? In what will become a recurring theme, no reason was given besides a vague, untraceable reference to expert advice and aspersions cast on 'centralization' in general. As a result we are behind the United States on this matter; and the few agencies that are taking CAIRS-like action duplicate effort and expense by doing so in parallel. I have confidence that we will eventually catch up; but for setting us back at least a decade in this area, the Conservative party deserves a reprimand at the ballot box.

Tomorrow: "Canada's New Government," or, what's in a name?

1. It is past midnight on the east coast, but not the west, so I'll claim I hit my Wednesday target.
2. Even non-private information, if the data set is large enough, can be abused by unscrupulous people. Navigating around such problems earned Statistics Canada an international reputation—more on that later.
3. Be wary of anyone who makes an unequivocal case for either one.
4. For example, accepting at face value an unsubstantiated claim that some information would "harm national security."
5. If you're not familiar with the general concept or Canada's implementation of access to information legislation, I encourage you to educate yourself about it. AtI is an essential feature of the world's strongest democracies.

Who? This guy:

(Images: CBC)

He's one of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the May 2 general election. Yesterday was the F-35.

I'm short on time, so this will be a brief post; but it introduces a theme that I can expand on later by talking about Suaad Hagi Mohamud and Omar Khadr. The Wikipedia article (link above) provides a good overview of what happened to Mr. Abdelrazik, so I won't bother with paraphrase.

There are some unsurprising things in his case. One is that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were overzealous and acted thuggish, saying things like, "You'll never return to Canada!" Pure, unadulterated Hollywood cliché.

We expect rigour and thoroughness in our security agencies and personnel, and we might tolerate a bit of zeal for that reason. We don't grant them license to act like cowboys.¹ We also acknowledge (even when they won't) that they make occasional mistakes. For example, you might remember the names Abdullah Almalki and Ahmed El Maati (I didn't) and I really hope you recall Maher Arar. The experiences of these three occurred before the Conservatives came to power, so the fact that Mr. Abdelrazik was flagged as a "false positive" can't be pinned on them.² So how does blame attach?

The proper response to a mistake, if I learned anything from my parents, is to apologize, make good the harm done, and learn a lesson about avoiding the same mistake in the future. The government has demonstrably not done any of these things for Mr. Abdelrazik. Worse, it actively denied him diplomatic help. On Sunday, I wrote:

Our Members of Parliament…delegate some of [their] responsibility to the civil service, but [they] are ultimately responsible.

So while the hands-off message was delivered by a Department of Foreign Affairs official,³ Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon is answerable for that action; and for his continued failure to reverse it, reprimand the official, or implement any policy to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Tomorrow: who cares about CAIRS?

1. Or cowgirls! CSIS is an equal opportunity employer.
2. There is a very interesting legal question here about whether the occasional wrongful detention of a Canadian not in Canada, on a precautionary basis, without conviction, can be squared with "reasonable limits prescribed by law [which] can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society," if that society happens to be worried about terrorism. I feel as if that's a capitulation to actual terrorists.
3. We might never—though we have every right to—know if this happened with the knowledge or approval of the minister.

Shiny, innit?¹ Nevertheless, the F-35 is one of ~36 reasons to not vote Conservative in the 2011 Canadian general election, and the first post in my daily series.

At least part of each item will involve me asserting some kind of authority on the topic, in order to make you receptive to what I say. Sometimes that will be a stretch; in this case, it's not. I have been a fighter jet nerd² since I was a kid; this led me to join Air Cadets while in junior high, earn my pilot's license, briefly consider joining the Canadian Forces, and eventually study aerospace engineering for about six years. I have seen Top Gun about a dozen times, etc.

Viz., I like planes.

Yesterday I linked to the history of Canada's involvement in the procurement process. As it stands, the Conservatives have committed to buying 65 jets as replacements for our current CF-18s. The Parliamentary Budget Officer³ has estimated the total cost of ownership to be $29.3 billion.

The issue of what the "real" price is, and who should have told whom about it when, is important, but I'll deal with that in the future. Let's just focus on the purchase itself.

Here are some relevant policy questions, from broad to specific:

1. What is Canada's role in the world?
2. What threats, if any, does it face?
3. To fulfill #1 and address #2, is military action required?
4. What kind?
5. What military capability would we need, cost being no object?
6. What equipment is necessary to support that capability?
7. How much (given our other priorities), are we willing to pay for it?

The answers that would make the purchase a clear good idea are roughly:

1. Do the same kinds of things the U.S. does.
2. People coming to attack us with things that can be stopped using air superiority.
3. Yes, inevitably.
4. Air combat, close air support, or bombing.
5. An air command capable of performing the above tasks.
6. Manned jet aircraft.
7. ~$30 billion.

These are either weak or highly reductive.

On defence (#2), obviously not. The Cold War is over; there are no longer Soviets eager to bring death to us over the pole.⁴ Even were valuable resources discovered on the Arctic seafloor—now sadly accessible in the summer—there would be intensive diplomatic and trade disputes, but no war, nor any need for deterrence in our northern airspace. On this matter good points are raised about the value of unmanned aircraft for surveillance and the risks of flying a single-engine jet in remote areas.⁵ These are valid; but air superiority in the north is still of limited value.

In terms of action abroad, I can't imagine a situation where we would act without the blessing of both the UN Security Council and NATO, as in Libya. In such cases we will always act with allies who happily spend lots of their money on significant jet air power. Good for them. There is no requirement that our participation in joint military action be in-kind. My understanding is that the Canadian Forces are renowned for the high calibre of their training; we can certainly supply more than our share of talented infantry, artillery, airlift, naval support and commanders.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the real air power story is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These raise interesting questions about autonomy, but they are certainly cheaper by orders of magnitude and in some senses perform better than manned aircraft.⁶

Finally, on cost. The best figure I can find on the CF-18 procurement was $2.4b in 1977 dollars, which is roughly $8.4b today, or only a quarter of the F-35 price (for twice as many aircraft). This "replacement" would, perhaps, be the largest defence procurement in Canadian history; and yet there is no discussion happening on the above questions. Nor is anyone advancing those shaky intermediate answers, trying to provide an alternate justification,⁷ or claiming that we can't address the many needs of the Canadian Forces with anything less than $29.3b.

It's reasonable to expect that a new Conservative government would interpret their mandate as one to go ahead with the purchase; that's one reason to not elect one on May 2.

Tomorrow: Absousfian Abdelrazik

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

1. I realize that Canada would not be buying the STOVL variant. The video is not an attempt to mislead on this point.
2. I am several kinds of nerd.
3. Kevin Page gets an entire post to himself, later.
4. One wonders how few in the USSR ever were eager.
5. The CF-18 has two; if a goose flies into one, you limp home on the other.
6. The U.S.'s perennial problems with civilian deaths in Pakistan may suggest that even precision air strikes are too blunt an instrument for dealing with terrorists; but so-called collateral damage can be a problem even with human pilots.
7. For example, economics; Canadian firms might help build the jets we buy, yes. But is buying an already-designed American military aircraft the best way to stimulate our aircraft industry? Why is it a better choice than supporting new, domestic, civil aircraft?