Now that the House of Commons is back to business, we feel certain our fellow Canadians can hardly wait for the next exciting announcement that nothing much is happening on Parliament Hill.
Oh, something might be going on, but with a self-imposed mandate to tell us very little of what is going on behind the closed doors, this current government in power with their majority status is about to establish an even more opaque barrier between themselves and the panting public.
The attitude that "we know what's good for you, so quit asking all those questions," that currently dominates this current regime, will probably continue to grow unabated.
So don't expect much transparency in this round of bafflegab in the House.
We will be informed that we shouldn't be expressing any concern over the late arrival of the new Sikorsky helicopters that were supposed to replace the 50-year-old fleet of Sea King maritime choppers. They were due 43 months ago. They might arrive any day now. The bill was going to be $5.7 billion. But don't hold your breath. As for an actual delivery date of these new Cyclone helicopters? Who knows? Nobody in the federal government is talking.
In the meantime the totally unreliable Sea Kings will be embarrassingly trotted out by our military as stop-gap tools to use, as they have been for the past 10 years.
In fact there are a few more Canadian Forces contracts that defied explanation and to be fair, some of these brain-trust decisions were made by previous governments. But at the same time, nothing much has happened during the Stephen Harper regime to ease the situation.
Take, for example, those second-hand submarines we purchased from the British. We believe there were supposed to be four of them, but in over 10 years of illusionary service, they still can't float, dive, deploy or deliver. They have spent more time in dry dock undergoing repairs than they have at sea. If our memory serves us properly, two of them never have gone anywhere other than the service bay and none of them are capable of being armed.
Chalk up another few billion in unmitigated financial waste of taxpayer funds.
Search and rescue planes?
That purchase was on the books before too. Never happened. We don't know why. Nobody is talking.
Then, of course, there is the most recent military procurement circus act, the phantom purchase of the F-35 fighter jets that were supposed to replace our aged out CF-18 fleet.
This was a sole-sourced deal ... in other words, it was a done deal behind locked doors and curtained windows, a rumoured $15 billion deal with one supplier. Nobody else was asked to bid.
The auditor general disapproved and called out the government for their low-brow horse dealing, but the government ignored his warning and call for transparency.
These jets are still in the designer mode, and other countries that placed orders for them are cancelling due to lack of information about reliability, potential and delivery dates. Not Canada ... after all, we're used to waiting decades and paying ridiculous cost overruns for our military equipment. We are the ideal suckers on the international military procurement front.
Maybe we should have built those Avro-Arrows back in 1959, at least we could have been flying our own planes all these years.
And these are just the non-transparency items we can off-handidly cite on the military front. You can only imagine how many other backroom deals are being fostered behind our backs as MPs head into a new House of Commons fall session.
We can hardly wait for the managed non-news items to start dribbling out.
