MacKay Has Become a Political Liability

"Et-Tu MacKay"?

When the Reform/Alliance party and Progressive Conservatives decided to cohabitate in 2003, Peter MacKay had only just been crowned Lord of the PCs. He had won that leadership race by promising David Orchard, another PC leadership hopeful that he would never, ever, ever, ever, in a million years negotiate amalgamation with Stephen Harper and the dreaded Western radicals. Based on this promise, Orchard threw his weight behind MacKay and the added numbers pushed  him to victory. The problem is, MacKay lied. 

The after-glow from his victory had barely faded when MacKay entered into negotiations with Harper and the stage was thusly set for the weak and withering PCs to be cannibalized by the predatory Reformites. MacKay, declining to vie for the captaincy of the new team, paved the way for Steve the Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist to become the Once and Future King. But Savvy Steve realized from the get-go that even though his Reformites were the alpha-dogs in the New Conservative Party, MacKay carried some weight in that he still represented the minority PCs - those unfortunate individuals who suffered under the delusion that Harper was an equal opportunity employer. The Reverend Steve needed the old PCs to continue to be deluded until such time that he could collar and neuter them. To that end, he gave MacKay positions of power and influence first in his shadow cabinet and later in his actual cabinet when the Reform-Conservative conglomerate won it's first minority government in 2006. 

Belinda Stronach

Given the Machiavellian way in which MacKay betrayed his old party, Harper - himself an adherent of The Prince- probably felt it best to keep one so capable of treachery content and close at hand- likely remembering the old adage about keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer. To Harper, anyone not in his inner circle was an enemy. But Harper should have noticed something was amiss as far back as 2004 when MacKay was dating the lovely automobile heiress and co-Conservative, Belinda Stronach. Stronach had figured out pretty early in the game that there was only room for one voice in the New Conservative Party and that was Harper's. She subsequently crossed the floor into the open arms of Paul Martin's Liberal party and into an instant cabinet position. MacKay's reaction was, to say the least, embarrassing. 

A Boy and His Neighbor's Dog

Upon hearing of his girlfriend's defection to the Liberals, MacKay reportedly flew in to a frenzied rage. Then, like a jilted school-boy, he returned to his home riding to mope. Heart rendering, staged pictures surfaced of a long-faced, broken hearted MacKay being consoled by his ever faithful dog. Problem is, MacKay doesn't own a dog. Back in Parliament, when MacKay was asked about the pooch by opposition members, he pointed to Stronach's empty seat and said: "you already have her". MacKay never owned up to, nor apologized for the derogatorily childish remark. His behaviour was nothing less than an embarrassment to the new Reform-a-Con party. 

MacKay believes he is treating "Condi"
to a unique Canadian dining experience. But
unbeknownst to Peter, there are over 600
Timmies outlets in the States

When the Reformites finally won an election in 2006, albeit with a minority, MacKay was dubbed "Minister of Foreign Affairs", a position of reasonable responsibility in the Harper Government. To say that MacKay was, for the most part, ineffectual in this position, is an understatement. His major accomplishment while in Foreign Affairs was to treat U.S Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice to Coffee at a Nova Scotia Tim Horton's. But the relative comfort the two seemed to have in each other's company led many rumor-mongers to suggest that MacKay and Rice had a "thing" for each other. Given his track record with women, the story might not be too far from the truth. 

In 2007, MacKay was shuffled to the Ministry of Defense, a position which better suited his "manly" image. MacKay liked to dress up in camouflaged out-fits, hang out with soldiers and take helicopter rides, even if it was just to go fishing. 

In 2010, MacKay attempted to renegotiate the free lease for Camp Mirage, Canada's "secret" military base in The United Arab Emirates. The folks in the UAE were more than willing to let Canadian troops continue to use the base free of charge as they had done since 2001. But in return, they wanted their national airlines to have increased access to Canadian airspace. To MacKay, this seemed like not such a bad deal. But it was promptly nixed by Harper who apparently has a thing about doing business with Arabs ( though he apparently has no qualms about doing business with various other totalitarian states. Maybe it's just that he can relate to them better). But Harper subsequently pulled some outlandish numbers out of his magic hat saying that a deal with the Emirates airlines would cost Canadians tens of thousands of jobs and tens of millions of dollars. He never accounted for those bizarre figures.

But with MacKay's bomb-shell of a deal effectively nuked by Harper, he returned to Ottawa in a particularly petulant mood. In yet another embarrassing display of immaturity unbecoming a Minister of State, MacKay was seen wearing a "Fly Emirates" baseball cap, an obvious "screw you" message to his boss.

"So Peter, does this thing come with engines"?

So MacKay set to work on what had become a government priority, namely upgrading the Canadian Armed Forces into a modern fighting force (as opposed to it's more traditional Peace Keeping role). To this end, MacKay set about procuring more and more up to date military technology and machinery for every arm of the Canadian Forces. The sum total of all of these procurements, from trucks to ships to stealth fighters was to cost Canadian tax payers billions upon billions of dollars. And in every instance, MacKay has either screwed up, misrepresented or outright lied about the true cost of each of his "deals". The most notable was his underestimating the cost of Canada's new Stealth Fighters by $10 billion. And not only did he lie about this snafu, he concealed his foul up, even as the country was heading into an election in May of 2011. During the campaign, the Harperites continued to push the original estimate of $14 billion for the cost of the 65 war-birds, even though they knew the estimate was off by almost half. 

But this was not the first time MacKay had lied or conspired to withhold the truth....aside from his betrayal of the PCs that is. In 2007, it had come to light that Canadian Forces were handing over captured Afghan detainees to local authorities, knowing they would likely be tortured. Harper of course, ranted in Parliament and damned anyone who questioned our men and women in uniform as being un Canadian and of siding with the Taliban. Of course, the more information that was revealed, the more likely it became that Harper and MacKay were both complicit in the torture of detainees because they knew it was happening and did nothing about it. So it is now possible that the International Court of Justice may seek charges against MacKay and Harper as war criminals, much as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are considered as war criminals by many in the international community. 

And as it seems that every day that goes by reveals yet another botched military procurement, lets not forget MacKay's  "St. Jean Baptiste Day" speech at the French Embassy in Ottawa where he proudly proclaimed that the French and English had fought side by side against the Americans in 1812. Not only was this un-true, but the fact was, England was at war with France in 1812 and if anything, the French supported the American war effort. So it seems that not only is MacKay not very good at buying things, he is not too up on his Canadian History, especially on facts that are commonly known to most grade seven students in this country. 

Ms. Afshin-Jam MacKay, a vocal critic of the 
Governments position on Omar Khadr

Oh, and MacKay's woman trouble seems to have continued as well. He fell for and subsequently married Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a former Iranian Beauty Queen and model earlier this year. Recently, the outspoken wife of the Defense Minister publically stated, contrary to the Government of Harper's position, that Omar Khadr, the Canadian Citizen being detained in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, should be repatriated immediately. One wonders how the petulant MacKay will reconcile that public relations faux-pas with his Boss. Perhaps he has a "Free Omar" ball cap he can wear to the next caucus meeting. 

When one looks at MacKay's track record of failures, miscues, misdeeds, cover-ups and out-right lies since becoming a Minister of the State, not to mention his immature, juvenile behaviour, it is now well past the time for Harper to cut his losses with this national embarrassment. The Prime Minister had no difficulties showing Bev Oda the door earlier this summer for making the party look bad and costing tax payers thousands of dollars. By comparison, MacKay is costing Canada billions in un-accounted for dollars and is continually making the Government look ridiculous both at home and on the world stage. What ever political advantage Harper had in Keeping MacKay around is now lost as even die-hard Red Tories and old school PCs would not be upset to see the screen door hit him in the back-side as he's ushered from cabinet. Regardless of old loyalties (something of which MacKay knows nothing), when a long standing member of the party is seen to be doing it more harm than good, it's time for those loyalties to be put aside and ties to be severed.  MacKay the Machiavellian would have no trouble with this. Neither should Harper.

"Throw in cigarette lighters and AM/FM radios
 and I'll take 65 of these babies".

We Have Ourselves to Blame for Our Corrupt Government

As the title implies, we only have ourselves to blame for our current ultra-corrupt majority government. They have stolen our government and our democracy right out from under our very noses. The Robo-call scandal is only the latest in a long line of scams, misdeeds, frauds and outright illegal and anti-democratic behaviour. Consider the following:

Stevie, the Evangelical Reformist

-The Reform Party of Canada was formed by the Evangelical Preston Manning in 1987 (yes THE Preston Manning of the Manning Centre who just recently had the reporter who broke the Robo-call story turfed out of his soiree). Another Evangelical, "Steve" Harper joined this bizarre collection of extremists in 1988 and became it's Chief Policy Officer. But these Western-Centric radicals  could gain no credibility east of Manitoba and the Reform Party was rife with unprofessional, partisan and unethical behaviour. They were too far out into right field, even for Blue Tories and were dismissed out of hand by the majority of the country.

- The Reform Party re-branded it self as the Alliance party and was led temporarily by a Jet-Skiing Evangelical, Stockwell Day,  who believes the earth is only 5,000 years old and that men walked with dinosaurs. But they were still a half-assed bunch of extremists that no one took seriously.

"Et Tu Peter"?

- In 2003, Peter MacKay became the last leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada based on the promise he would NEVER negotiate an amalgamation deal with The Reform/ Alliance bunch. A promise he promptly broke once elected leader. Whether he conspired with "Steve" Harper before hand we might never know. But we do know that MacKay went  from being the leader of a toothless non-party at the time, to a position of power and influence in the Harper Government, complete with models hanging off his arm and a brief "tryst" with the lovely  automobile heiress, Belinda Stronach.  And we watched this all happen.

-The treachery that allowed the merger of the Reform/Alliance party and the near-dead Progressive Conservative Party gave Harper and his Reform cronies control of the "Conservative" moniker which  they quickly adopted, dropping the "Progressive" label in the process, which suited their Ultra-right wing Neo-Conservative purposes. This gave the Reform Party the instant credibility they had long sought even though they were nothing more than carnivorous,  ideological wolves in Conservative apparel. And we watched and the main-stream media blithely and erroneously referred to this new party as "Tories" thus giving them even more undeserved credence.

- We watched as this new party, riding on the momentum of the Liberal's own in-house scandal (aided greatly by the RCMP who chose to make public, damning accusations about the Liberals  at the height of the 2006 campaign) managed to grasp a minority government for the first time.

- We watched as the "Reform/Conservatives" Prorogued Parliament not once, but twice. First to avoid the will of the people (which would have seen a majority coalition  govern us, at least temporarily) and again to avoid having to account for the Afghan detainee scandal (which they have never accounted for, despite the prospect of MacKay and Harper being seen as potential war criminals)

15 year old Omar Khadr, wounded by American soldiers

- We watched as Harper spent over three million dollars of tax payers money on legal fees to deny Omar Khadr his constitutional and international rights as a child soldier and keep him penned up in Guantanamo Bay .The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Harper Government was denying the boy his Charter Rights but stopped short of ordering them to repatriate him. Khadr was 15 when he was shot by American soldiers. He is now 23 years old and continues to be held on what can best be described as circumstantial evidence while the Harper Government continues to thumb it's nose at the Supreme Court.

- We watched as the Reform/Conservative back room boys, using American-style smear tactics, systematically destroyed the political career of one of the few remaining good men in Ottawa, Stephan Dion.

-We watched as Stephen Harper and his then director of communications, Kory Teneycke  secretly met with the heads of the ultra right-wing Fox News in the states. We subsequently .watched as the Prime Ministers Office pressured the CRTC to grant a bid led by Teneycke to licence  Sun TV News. We watched as Teneycke resigned over tampering with an Avvaz petition to stop the licensing of Sun TV news (alias Fox News North). We watched as Teneycke was quietly rehired. We watched Sun TV news become a reality.

- We watched as Kory Teneycke told delegates at a Manning Centre Conference (remember Preston the Evangelical?) that he would love to have the names of Left-leaning College professors and teachers so he could "make them famous" (meaning he would love to start a smear campaign against them and otherwise, silence them)

- We watched as the Reform/Conservatives, who campaigned with promises of more transparency in Government became the most closed and secretive Government in our history.

- We watched as Stephen Harper promised Senate Reform, then proceeded to stack the Senate with partisan cronies, mostly defeated Conservative candidates, so that no matter which bills were passed by Parliament, they would either be passed or defeated at the whim of the hyper-partisan Reform/Conservative Senate . Harper has appointed more partisan Senators than any other Prime Minister in our history.

- We watched as Dmitri Soudas, another Harper Director of Communication, put pressure on the Montreal Port Authority to hire as it's new Board President, a man sympathetic to the Reform/Conservative cause.

- We watched as the Government of Harper  systematically fired, silenced and otherwise ruined the careers of any pubic service whistle blower who spoke out against  the Reform/Conservative agenda.

- We watched as The Government of Harper sought to invest BILLIONS of dollars in a new fighter Aircraft, who's need is questionable, with out first tendering a contract or asking for proposals, all at the behest of our neighbors to the south.

- We watched as Stephen Harper ruled his party with an iron "my way or the highway" fist. We watched him silence his own party members. We watched as he forbade candidates from participating in  open campaign debates, we watched as he kicked people out of his campaign rallies on the basis of the content of their Facebook  accounts (who did these internet searches was never revealed) and we then watched as he stacked these rallies with rabid partisans who shouted down legitimate questions from the media. We watched as Harper limited questioning of any kind from the media at his campaign rallies.

- We are still watching Harper's attempts at dismantlement the CBC as he views them as being "Anti-Government". And we are still watching to see what he intends to do with the "war-chest" he is amassing in order to combat the main stream media, ALL of whom he feels, are too left leaning.

-  We watched as the Harper Government (as the Government of Canada is now officially called) was found guilty of Contempt of Parliament. No other government in the history of parliamentary democracy has ever been guilty of such an infraction. Neither Harper nor any of his Reform/Conservative cronies have ever been held accountable for this.

-We watched, silently dumbfounded, when it was revealed that the Reform/Conservatives had produced a 200 page manual on how to stone-wall Parliamentary committees in which the opposition held a majority of members, thus suppressing and otherwise, impeding the democratic process once again.

- We watched as the Government of Harper was found guilty of election fraud around the "in and out" scandal that occurred in the 2006 election. We watched as the party was given a slap on the wrist, a $52,000 fine. And we watched as the Harper-led Reform/Conservatives spun this guilty finding into a "victory"!

- We continue to watch as the Government of Harper refuses to answer or admit to any of it's indiscretions. Instead, it denies, deflects, minimizes or instead, sets out to attack and defame it's opponents rather than proving them wrong or taking responsibility for it's actions. The standard operating procedure is for them to tell the same lie so often that the electorate will come to accept it as truth eg:" Coalition governments are un-democratic".

And the above list of Reform/Conservative indiscretions is far from complete. We have watched for six long years as the Government of Harper has systematically engaged in unethical, undemocratic behaviour and blown us way off course using rhetoric and fear tactics. They have lied, cheated and  stolen from the Canadian people. They have ruined careers and lives and eroded the rights of Canadian citizens. And we have given this all, passing notice and shaken our heads at the deteriorating state of our democracy and done nothing but given them cart-blanch to rule as they see fit.  We have accepted it as the "new normal" and moved on with our lives- until now that the Robo-call scandal has come to light. We are finally waking up. We are finally beginning to take action. We are finally realizing that our very democracy is in grave peril. And we have no one but ourselves to blame as we watched passively, this dreadful progression and rise to absolute power of an idealistic, power-hungry mad-man. We should have seen this coming. Any political party that is born of treachery and deceit is destined to govern in the same manner.