You Win, Stephen

After a freedom of information request today by The Toronto Star it's been discovered that not only was Peter McKay full of shit in his "training exercise" excuse for the use of the rescue helicopters - but they were also warned ahead of time that it would likely turn into a PR nightmare. With that in mind they of course set it "Under the guise of... a search and rescue operation". These emails also outline how there were actually two other options discussed, neither of which would have been a search and rescue operation. So if the entire point of this exercise was to display the search and rescue capabilities, why were two of the options not search and rescue options? 

Of course we know that wasn't the point at all. It was a glorified taxi ride.

Surely, being the Minister of Defense it's not completely unreasonable to think this was for something important like an impending war or whatnot. OH! It must have been right at the start of the Libyan conflict, right? Well.... wrong. It was to get him to a photo-op on time. Of course this was a very important announcement covered by all kinds of news media, right? A search on Google News for this time frame provided me with one result (that was public and not a press release cut&paste) from the London Free Press. My favorite part of this story has got to be that there was already another cabinet minister there. They had to order the helicopter to get the minister to an event that a federal minister was already attending and got news coverage in exactly ONE city. In the next election two of the three seats in London went Conservative so surely the tax dollar usage was worth it. 

When asked about why his previous story made no sense in the house today, Mr. MacKay reiterated his old story. Which leads me to this article by Lawrence Martin. 

I'm increasingly disgusted by how the government will not answer questions. I didn't watch the Grey Cup, but I have a nice little mental image of how all this looked. Mostly because I've seen the last 10 Super Bowls and they do the exact same thing. The Americanization of our once great country is not only troubling to me... it's terrifying. The man in charge is the same man who thought we should have gone to Iraq. There are lots of middle eastern countries pissing each other off (as usual) and a shit-ton of Republican candidates that would love to bomb something. Two years from now when a Republican is leading his nation into an ill-conceived war with Mr.Harper following closely behind with his 1500 communications staffers and stealth snow mobiles... there's really no witty finish to that. It's fucking terrifying how realistic that scenario is. 

So Stephen, you win. I'm just going to stop paying attention. Clearly you don't want an open government, or an honest dialogue with your citizens. Most of the country stopped paying attention long ago. I'll join them.