Vancouver Sun banner depicts Harper as the one with the problem—not taxpayers. And Liberals are cast as a minor player in the ordeal. This should be a Liberal Party problem. And it IS a
taxpayer
headache.
Team Chretien/Martin Liberals were military pacifists and pantywaists, but Stephen Harper’s new Conservative government will nonetheless be dealing with their weapons of mass destruction and sundry hidden time bombs which are buried all over the landscape —for years to come. And we taxpayers will of course pay the price.
The difference now? All those landmines will be unburied and safely disposed of —unlike how it would still be had the wretched Liberals been re-elected.
Many things will be exposed. The Liberals will be exposed. So go ahead and add that to the list of things that the minority Conservatives can do without a majority. And that’s huge.
And another difference SHOULD be that we all get it clear in our heads that the “Harper Conservatives” are not an entirely different entity than the “taxpayers”. That seems to have been the Canadian way under the Liberals. Folks think that the government has a magical pile of cash that came from nowhere—which was separate and distinct from their own cash. See the banner above. No wonder Canadians re-elect liberal-left politicians. They’re misinformed by their own media.
Another challenge for Canadians is to ensure they see it not as the media would cast it —as “Harper’s headache” in this case —but as the Liberals’ perfidy and political interference and irresponsibility (and I’m quite sure some would call it treason). The Liberals barely caught a cold over these horrendous acts while they were in power, thanks to the crack journalists out there in the old liberal-left mainstream media—at least not to the extent that their re-election was prevented —twice. And that in itself is very troubling. So let’s not let them re-write history as the American media continues to try to do with the disgraceful Clinton presidency.
We’ll have to make sure the media doesn’t play defence or cover for them even now while they are finally out of office.
For example, aside from that big front page banner (above) which places Harper’s name above the culprit and mis-identifies who has to pay $1 BILLION, and mis-emphasises the culprit which is the Liberals; the big headline, spanning the entire page A3 of the Vancouver Sun, is: “‘Copters could cost Canada big dollars”.
The headline is just wrong! “LIBERALS could cost us taxpayers ANOTHER one BILLION dollars even after being booted out of office; more like this on the way” …would be the more fair and accurate headline.
And if it were my newspaper, I’d have all the yellow highlighting that I’ve got here:
Stephen Harper’s new government could face a $1-billion legal penalty after a European aerospace firm filed a claim for damages, citing political interference by the Liberals during the 2004 purchase of naval helicopters.
Aerospace giant Agusta-Westland recently filed the $1-billion claim for damages in Federal Court, alleging its EH-101 helicopter didn’t win the competition to provide Canada’s military with a maritime chopper because of political interference by the Liberal government. The company is also asking for $1 million in punitive damages.
[…] Agusta-Westland contends the Liberals designed the $5-billion program to buy 28 maritime helicopters in such a way as to prevent the selection of its EH-101 chopper. The firm lost out to its American rival Sikorsky, which was awarded the contract in 2004 to provide a replacement for the military’s aging Sea Kings.
[…] With the lawsuit now underway, the EH-101 saga appears to be coming full circle, since it was a Conservative government which originally selected that helicopter in 1987 as the best chopper for the Canadian Forces. But during the 1993 election campaign, Jean Chretien highlighted the purchase as a waste of taxpayers’ money and vowed to scrap the deal if he became prime minister.
Cancelling the EH-101 contract was one of the first things Chretien did when he came to power in the fall of 1993. At the time his government
[“his government paid…”!! —Joel]
paid more than $470 million in cancellation fees to scuttle the deal.
But in 1998 the Chretien government was embarrassed when the EH-101 was once again selected by the Canadian Forces as the best chopper for its search-and-rescue operations. Fifteen of those helicopters were bought for that role.
[…] In its statement of claim, Agusta-Westland contends the Liberal government wanted to ensure the EH-101 didn’t win the Sea King replacement contract because it wanted to avoid political embarrassment. The firm alleges the Liberals were worried that if the EH-101 did win, the government would be accused of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in cancelling the first deal.
[…]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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