Shameful display by Sajjan

Well, what a sorry spectacle that was, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan standing, 11 times by my count, in question period Monday and talking about “owning” his mistake and never intending to “diminish the great work” of his superiors in the Canadian Army and other soldiers.

Each time, he was visibly shakier, less convincing and frankly more pathetic, but he stuck doggedly to the script.

Someone, likely in the PMO, had clearly told him that in the modern world, “owning” a mistake is a good thing but failed to tell him what “owning” entails.

It’s like the ancient but eternal Seinfeld skit, where Jerry, upon discovering the car rental place has run out of the car he reserved, says, “See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation, and that’s really the most important part of the reservation.”

As my colleague, Matthew Fisher, has so ably reported, in an April 18 speech in New Delhi, Sajjan said flatly, “On my first deployment to Kandahar in 2006, I was the architect of Operation Medusa, where we removed 1,500 Taliban fighters off the battlefield … and I was proudly on the main assault.” Alas and alack, it isn’t true. As a reserve major working as a liaison officer attached to Task Force Kandahar, Sajjan is credited with being one of those whose work shaped the biggest and costliest battle of the war in Afghanistan.

As someone familiar with Who Was Who in the Zoo back in the fall of 2006 says — to continue with the architecture theme — he was a key surveyor of the real estate the architect would build on.

That ought to have been enough for him. Almost anyone who was there has plenty to be proud of, and probably enough to regret and mourn too.

That includes Sajjan, who had a distinguished earlier career as a Vancouver police officer and who was the first Sikh Canadian to command an army regiment, the British Columbia Regiment (Duke of Connaught’s Own, an armoured reconnaissance unit.) He earned his chops.

But what on earth was he thinking when he said what he said in India?

Sajjan’s spokeswoman, Jordan Owens, told my colleague Fisher that the minister had personally inserted “the line about Medusa” into the speech, and that he was publicly taking responsibility for doing this so that it didn’t appear he was blaming a civil servant.

That’s good. That’s honourable.

But standing in the House of Commons and pretending to answer questions asked of him — some quite specific, such as “Why did he concoct the story?”, and all respectful of his credentials — was shameful. To say, as he did multiple times, that “I in no way intended to diminish the great work of my superiors and others” is ridiculous.

If I were to claim that this was my story, that I’d been the one to break it not Matt Fisher, I damn well would be intending to diminish his work and I’d be doing it too. There is no other possible result when you hog all the glory.

The thing is, Sajjan knows the truth. He knows he had a genuinely significant role in Medusa. He also knows that he didn’t run that show, that lots of others had roles as important or more important as his, and that some paid a far greater price than he did, and were killed.

And he would know too what soldiers think of those who steal credit or crave attention. He knows the army code, rather like the code in hockey, doesn’t look with approval upon the hot dog, the guy who seeks publicity or revels in it too much.

To “own” his inexplicable statement, he should explain why he said what he said. I’m not sure there can be a credible explanation, but he should have tried, and at least explained what his thought processes were — I was tired and had a brain cramp; I was far away and didn’t think anyone at home would hear about it; my vanity got the better of me and I blew it.

In other words, as many times as he said “I’m owning my mistake,” he did nothing of the sort. And he owned up to it only when caught by a reporter squarely in the mess he’d created.

This is a critical time for the army (in the middle of a defence review) and particularly for the perpetually under-loved and always endangered reserves, the very ranks from which Sajjan hails.

Until this debacle, soldiers may have thought that whatever else, they had one of their own as minister, and that that was worth something.

It’s worth a hell of a lot less now.