BROTHERS IN ARMS, FOES IN THE COURTROOM
Vice-Admiral Norman’s ouster didn’t come up over dinner with PMO staffers, says Gen. Vance
Born in the same year, to military families, Jon Vance and Mark Norman followed separate career tracks as rising stars, Vance in the army, Norman in the navy, until they ended up, respectively, as the Nos. 1 and 2 in the Canadian Forces.
They would have worked together intimately, and likely found themselves, longsuffering spouses in tow, at dozens of the military/government social functions that are an inevitable part of life for ambitious officers. Perhaps they were even friends.
But on Jan. 9, 2017, Vance gave his secondin-command what’s called “a notice of intent,” alerting Norman that he might be relieving him of military duty.
An RCMP investigation into Norman’s conduct was underway. Vance had just been briefed on it by deputy police commissioner Gilles Michaud.
Vance then went to brief Gerald Butts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary, the PM’s chief of staff Katie Telford and others.
That meeting started, Vance estimates, around 4 p.m.
Then Vance got a phone call from the PM himself, who confirmed he’d been told.
Then Vance gave Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and his own chief of staff the news.
He took not a single note of any of these discussions.
And then he went out for dinner with Butts and Telford.
“We did not discuss that (the Norman suspension), I’m quite sure,” Vance told Ontario Court Judge Heather Perkins-McVey Wednesday.
Not even Norman’s ferocious lead lawyer, Marie Henein, asked Vance what on Earth the three did chat about — this after all is a pre-trial motion, not the actual trial — but the question leaps like a big fat trout into the air.
Does the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) usually break bread with the PM’s top two aides? If so, why? And if not, why then this time on this sad and unusual occasion?
Vance was subpoenaed by Norman’s defence team to testify at their third-party records motion, one of the team’s multi-pronged efforts (they also have badgered insensate prosecutors for disclosure, written personally to Trudeau and made several Access to Information, or ATI, requests) to get at government documents in the case they believe will exonerate Norman.
He was later charged by the RCMP with one count of breach of trust for allegedly leaking confidential information to a CBC reporter and an acquaintance at Chantier Davie, the Quebec shipyard the former Stephen Harper government chose to supply the navy with an interim supply ship.
In late 2015, the then-new Liberal government, under pressure from rival Irving Shipbuilding to have another look, appeared to want out of the deal.
But media reports that it would cost taxpayers $89 million if the contract was cancelled appeared to have changed the government’s hive mind, and it went ahead.
By the by, that ship, the MV Asterix, just completed a stunningly successful first year of operations.
In any case, back to the Ottawa courtroom, where Vance in the witness box and Norman sitting kitty-corner at the defence table, squared off. It was impossible to know if they even exchanged glances.
The public record is silent on whether Vance defended or advocated for his former Vice-Chief, but it certainly appears to the outsider that after a long and noble career, Norman was thrown under the proverbial bus.
He is the only person to have been criminally charged for leaking information, though others have been identified as having done so, and in fact, it’s the norm in Ottawa. And the courtroom is entirely absent of his fellow “flag officers” (senior officers) and generals, and there are more of them in the Canadian Forces than you can shake a stick at.
So while ordinary Canadians and retired military friends may support Norman, his own are missing in action.
Vance’s evidence was notable on a number of points besides the Butts/Telford dinner.
At this hearing last December, an anonymous witness, a CF member, testified that he had been directed by a brigadier-general to answer “nil response” to a 2017 ATI request for documents about the Norman case.
The senior officer allegedly said, “This isn’t our first rodeo” and told his junior they weren’t dopey enough to refer to Norman by name in documents such as emails.
That raised the spectre of a deliberate attempt by the Department of National Defence (DND) to thwart proper requests for information by using code names.
In fact, just days later, Vance raged to CBC News about how “extremely serious” and even “disgusting” that allegation was, if true. He vowed to get to the bottom of it.
Henein asked, reasonably enough, “So what did you do?”
And the sum of what he did, in his own words, is that “I spoke to the deputy minister and expressed my concern.”
Here is where Vance engaged in a remarkable hairsplitting exercise.
(By definition, in the military, a blond hair is considered the finest and thinnest, and it’s that sort he split.)
You see, after the anonymous witness’s testimony, the defence team filed an ATI request for possible code names.
Only then, Vance said, did the penny drop that it was all those damn military acronyms and nicknames (for instance, for Norman, the list includes C34, because he’s the 34th navy commander, and “The Boss” and “The Substantive VCDS or Vice CDS) which were confusing things.
Why there wasn’t, he told Henein, anything “sinister” about those names. Heck, he said, “I’ve been aware of this list my whole life.”
This wasn’t the institution “using code words to avoid having to respond” to ATI requests, heavens no. This was just military folks, speaking in jargon, being their impenetrable selves.
However, he acknowledged the effect would be absolutely the same.
A search for documents without those code words, he said once, and “You could miss something,” or as he said another time, when Henein asked, “You won’t get that document?” Vance replied “Right.”
The search was only recently ordered rerun within DND, the court heard from another witness, with code words and nicknames.
Two sections have responded they have no documents. Ten other sections have yet to respond.
FUBAR, as soldiers say, comes to mind: F---ed Up Beyond All Recognition.