No `influencer' lipstick can make this pig glitter

Did I hear someone ask how stupid the federal government thinks we are? I think we have an answer: Postmedia's David Pugliese reported this week that Public Services and Procurement Canada has been trying to recruit “influencers” to put a positive spin on the government's three-year-old National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS), which — to no one's surprise — is already foundering amidst heavy delays and unfathomable cost increases.

Essentially the Feds want friendly defence analysts, academics and industry figures to spread propaganda among their “followers and networks,” without telling people that's what they're doing. Sample bumf: “The NSS has resulted in many social and economic benefits, from creating and sustaining more than 16,000 jobs annually to showcasing the innovations applied to shipbuilding.”

This hilariously insulting idea speaks volumes about Justin Trudeau's Liberal government in particular — but also about Canada's fundamental character as a player in world affairs. Everything it says is bad.

Let's dust off the flux capacitor and head back to July 26, 1985. Corey Hart's Never Surrender was finishing up four weeks atop the Canadian pop charts. Twentyfour-year-old Wayne Gretzky had just hoisted Edmonton's second straight Stanley Cup. The Globe and Mail led with a story about 12-yearold Justine Blainey's pioneering battle to play hockey on a boys' team in Toronto. And a good few Canadians were upset that a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Sea, intended to sail through the Northwest Passage from Greenland, without even asking us — those waters being international, in Washington's eyes.

Many saw Canada's Arctic sovereignty as perilously at risk. Franklyn Griffiths, an international relations professor at the University of Toronto, coined the phrase “use it or lose it” to describe our claim to the Arctic. Liberal foreign affairs critic Jean Chrétien warned we would profoundly regret allowing this Yankee trespass. In response, the Progressive Conservative government vowed it would build a state-of-theart heavy icebreaker capable of patrolling the Arctic all year round, and never mind the $500 million cost (about $1.1 billion today). “This Government is not about to say Canada cannot afford our Arctic,” foreign affairs minister Joe Clark said.

Canada couldn't — or wouldn't — afford it. The project died amidst exponential cost increases, a bankrupt shipyard and general indifference.

Fast forward to December 2005, in Winnipeg. Wouldbe prime minister Stephen Harper laid out a $2-billion plan to bolster Canada's Arctic sovereignty, key elements of which would be three shiny new icebreakers capable of year-round Arctic patrol. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper said two years later. “We either use it or lose it.”

But the plan for a yearround icebreaker became a plan for a larger fleet of less robust icebreakers, the first of which was to launch in 2013.

Fast forward to today and there is some good news. The first of those less robust icebreakers went into service last year; another is scheduled for next year; and two more are under construction in Halifax. But that's not much to show for 35 years of trying and a whole lot of sea ice. (The Liberal NSS did recommit to the year-round icebreaker, but there is no schedule or shipyard yet attached to the project.)

Not every element of the NSS is a full-blown disaster: Two new offshore fisheries science vessels were delivered in June and November 2019, only 10 and eight months late. But budgets are yet again spiralling out of control across the board, threatening the existence of any vessel not already under construction — including the proper icebreakers. In December, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux estimated each would cost roughly $3.6 billion, up from the government's original estimate of $1.3 billion.

This week the coast guard announced it was decommissioning CCGS Hudson, a nearly 60-year-old science vessel, with nothing to replace it and its “vital” oceanic research. The target date for a replacement has sailed from 2017 all the way to 2025. The Ottawa Citizen reported last year that the project was 825 per cent over budget, and that South Africa was building a similar vessel for roughly one-fifth the cost.

Canadians may not be aware of these byzantine details. But I suspect many have at least an impression that this country's military procurement is a Royal Canadian Museum of Failure: We can't build or buy suitable ships, helicopters, fighter jets or submarines to save our lives. We struggle even to replace Second World War-era pistols, as Matt Gurney noted in these pages last week.

This is not a situation that can be “influenced” out of existence, although you can see why the Liberals might want to try: With China and Russia acting much more belligerently than in recent decades, it's just possible Canadians might finally start to care about our actual capabilities. People might start demanding a shipbuilding (or ship-buying) program that's designed, first and only, to build (or buy) ships, rather than buy votes.

Far too many Canadians have been far too content for far too long with what you could call “influencer” governments. Canadian servicemen and women sacrificed much in Afghanistan under Liberal and Conservative governments alike, but if you looked at Canadian government social media in the Harper era, you might think we were “punching above our weight” in armed conflicts all around the world. If you look at government social media under Trudeau, you might think we had dramatically recommitted to peacekeeping and diplomacy.

Neither is true, of course. Someday, it's just possible the piper might drop by Parliament Hill with an invoice.