Transcript: Season 4, Episode 9

WATCH: The full broadcast of The West Block with Tom Clark from Sunday, November 9

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 9, Season 4
Sunday, November 9, 2014

Host: Tom Clark
Guest Interviews: Jack Harris, Paul Eaton, Jim Prentice,
Jennifer Ditchburn, Mark Kennedy
Location: Ottawa

On this Sunday, will Canada be asked to contribute more on the mission to combat ISIS? The US government has spent $25 billion dollars training the Iraqi Army so why is it in such disarray? We’re joined by a former US commander in Iraq.

And then, oil: the United Nations Climate panel says there will be disaster ahead if carbon emissions aren’t reduced by 2020 and stopped altogether by the end of the century. We asked Premier Jim Prentice what that means to an oil producing province like Alberta.

And, allegations of harassment on the Hill: two Liberal MPs are out of caucus. What are the politics at play?

It is Sunday, November the 9th and from the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark. And you are in The West Block.

Well, late last week, the Canadian Press reported on a leaked document from the Pentagon suggesting that Canada has signalled its plans to purchase F-35’s, this fiscal year. The Department of Public Works who handles this responded by saying this: “No decision has been made on the replacement of the CF-18 fleet.” We also asked if they’d like to categorically deny the story and they demurred.

Well originally we had an interview booked with the Chief of the Defence staff, but he cancelled at the last moment. Nobody else from the Canadian Forces was made available by the time we recorded this, and neither was the Minister of National Defence. We do, however, have the NDP defence critique, Jack Harris.

Mr. Harris thanks very much for being here. What do you make of this? Why is Canada buying four F-35’s?

Jack Harris:
Well that’s a very good question. I mean we saw so much controversy about this project and now we’ve apparently got a decision to buy for, and I’ve got evidence here in the form of a briefing done at the Pentagon on October 27th saying that Canada wanted to swap a place in the production line for the year 2015 with a payback for another slot later on. And it says that the Air Force concurred with the four swaps. It’s executable. It had two caveats on it, but the next step is that Canada needs to deliver a letter of intent by mid-November.

Tom Clark:
Well that’s in a couple of days.

Jack Harris:
This is next week. So you know we’re not talking about something that’s a signal. This is more of the actual intent to purchase four aircraft in a production line on a program that’s supposed to be stalled waiting for proper consideration.

Tom Clark:
I guess this is my question, is that the F-35 issue has not been resolved, at least nothing that the government has told us, they were investigating this. But by buying four, I would imagine that you have also committed, or the Government of Canada has committed, to buying perhaps all 65 at this point because you’re not just going to buy four of these things.

Jack Harris:
Well there was a claim at one time that the actual years of production that Canada had signed up for were supposedly in the sweet spots for costs and all of that stuff that Peter Mackay was getting on, but you know you gotta remember that this program, initially in May of 2010 was advertised to be going to be a full competition for a replacement of the CF-18’s. Six weeks later they sole sourced the F-35. It seems like they have never changed that position despite all the malarkey in between and the fact that there was no competition, no guarantee of Canadian jobs and of course, a plane that’s unproven to date.

Tom Clark:
So the story is out, the government is not categorically denying it. It appears we want to buy four F-35’s, pay for them in the next couple of days, so what should the government do at this point?

Jack Harris:
Well they shouldn’t be doing it. I mean the letter of intent is the next step that’s expected, I think that there should be a halt put on this. This is not something that should be done behind the backs of Canadians without proper debate in Parliament. They’ve had a report that was delivered in June that they said supported some analysis, but we haven’t seen the analysis. We haven’t seen the report. That was almost six months ago and there was speculation and they allowed that speculation to occur that this was going to be put off until after the election. Well it doesn’t look like that right now but I think Canadians are not going to be very happy with this decision being made without any notice, without the cost being the big issue. One of the big issues was the cost. The enormous cost and the sticker shock…

Tom Clark:
And we don’t know how much these are going to cost; the four alone.

Jack Harris:
We don’t know how much these ones…they might cost even more than the later ones, but the sticker shock from when the Parliamentary budget officer laid out the numbers and that was enough to cause them to put the whole thing on hold. But maybe they’re just waiting for the opportunity they thought they’d get away with it.

Tom Clark:
Jack Harris, defence critic for the NDP, thanks very much for being here. I appreciate it.

Well of course the CF-18’s are still flying and they fired their first shots in anger last week as part of the combat mission against ISIS. The bombing campaign was aimed at construction sites near Fallujah, but there are growing concerns that dropping bombs will not be enough. We will need more military trainers and boots on the ground, and Canada may be asked to do a whole lot more.

And joining me now from Washington is retired Major General, Paul Eaton. He’s a former US commander who designed and directed the training mission in Iraq. General awfully good to have you here. You know every country now seems to be in agreement that to win the battle against ISIS it’s going to take boots on the ground. And virtually every country right now is saying that those have to be Iraqi boots. In other words, the Iraqi Army. You were there. You trained them. Is the Iraqi Army in any condition to take on ISIS and win?

Paul Eaton:
Well the Iraqi Army Tom is in crisis right now and it’s a political crisis more than anything else. That very big component of developing a soldier that’s so easy to do in Anglo-Saxon countries and so difficult to do in many countries that have not had the luxury of our constitutions that we enjoy in Canada or the United States. So the moral component is very, very difficult to develop in the Iraqi soldier…that trust in his chain of command, that trust in his government and his governmental institutions; the political infrastructure. The resilience that soldiers get when they know that if they get hurt, they’re going to be evacuated, that they’re going to be taken of. That’s not resident in the Iraqi Army right now. It was back in 2010, especially 2010-2011 when US Forces were there to work with them.

Tom Clark:
Well that brings up an interesting question though because we are hearing reports that there may be an ask of Canada and perhaps other coalition members to send in trainers to train the Iraqi Army, but frankly, after what you did, and I believe your country spent about $25 billion dollars training them over an eight year period, what could we teach them now that they don’t already know?

Paul Eaton:
The most important component is to give feedback to the US political structure to the Canadian political structure on what the trainers are seeing on the ground, and to allow us to help shape Iraq politically. That’s still the significant problem that we have in developing the Iraqi soldier. We can develop him physically. We can impart great training; how to shoot move and communicate, but if he doesn’t again trust his chain of command and have a ,good chain of command, which Al Maliki destroyed during the sectarian moves that he made after we left. So we have got to help the Iraqi’s develop their chain of command and help the Iraqi soldier trust in that chain of command. And that’s what the American, Canadian…

Tom Clark:
But General you would know better than anybody else that putting humpty back together again if you want and mixing in the Sunni and Shia, and Peshmerga elements of the Iraqi Army to work effectively as one unit, is going to take some time. Do you think, at the end of the day because the battle is happening now that we’re going to have to put western boots on the ground?

Paul Eaton:
Tom, I have no interest in seeing any western boots on the ground. I can expect to see special operating forces and some very well trained embedded western military to allow the enablers to operate effectively. To all targeting Intel development so that our airstrikes are more effective, that we bring those intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets to the field as well as logistics. So actual trigger pullers, no. Enablers for combat multipliers, yes.

Tom Clark:
In the one minute that we’ve got left, General do you think that if Canada, among other countries, sent over large contingents of trainers that we’d be able to construct a winning army in the time necessary to stop ISIS? Or is this going to be, not only a few months long but many years long before we deal with this?

Paul Eaton:
Tom, it’s going to be years. It took Great Britain 250 years to create the country that is difficult to govern known as Canada…sorry, India is what I meant. And but it took the Brits a long time to do that. And it’s going to take us a long time to operate effectively there as well.

Tom Clark:
General Eaton thank you so much for joining us today, I appreciate your time.

Paul Eaton:
Tom, my pleasure, thank you very much.

Tom Clark:
After the break, we’ll find out how one oil producing province is responding to the United Nations call to reduce and stop carbon emissions.

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well it’s a very stark message from the United Nations. Its latest report on climate change, released a week ago, says that we need to make dramatic reforms and we need to do it very fast. Here it is, your weekly West Block Primer:

This is planet earth. Beautiful, but ice caps are melting, oceans are rising and things are heating up. And the United Nations says it is all because of us. And some of us are worse than others; China, world’s biggest polluter but also the world’s biggest economy. Number two: the United States, also the world’s biggest economy. India falls not far behind and Canada, well we’re no angels.

Countries who pollute the least are feeling it the most. The UN says we have two choices: continue what we’re doing and temperatures will go to catastrophic levels. Cities and countries will be flooded and the world will never be the same again, or change. Cut emissions by as much as much as 70 per cent by 2050. And, by the end of the century, we’ll need to completely walk away from oil, gas and coal and just leave it in the ground. Do that and we survive.

Joining me now from Calgary is Alberta’s Premier Jim Prentice. And Premier awfully good to see you. Thanks very much for being here.

Jim Prentice:
Nice to be with you Tom.

Tom Clark:
I’m just wondering how you react to the United Nations saying that you know by 2050, you’ve largely got to be out of the oil, gas and coal business, and that by the end of the century, you’ve got to be out of that business altogether. How do you react?

Jim Prentice:
Well you know the IPCC work is important work and we’re all concerned about climate change and about trying to reduce emissions wherever we can. That’s actually you know a priority of our government to re-craft the policies of the Alberta Government on energy, the environment and climate change. But as you look forward over the course of the next 50-75 years, the world will continue to be quite dependent on hydrocarbons and so we want to be the most environmentally responsible producer of energy in the world. I think that’s a Canadian objective and it’s certainly the Alberta Government’s objective.

Tom Clark:
Realistically though, can you be out of the oil and gas business by the end of the century?

Jim Prentice:
Well, I don’t think it’s realistic for consumers to be out of the hydrocarbon business by that timetable. Certainly we all want to improve environmental outcomes and want to find cleaner sources of energy, but there hasn’t really been the game changing technology developed yet that would allow us, as consumers, to not be using hydrocarbons in a way similar to what we do currently.

Tom Clark:
Let me ask you one other thing that was in that report and the IPCC said that yeah, it’s going to be an expensive shift to make, but if we start now, it’s going to be less expensive than if we wait 40 or 50 years to turn the ship around. Is this putting a lot of pressure on you to start investments in other forms of energy at this point?

Jim Prentice:
Well it’s producing pressure I think on everyone but you know, I come back to the fundamental point that 80 per cent of the emissions arise at the point of consumption, not at the point of production and so, you know it’s all of us as consumers. It’s when we climb in our cars or get on an airplane, or turn on the flat screen television in our house. I mean that’s really the point where the lion’s share of the emissions comes from. So certainly, we all want to improve environmental outcomes. It increases the pressure. You know we’re in the middle of reviewing our environmental policies at the moment, trying to make sure that we achieve emission reductions, intensity reductions. But this will continue I think to be you know a strong part of the Canadian economy.

Tom Clark:
You know, it occurs to me that there is such a growing divide in this country, throughout North America for that matter, between those who see oil as the salvation economically and those who see oil and gas I suppose, as an environmental threat. And between those two camps, how do you build a bridge? Or is there a bridge to be built?

Jim Prentice:
Well the bridge I think Tom, has to be built on the highest possible environmental standards and you know I’ve tried to be clear about this. I mean as you know, I used to be Canada’s Minister of the Environment, but if you’re in the energy business in today’s world, then you’re in the environment business. And you know I’ve made it very clear that we’re going to succeed at both and I don’t see them as inimical to each other. I think that you know part of the genius of our country and our province has been to use technology to achieve environmental outcomes and at the same time have a strong economy, so we’ll continue to do that.

Tom Clark:
Ah, you saw the midterm elections in the United States last week. You’ve got a much more friendly Congress than you had before when it comes to the Keystone pipeline project. You were talking about going down to lobby further on this, but I’m wondering at this point Mr. Prentice, is anymore lobbying really going to make any difference? In other words, don’t the Americans already know how we think about the Keystone project?

Jim Prentice:
Well sure, I hope they do. You know, I think they certainly know what I think because I’ve spoken about it repeatedly over the last number of years. And I hope that Congress and the president come to the conclusion that this project is in the best interest of both of our countries. You know I fervently believe that it is, but I will in due course go down to Washington and you know try to be constructive in any way that we can. there are some very positive sounds I think yesterday coming out of the White House and so we remain optimistic, cautiously so, but optimistic about the Keystone project.

Tom Clark:
Alberta Premier, Jim Prentice. Thank you very much. Good seeing you again Premier.

Jim Prentice:
Nice to be here. Great, thank you Tom.

Tom Clark:
Well coming up next, charges of harassment on the Hill: two MPs expelled from caucus and accusations that political reaction went too far or perhaps not far enough.

Break

Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well time to unpack some politics and joining me to do that is Jennifer Ditchburn of the Canadian Press and Mark Kennedy the Parliamentary Bureau Chief for the Ottawa Citizen.

Well last week was quite a week on Parliament Hill, but let’s start with the big one. Everybody seemed to be trying to figure out what is not only the right way to handle allegations of sexual harassment, but what’s the wrong way to do it. So let me start here, Jennifer, was Justin Trudeau right to suspend two MPs?

Jennifer Ditchburn:
Well I’d hesitate to pass judgment on that, but what I will say is that I think he is between a rock and a hard place. If you remember there were allegations against a Liberal senator that were brought in the last year by some women that worked on the Hill, and Trudeau found himself the subject of great criticism by people who said hey you had this file…that letter was sent to your office in x-month and it took this long for anyone to do anything. So if you put yourselves in their shoes and you think, okay, I’ve received these complaints, one of them to me personally, do I wait and not do anything or try to handle it in back channels, or do I take very public action? And you can see where the fear might be that if you don’t do anything publically that you’ll be accused subsequently of trying to cover something up.

Mark Kennedy:
You know, it’s very unfortunate how this whole episode has suddenly become politicized. I mean this is the last issue we should be dealing with in a political nature. You know without getting into the actual specifics of the allegations about which we know nothing, or even the names of the two male MPs, this place should not be the subject of any kind of harassment or any kind of intimidation. And so therefore, there needs to be a system in place. So when a Liberal leader is returning from a funeral in Hamilton for Corporal Cirillo and is approached by an NDP MP on the bus who apparently sits down next to him and says listen, you should know something. He gets back to Ottawa, he gathers his staff and says listen, I’ve just heard this, and we better look into it. What is he to do? I mean I suppose the question…the flip question would be if Tom Mulcair had been told that one of his male MPs had been acting inappropriately around a female MP of another party, would he take that MP out to the woodshed and give him a stern lecture or would he take action? These are not easy issues to deal with and when I suppose if you went…if you put one foot wrong, it probably would have been once he made the decision to do something proactively about this, he probably should have brought the NDP into the picture a bit more so that they would not then say we were blind sighted by this. We should have known.

Tom Clark:
Okay, but Jen, let me put this to you because the NDP have been saying that the real violation here was the fact that this was made public against the wishes of the two NDP MPs who are the alleged victims. In a situation like that, you know this is the stuff everybody’s trying to figure out, where do you come down? As Mark said on the one hand, it would be political suicide to do nothing about it, but then is it grossly insensitive to do something about it?

Jennifer Ditchburn:
Well first of all, we haven’t heard from these two women. We don’t really know their stories. We don’t even know if they had a problem with what happened. We’re only hearing it from other people who are saying that they are speaking on their behalf. And also, we don’t know the continuum of action that could have occurred. What were the other possibilities? Could there have been a mediator involved, as happens in many workplaces if you are the subject of sexual harassment. There’s a process that happens before it goes all the way up the chain. So it’s hard to know. What could they have done differently? I don’t know. I don’t know if you know… there seems to be no process that was available.

Mark Kennedy:
There is no process which is the total….which is the shameful part of this. How can we go through decades and generations in an institution where let’s face it, we’ve all known for a long time, it’s a male dominated place. The possibility of that kind of activity has always been there so why not have a process in place to deal with it?

Jennifer Ditchburn:
We know it’s a shame too Tom is that, I find that there is all this politics that we heard about at the end of the week. It overshadowed what I was hoping was going to be a positive discussion on Parliament Hill, which is a very male dominated place, about women, about how women are treated, about the kinds of challenges that women face. I think we were finally going to have that conversation. It got completely subsumed by this sort of chicanery between the Liberals and the NDP on this issue.

Mark Kennedy:
The problem is that the Liberals and the NDP don’t trust each other. They don’t like each other. There is a lot of bad blood for a lot of different reasons. And for that reason, they are not talking about this.

Tom Clark:
And because politics is a blood sport, everything is played to advantage. Because if you don’t you’re missing an opportunity and of course the other thing…the other story that it subsumed was the resignation of Dean Del Mastro, a Conservative MP, former Conservative MP, former Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, convicted of crimes and had to resign, but he gets to keep a million dollar pension.

Jennifer Ditchburn:
Well and there was some discussion this past week whether you know there could have been some sort of legislative action taken so that he wouldn’t have been able. I’m not so sure about that. They would have had to twist themselves into pretzels to figure out some way to keep him from keeping his pension. And that whole situation about Del Mastro is interesting because he was very well liked in his caucus. And I don’t know if you were watching but there was some standing ovation for him and so you know in your mind you automatically go and compare it to other cases like the senators that were suspended before even having been charged. Imagine the difference in attitude there.

Tom Clark:
Well what it really underlines is that both the case we were talking about of sexual harassment charges and the case of Dean Del Mastro, living on Parliament Hill is a very surreal experience for everybody who is there.

Mark Kennedy:
Well it is. As it was happening, I thought it was very surreal and very sad frankly.

Tom Clark:
Mark Kennedy of the Ottawa Citizen and Jen Ditchburn of the Canadian Press, thanks very much. Good having you here.

Jennifer Ditchburn:
Thanks Tom.

Mark Kennedy:
Thank you.

Tom Clark:
Well that’s our show for today. Remember on Tuesday, Global News will have live special coverage of Remembrance Day ceremonies here in Ottawa. The special begins at 10:30 eastern. Until then, have a great week and we’ll see you here next Sunday.