Esprit de Corps

Written by Scott Taylor

14.12.11

For the past two weeks, Defence Minister Peter MacKay has been taking a considerable amount of flak for his use of a Canadian Forces Cormorant helicopter to airlift him from a private fishing lodge. When the story first surfaced this past September, the July 2010 incident was dismissed by MacKay as being part of a longplanned search-and-rescue exercise, and that it provided him a long-overdue opportunity to see first-hand such operations. That ruse enabled MacKay to temporarily put the issue on hold.

However, when documents released under the Access to Information Act became public last month, the paper trail indicated a somewhat different version of events. When air force brass first received the request from MacKay’s staff, their email traffic questioned the necessity of such an airlift. The defence minister had been on vacation at a fishing lodge in Labrador and would have needed to take just a 90-minute boat ride and a 30-minute car ride to catch his flight from Gander, Newfoundland. Although they are air force operations officers and not public affairs officials, those fielding the request immediately recognized the potential for negative press. “When the guy who’s fishing at the fishing hole next to the minister sees the big yellow helicopter arrive and decides to use his cell phone to video the minister getting on board and post it on YouTube, who will be answering the mail on that one?” wrote Colonel Bruce Ploughman. Despite his warnings of possible bad public relations, Ploughman ended the exchange by noting, “If we are tasked to do this, we of course will comply.” Obviously, someone on MacKay’s staff felt the minister should not have to endure a 90-minute boat ride, and someone senior to Ploughman in the air force chain of command agreed to authorize the $16,000 cost of the airlift, admittedly “under the guise… of search and rescue training.” The release of the contradicting emails had the same effect as the ladling of chum into a tank full of hungry sharks. Smelling blood, the opposition critics savagely attacked MacKay in the House of Commons. The Liberals demanded an apology, while the NDP has been calling for MacKay’s resignation from Cabinet.

In a very fortuitous turn of events, MacKay was urgently required as a last-minute substitute for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird at a NATO conference in Brussels last week. With MacKay mercifully out of the opposition’s crosshairs, Jay Paxton, the defence minister’s spokesperson, advised the media that his master was considering legal action against anyone who had publicly doubted his version of events. So, with MacKay fleeing the battlefield, and his embattled minions vowing to fight to the death, some unexpected relief arrived in the form of two of the Cormorant’s aircrew coming forward to defend MacKay. Retired Major Stephen Reid and still-serving Warrant Officer Morgan Biderman were part of the crew who retrieved their minister from the fishing lodge on that fateful summer day. Reid, the pilot of that flight, claimed that “This was a training flight that we were going to participate in…If the minister was able to slide his way in, in some fashion, that was fine with us.”

Biderman went even further in his assessment of the benefits achieved. “The positive aspects of Minister MacKay becoming actively involved in our training and the absolute trust he puts in the personnel of the air force are what need to be emphasized! If it has a spin off benefit of transporting him—them, where they need to be, I consider it a win-win for all concerned,” Biderman wrote in an email to the Defence Department’s public affairs office. Surprisingly, some Ottawa-based pundits believe that this unprecedented public support from the search-and-rescue operators puts the whole issue to rest. The fact is, it changes nothing. If the mayor of a major city arranged for an ambulance to whisk him to the airport to avoid rush-hour traffic under the guise of a better understanding of his city’s emergency services, no one would buy it. Even if the paramedics told reporters that it was a good chance for them to hone their highway driving skills and it was fun to have the mayor in their emergency vehicle it would change nothing. And if the hospital administrators had told the mayor’s staff ahead of time that the use of an ambulance in this case was not warranted, one would expect the mayor to apologize. This incident does not warrant MacKay’s resignation. His staff were wrong to request the airlift, but it is the air force members who are the guilty parties in all of this. They failed to trust their own instincts and by catering to MacKay’s whim, they failed to properly serve their minister. Every toddler would eat Smarties for breakfast if their mother let them.

Sometimes tough love is required.

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