The Canadian left is miffed about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s newly painted jet.
The government’s CC-150 Polaris recently received a new paint job as part of its scheduled six-year maintenance and upgrades. The new design and subsequent paint job added an extra $50,000 to the bill, and what’s even worse, according to detractors, are that the colours chosen were red, white and blue.
Hardly patriotic, argue the prime minister’s critics.
The decision to give the plane a more exciting exterior ran contrary to the advice of Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who clearly stated that the plane should stay grey so that it could continue to function as a military plane. It’s often used to transport military equipment and personnel.
Harper’s defenders are arguing that the new paint job is perfectly patriotic. It’s reminiscent of the Snowbirds’ colouring, and those who call it unpatriotic are simply looking for an excuse to find fault with the PM.
Perhaps, but the Snowbirds are primarily white and red, with only a dash of blue along the sides, while the Polaris’s entire undercarriage is blue, with only a thin lateral sweep of red. It sort of looks like it’s lost at sea.
Nit-picky though it seems to some, blue is, well, the Conservatives’ colour. It certainly isn’t Canada’s.
Moreover, the red, white and blue colour scheme is representative of so many countries that are not our own (including that really big, really powerful one just down south) that it seems strange to use it for our national aircraft, especially as Harper is often accused of embracing the more partisan American style of politics that most MPs disavow (publicly, at least).
Blue is Conservative, not Canadian, and the fact that blue features so heavily in the new design is of a piece with this government’s continued blurring of the lines between party and government.
In response, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said pointedly that “when we [the NDP] form government in 2015 we will not be painting that plane orange.” Presumably this is not simply because that would give the jet a sort of “tropical sunset” feel.
Again, it might seem pedantic or even trivial to be harping on such small symbolic details, but if our government wants to insist upon the integrity of our national symbols, as it does every time it uses a flag, a maple leaf, a crest or the word “Royal” to evoke the might and majesty of our country, then it’s not too much to suggest that it’s proper to maintain symbolic continuity, and keep the Conservative colours out of it.
But the problem isn’t that this is obviously a partisan decision — the problem is that it so obviously could be interpreted as a partisan decision, and nobody in the Conservative decision-making process stepped up to say: “Hmm, this could look bad.” I’d go so far as to say that they probably didn’t care.
It’s especially bad timing for the jet, since we’re receiving more and more details about the special discretionary fund in the Prime Minister’s Office that may be linked to Senator Mike Duffy’s scandal. It’s harder to defend the decision as nonpartisan when the PMO is being accused of using government money for non-governmental purposes.
Over the years, the federal Conservatives — and Harper in particular — have accrued a significant amount of criticism about their secretive and partisan habits: Being uncooperative and uncommunicative in Parliament, consolidating financial power in the PMO, running American-style attack ads during elections and insisting that civil servants call it the “Harper government” rather than the Government of Canada.
These are all indications of a specific style of government that many Canadians, including me, take issue with.
While the issue of the jet might seem like a small detail, or even a distraction in the face of larger and more important issues, it fits the regular pattern of this government’s failure to examine how its behaviour is perceived by average Canadians. I think the word I’m going for here is arrogance.
The paint job was but a small part of the plane’s overhaul, and the plane is but a small part of the larger pattern of instances where the Conservatives have blurred the line between government and party, but symbolically, it matters.
It’s yet another instance in which the Harper government has shown itself to be utterly uninterested in how self-serving its behaviour appears.
