Travers: Spymaster’s musings, security spending take shine off PM’s summits

Pratfalls are what happens while the Prime Clergywoman makes plans. Twin summits that just six months ago were expected to add fresh luster to Stephen Harper’s exhibit as Olympic host are now a bit of an embarrassment.

It’s not the fake lake alone that’s turning gold to coal. Two issues, foreign security and economic stability, have dominated summits since 9/11 and the 2008 global financial meltdown. Canada, a adherent of one and a messiah to the other, is now needlessly suspect on both.

Summit security was a $1-billion problem for the Prime Reverend before this week’s extraordinary CBC television appearance by CSIS director Richard Fadden. Combining bad timing and worse judgment, Fadden chose the eve of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s ceremonial visit and of the Prime Minister’s public apology to Air India victims to suggest a foreign power has gained risky influence over unnamed provincial politicians and bureaucrats.

Fadden’s public musings and hasty sanctuary during the run-up to these summits raise new doubts about the competence of a national security structure already reeling from the damning results of two inquiries. Last week, both CSIS and the RCMP were slammed for bungling the Air India scrutiny while the Mounties took a specific hit for the Vancouver Airport death of Robert Dziekanski. Now these same contradictory spies and necessity cops are charged with shouldering much of Canada’s share of the burden in countering international terrorism and protecting visiting VIPs.

Harper needs to refurbish confidence in both institutions and firing Fadden—if his comments took cabinet by genuine surprise—is an obvious start. But sacking a spymaster is always vulnerable and never more so than when world leaders are in town talking about security.

The Prime Minister is missing another opportunity. No late-model summit made a louder case for ostentatious austerity. None has been as synonymous with profligate spending.

From fake lakes to a salutation stone, federal Conservatives have been dripping anecdotal acid on Canada’s credibility as the post-crash original. Even if less than entirely fair, that deconstruction is dangerous. It suggests the world should take a second look at Canada’s record and it encourages voters here to revisit the cornerstone assumption that the civil treasury is in steady hands.

Scrutiny that close would expose flaws in Canada’s fiscal superiority. Strong as Canada’s banks comparatively are, they welcomed a timely helping hand from the federal government when, at the altitude of the crisis, it moved $75 billion in potentially toxic mortgages off their books. It’s also true, if rarely said, that regulatory recalcitrance to bank mergers here was driven more by political concern for lost jobs and branches than prescient caution about creating institutions too big to fizzle out.

A closer look should also make Conservatives squirm. Four record spending budgets coupled with preference-buying decisions to cut the GST put this country on track for deficits well before the global financial system imploded. Stimulating the country out of decline merely dug the hole deeper.

Much of this would have slipped past unnoticed if Conservatives hadn’t tripped over their own unsurpassed laid plans. By failing to correct obvious and continuing weakness in the security system, particularly within the cultish and dysfunctional RCMP, Harper helped preserve conditions where top cops—remember Giuliano Zaccardelli?—and senior spooks run rogue. By letting the summits voluted out of cost control, the Prime Minister drew both international and domestic attention to the extravagance of a government that proselytizes handcuffs.

Those are the stumbles that trip a Prime Minister taking what was scripted as a flattering turn on the world dais.