National Post - September 20, 2011
By Colin Kenny
Anyone working on Parliament Hill is used to cartoon journalism. Often the target is the Senate. For the moment it’s the military.
Gen. Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, has been skewered by simplistic reporting this week. He is right to be indignant, wrong to be surprised, and out of luck if he thinks many in the media are going to stop and put everything in perspective.
When a reporter creates a simple image of someone with power or privilege abusing their position for personal purposes, an indignant response is just a tag-on, a footnote to the story. The public has already digested the original scurrilous image, unfair or not. And the news cycle moves on.
Gen. Natynczyk has been pretty well known to the public for leading the Canadian Forces during some tough times in Afghanistan. But now he’s much better known for supposedly flying high-cost government jets anywhere he pleases. The fact that Natynczyk’s use of those jets was both understandable – and responsible – doesn’t have much to do with anything.
In this case, Robert Fife, parliamentary bureau chief for CTV news, is the original cartoonist. The horrific allegation: Gen. Natynczyk regularly flies off to family vacations and hockey games at outrageous cost to the taxpayer. What cost? According to Fife, more than a million dollars worth of flights over the past three years.
Other news organizations climb on board, and by Monday the Globe and Mail website is calling Natynczyk the “Jet-setting general.”
I’ve had my differences of opinion with Gen. Natynczyk on defence issues, but I respect him as a hard-working guy, proud of his role on working toward resuscitating the Canadian Forces. He knows how to lead, and his troops respect him. The fact that he’s a family man but has spent Christmas in Afghanistan for the last three years, personally serving out turkey dinners to the troops, tells you something.
So let’s examine the allegations against this man and see how he went from being a pillar of integrity to a media target in 48 hours.
Natynczyk is in effect the Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Forces. Half the job of a CEO is boosting the image of the company and communicating with both workers and the public.
This general has worked tirelessly at that part of the job, putting in long hours at what appear to fun events but are really hard work – such as hockey games at which the Forces were being honoured, as well as sad events – such soldiers’ funerals and memorial services.
Canada, you may recall, is a huge country, so he invariably flies to these events. His job is a demanding and complex one, so he often takes Challenger jets, purchased for purposes just such as these. Not only does that allow him flexibility with his busy schedule, it allows him to bring aids, do work on the flight, and to have classified communications with key people.
That kind of communication is essential. Anyone who is familiar with the 9-11 disaster knows that the U.S. air force responded slowly and ineffectively to the hijackings that won the day. When disasters happen, top military commanders need to be in the loop.
Now, think back to what the original CTV story said was the cost of employing the Challenger for Natynczyk’s many missions: “Flight records obtained by CTV show he's using the Challenger aircraft as an expensive alternative to regular commercial flights, racking up more than $1 million since 2008 on everything from a flight to the sunny Caribbean to hockey games with his family.”
Let’s deal with the cost first. Canada has a fleet of six executive jets to get senior politicians and people important to running the country around, when speed and efficiency are essential. Those jets are there – the cost of purchasing them, maintaining them and paying for pilots and maintenance crews is the same whether the aircraft are flying, or not.
So why would a reporter include these kinds of fixed costs into calculating the cost of Natynczyk’s flights? Duh. Because “more than a million dollars” makes a better story than maybe “a few hundred thousand dollars.”
When I look at the numbers, some of these flights cost well under a thousand dollars – sometimes a few hundred dollars – per person, which isn’t outrageous given the advantages over commercial flights.
Here’s a second point, which the general has made. Because the current government has been reticent about using the jets, they don’t get flown as often as they need to in order to keep their pilots qualified. Perhaps some of the jets should be sold under the current austerity initiatives. But as long as the government keeps them, they have to be flown, and sometimes they will be flown empty to maintain pilots’ qualifications unless somebody like Natynczyk makes good use of them.
Finally, the “flight to the sunny Caribbean.” It seems the general had booked a vacation trip to St. Maarten but let his family go ahead. Why? Because he felt an obligation to stay behind and attend a ramp ceremony for four Canadian soldiers and Michelle Lang, a Calgary Herald journalist killed in Afghanistan.
His minister, knowing how much time Natynczyk puts in serving both the quick and the dead, didn’t hesitate in telling the general to take the Challenger.
For this, Michelle Lang’s colleagues brand him “the Jet-setting general?”
Hey, I’m used to cartoons. But this one is very badly drawn. Perhaps the general should get into the practice of posting every flight he takes on his website, so his transparency can never again be questioned. And perhaps he will decide, as he said he might in the wake of conversations with the prime minister and opposition defence critics, to repay the commercial airline costs of the flight to St. Maarten.
But nobody in the Canadian media will repay the hurt done to a hard-working military leader whose main problem has been he tries to do too much for his country.
The Jet-setting general? Hardly. But the damage is done, and the news cycle moves on.
[Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. Kennyco.sen.parl.gc.ca]