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This month we review Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, one of the great precursers to modernist literature and a masterpiece of Russian theatre. It’s easy to see from Chekhov why a revolution was necessary to catapult the Russian state into the 20th century. No prizes are awarded to anyone who sees a similarity between Chekhov and Ibsen.

We continue our exploration of John Donne’s love poetry, and the lyrics to the earliest written music in the English language are contained in our LocSec’s message for this springtime month.

Our articles include a piece on how to bribe your way into the Chinese news media, and an insightful summary of the tragedy that has befallen public life in Canada, to wit the culture of lies.

And don’t forget our puzzles. If you get them both right, you’re clever indeed.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD, by Anton Chekhov

For immobility and despair, there’s little that can surpass this little gem except perhaps an Ibsen drama in which grandpapa hangs himself in the barn behind the house.

A landowning family has been traveling abroad and is ecstatic on its return. But sale of the estate is imminent to pay the mortgage. The family does not acknowledge the need to act. Evasion is its byword. A rich friend of the family shows them a way to keep the estate, but modernization is required. The orchard must be cut down and the land subdivided for summer homes. The family cannot even discuss this. Modernization is impossible. The orchard is sold.

That’s the plot in a nutshell.

It turns out that the trip abroad was a mini tragedy of its own. The matriarch is a widow. Her husband was a drunk. He died and their son drowned. She fell in love with someone and left the country, but he deserted her. Quelle joie de vivre!

Nevertheless, the key to the play is its balance. There’s language of hope without action, imminent tragedy (foreclosure) that is postponed to the end and situated offstage. Imagine a Hamlet in which the new King is better than Hamlet’s father (murder that results in social improvement), and the final duel never takes place but Hamlet simply goes back to school.

The student in The Cherry Orchard is a perpetual student. Money drops into his lap when needed most. The female head of the family can return to Paris, using money sent by a relative to help rescue the estate. All of this is deus ex machina.
There’s no real hope for them.

Underlying the play is another level of unreality: an orchard was not situated beside the manor, as in this play. And there were no cherry orchards. At most, parts of an orchard were devoted to cherries. And real cherry trees didn’t present the lovely cascade of blossoms that Chekhov depicts, but rather gnarled growth.

The play originated in Russian society at the turn of the 20th century. Decades of reversal in social policy had produced emancipation of serfs without the means for them to survive and prosper. Freedoms were followed by political repression, followed again by freedoms, but the prevailing attitude of government was the iron fist. Censorship was rife; passages in Chekhov were deleted, and in 1903 his plays were banned from theatres, which the working class could afford. A common joke was that it took ten years to graduate from university: five for study, four while you were expelled, and one while it was closed.

Chekhov’s father went bankrupt when he was 16, but Dickens’ father also went bankrupt. The dominant mood of their creative efforts is very different. Chekhov died of tuberculosis at 44. Some of his plays are more interesting than others, but don’t turn to them for bonhomie and good cheer.

AR

Click here to see the Calendar for this month. Use it as a reference by rolling your mouse over the links or just as a reminder. Bookmark it today! Email us if you want to try something new. We have glorious hockey nights and a superb book club. The second Tuesdays rock. Find our FaceBook page and Calendar for more.

1) Spring used to be the beginning of our calendar. This practice antedated Christianity, and reflects the rebirth of the sun or renewal of life. The Church adopted the custom, and for many centuries our ‘year’ began with easter. We mark this rotation back to the beginning with a simple and classical question, namely how to calculate the sum of the first x natural numbers without adding them all up.

2) Our first question involved the triangular numbers, which are 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, 1+2+3+4, etc. What digits can never appear at the end of a triangular number? What is the only triangular number that is a prime? Can you find a natural number that can’t be represented as the sum of 3 or less triangular numbers?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Gauss gave us the answer, which is (x/2)(y + z), where x is the number of numbers being added, y is the first number, and z is the last. Thus if we’re adding the first 12 natural numbers, the first number is 1 and the last is 12. The formula gives us (6)(1+12) which amounts to 78. The usual story is that Gauss discovered this method while solving a problem set by his teacher in elementary school, and that the numbers were 1 through 100. Gauss himself, however, said that his teacher had given the class a particular five-digit number and asked the students to add a particular three-digit number to it 100 times in succession, then find the sum of that series. Does the above method work if the story is changed as we’ve indicated?

2) The digits that can never appear at the end of a triangular number are 2, 4, 7, or 9. The only triangular number that is a prime is 3. All natural numbers can be represented as the sum of 3 or fewer triangular numbers (discovered by our friend Gauss).

[This month’s puzzles are adapted from Posamentier and Lehmann’s Mathematical Amazements and Surprises]

We present this filler until our May message arrives. The filler is an acknowledgement that our Local Secretaries are human. They have lives with priorities that extend beyond Mensa. They practise medecine. They take courses with exams. They fall ill, and otherwise are forced to delay obligations which they would like to perform but cannot. We pay tribute to our Local Secretaries. They work hard, and we love them. May they thrive. When our May message is ready, we shall post it right here. Meanwhile, here is the oldest written song in the English language:

Cuckoo Song [Brit. Lib. MS Harley 978, f. 11v]

Sumer is ycomen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

Ewe bleteth after lamb,
Loweth after calve cow,
Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Merye sing cuckou!
Cuckou, cuckou,
Wel singest thou cuckou:
Ne swik thou never now!

COME, madam, come, all rest my powers defy ;
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet, and show
The hairy diadems which on you do grow.
Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Revealed to men ; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven-like Mahomet’s paradise ; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite ;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee ;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views ;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
— Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;
There is no penance due to innocence :
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

(For more love and sensual poetry, look at Elsa’s web sites, for example Elsa’s Wild Poetry. Also dive into Elsa’s mind and heart at Elsa’s Love Poetry or Elsa’s General Page.)

The OK Corral, except the gunfight takes place every five minutes and the good guys win by default. What a system, thought Steven as he rang the bell and a South American in tux and tails answered. The man was tall. He had a broad lined forehead and the wide cheekbones of the Incas. Intelligence gleamed from his pores, tempered with the prudence of the conquered. His glance probed Steven’s skin for what made him tick.

Columbian, Steven guessed. And not the butler, definitely not the butler. Steven gave his name and asked the man’s in return. Gabriel Inarritu, and yes he was a cousin by marriage of Alejandro. “Muy bien de acuerdo,” Steven said. “Alejandro is a talented man.” They passed a few minutes in Spanish, Columbian style and not up-country either. Steven listened to the pure vowels rip through the air. “Let me take you to the meeting. I have a few chores before I go.”

“Chores in a black tie?” Steven asked.

“Chores in a black tie, tick, tick, tick, as T.S. Eliot might have said.” An ungainly smile creased Gabriel’s lips. “Not everyone likes Nike and Salomon. I work better when I’m dressed up.”

“You think quick and clean, keep your eye on the ball, don’t make mistakes.”

Gabriel nodded briefly, escorted Steven down a long hall and around a couple of corners. The floor was parquet, the corridor enlivened with 18th century porcelain.

“What do you do?” asked Steven.

“Research.”

“Remind me to answer a question of yours one day,” Steven said.

Gabriel reacted with surprise. “I do research. Sam asks me something, I get him the answer.”

“They must be profound questions.”

Gabriel shrugged. He opened a door, Sam called out “Our guest, Steven Lin,” and Steven entered an octagonal chamber decorated in blue watered silk that no decorator could succeed in ruining. The chairs were Jacquard, the ceiling high, the walls shrouded and swagged, the floor draped with a Persian rug that a god had woven. The room looked soundproof. Steven had the impression there were a couple of other doors behind the arras, but he couldn’t be sure.

Sam jabbed his stubby forefinger at each person in the room in turn. “You know this thin fusspot here, Ernest Carrera, oncologist and head of the Albany Cancer Clinic. Ernest cleared his throat. He cleared his throat again and picked at his collar that was too tight.

“Next to him, Erskine Thorne.” Sam pointed again. “If you see someone wearing a light brown sweater, that’s him.” Freckles dotted Erskine’s cheekbones and sprawled across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were watery, as though he’d just been crying. “Erskine has been my lawyer more years than I care to admit. Isn’t that right, Erskine?”

Erskine smiled faintly. “I want to get back to this drug business. Can’t we cut the intros short? Steven will figure out who’s who.” He spoke at a murmur, almost too fast to understand, like a sprinter at a geriatrics meeting. His voice was bass and reached itself out of the floor like a sea monster.

“…. Leokadia Thorne, and Fred Beaudine for liaison with Albert.” Fred winked at Steven. He held a notebook in his lap. Steven guessed that everyone else had perfect memories. No one else had paper.

Sam: “Albert is in a heap of shit. The papers blame him for a dozen deaths and more to come. Worse, Americans are a forgiving lot and they have a short attention span, but the papers say he screwed up the distribution of the Immortality pills. They say he couldn’t organize his way out of a brown paper bag. Americans don’t like incompetence. When you fight an election in this country, you should believe in Santa Claus before you admit you messed up.”

Steven agreed 100%. Americans, he knew for a fact, wanted God for President but would criticize him as though he were the Devil. And no amount of argument would change their minds. It was a habit, and American habits were sacred. Pick your battle, Steven told himself. “I agree,” he said. “But our blue ribbon team is on top of it. Read tomorrow’s headlines, you’ll see that the cure is on the way. The real problem hasn’t surfaced yet and both parties are to blame. It’s the economy. No one knows what to do. Jobs are down the toilet. You can’t borrow money without signing your name in blood. In a couple of days, the papers will be all over the economy. Companies cut corners and the result is tainted pills. Cities don’t have cash, they can’t afford to hire quality drivers, pills get stolen. We’re on it. We’ve also covered the next exit on the highway. In a campaign there’s a big difference between rhetoric and real answers. Brull is going to tackle mortgage costs head on. And your food bill. Your hospital charges when you get sick, food inspection, gas for your car. This is a staged advertisement plan. The problems are the Democrats’ fault and the Republicans have the answer. Vote for Albert; your troubles will disappear. It’s smoke and mirrors, but that’s politics. Watch the ads, boys. We’re on the job.”

Paella

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons dried oregano
salt and black pepper to taste
2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into 2 inch pieces

2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 cups uncooked short-grain white rice
1 pinch saffron threads
1 bay leaf
1/2 bunch Italian flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 quart chicken stock
2 lemons, zested

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 Spanish onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 pound chorizo sausage, casings removed and crumbled
1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined

Directions
1. In a medium bowl, mix together 2 tablespoons olive oil, paprika, oregano, and salt and pepper. Stir in chicken pieces to coat. Cover, and refrigerate.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet or paella pan over medium heat. Stir in garlic, red pepper flakes, and rice. Cook, stirring, to coat rice with oil, about 3 minutes. Stir in saffron threads, bay leaf, parsley, chicken stock, and lemon zest. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce heat to medium low. Simmer 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a separate skillet over medium heat. Stir in marinated chicken and onion; cook 5 minutes. Stir in bell pepper and sausage; cook 5 minutes. Stir in shrimp; cook, turning the shrimp, until both sides are pink.
4. Spread rice mixture onto a serving tray. Top with meat and seafood mixture.

Nutritional Information
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 736. Total Fat: 35.1g. Cholesterol: 202mg

China is notorious for censoring politically delicate news coverage. But it is more than willing to let flattering news about Western and Asian businesses appear in print and broadcast media — if the price is right.

Want a profile of your chief executive to appear in the Chinese version of Esquire? That will be about $20,000 a page, according to the advertising department of the magazine, which has a licensing agreement with the Hearst Corporation in the United States.

Need to get your top executive on a news program by state-run China Central Television? Pay $4,000 a minute, says a network consultant who arranges such appearances.

A flattering article about your company in Workers’ Daily, the Communist Party’s propaganda newspaper? About $1 per Chinese character, the paper’s advertising agent said.

Though Chinese laws and regulations ban paid promotional material that is not labeled as such, the practice is so widespread that many publications and broadcasters even have rate cards listing news-for-sale prices.

And while Western companies and many Chinese journalists are loath to discuss the subject, public relations and advertising firms are sometimes surprisingly candid about their roles as brokers in buying flattering coverage, referred to here as “soft news” or “paid news.”

Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s biggest public relations and advertising agencies, acknowledged that it pays Chinese media outlets for client coverage in some categories.

“Our policy is to advise our clients to not participate in such activities,” the agency’s Beijing office wrote in an e-mail, in response to a reporter’s questions. “However, in some industries, such as luxury, the practice of soft news placements is very common so this is something that we have also done before.”

A Chinese account manager for another American public relations firm was strikingly frank about paying for coverage, although she spoke only on condition of anonymity to avoid riling her industry colleagues and her employer.

“If you want more media coverage, that’s easy to do — we have plenty of channels to get your company shown on television, and in top magazines and newspapers,” she said in a telephone interview.

Media specialists, and Chinese journalists intent on playing by ethical rules, deplore the paid placements they say are all too common in the nation’s media.

“Corruption has become a lifestyle in today’s China,” said Sun Xupei, a journalism fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “But when it happens in journalism it’s even worse than other fields, because people feel there’s nothing they can really trust.”

Executives at the Chinese language version of Esquire magazine say they regularly publish soft news features that are essentially ads masquerading as news.

One example was a feature about a European audio company, Bang & Olufsen, that supplies equipment to Audi, the automaker. Nothing in the magazine indicated that the Chinese Esquire had been paid to run it.

But the magazine received at least $10,000 a page for the five-page feature, according to the publication’s executives, who e-mailed images of it as an example of the paid genre. They, and others who helped produce the article, said Audi was involved in the payment. A spokesman in China for Audi declined to comment. Cheryl Sim, a Bang & Olufsen spokeswoman in the company’s Singapore office, said it was not the company’s practice to pay for news coverage. “We certainly did not pay in this Esquire case,” she said. “But we’ll look into the matter.” The Hearst Corporation declined to comment.

Not all business and company profiles in Chinese media are planted and paid for, of course. But even when they are not, Chinese media organizations often have much laxer rules than many mainstream Western journalists for accepting payments from sources for news coverage.

The highly regarded Chinese newspaper, 21st Century Business Herald, which is better known for its investigative reporting, recently ran an interview with Christophe Navarre, chief executive of the French wine and spirits maker Moët Hennessy.

The article appeared after the company, with the help of Ruder Finn, an American public relations firm, agreed to pay the airfare, lodging and food costs for nine journalists, including one from the 21st Century paper, to visit Moët Hennessy’s chateau in western China. Of the media organizations that rode along, only the international news agency Reuters paid its own travel and other costs, Ruder Finn said.

Moët Hennessy and Ruder Finn, however, insist they did not make any other payments to entice coverage. “Although we know it’s a normal practice in China, we never pay the media,” said Jean-Michel Dumont, chairman of Ruder Finn Asia.

China is not alone in bending boundaries. Media outlets in Europe, Japan, the Philippines, Latin America and even the United States may venture into various gray areas, encouraging companies to pay for journalists’ travel or underwriting favorable reporting or agreeing to take out advertising packages in exchange for coverage. (Mainstream American journalism ethics, including the ground rules of The New York Times, prohibit such practices.)

But media specialists say nowhere are such quid pro quos as common and as aggressively pursued as in China — to the frustration of Chinese business executives.

“If one of my companies came up with a cure for cancer, I still couldn’t get any journalists to come to the press conference without promising them a huge envelope filled with cash,” said one Shanghai-based private equity investor, insisting that he not to be named because he feared journalists would boycott covering his companies altogether.

Six big American companies that operate in China, including Ford and General Motors, declined to comment for this article about the Chinese practice of paying for coverage. So did the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, which represents many of the biggest United States companies operating in China. None of the six companies have been accused of making the payments.

If American multinationals made off-the-books payments directly to Chinese reporters, editors or producers, rather than simply buying space or air time through media agencies, the American companies could be at risk of violating the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law prohibits people working for American companies that operate abroad from paying bribes or making corrupt payments to foreign officials to obtain or keep business or obtain other business advantages.

It is unclear whether any Americans have been prosecuted on suspicion of paying journalists in China or elsewhere.

“Journalists are considered government officials because generally all the press is government-controlled in China,” said Lesli Ligorner, a Shanghai-based lawyer at Simmons & Simmons, an international law firm. “So making an illicit payment to a journalist would be an F.C.P.A. violation.”

Such payments also violate Chinese law. China’s propaganda authorities prohibit news outlets and journalists from accepting payments to cover news conferences or to publish news. Accepting secret payments can also be prosecuted under the nation’s laws against bribery, and some cases have been. Convictions can result in prison sentences.

But so much money is sloshing around, analysts say, that enforcement is rare in China. Instead, the government occasionally issues general warnings, which go widely ignored.

Newspaper and magazine advertising departments continue to openly discuss their rates — even when a researcher making inquiries identifies herself as working for The New York Times.

“If your company’s boss wants to be shown twice, in an audience seat, for a total of five seconds, the average price is $5,000 on some popular news programs,” said Wang Limin, an account manager at Yashi Media, a Beijing agency that helps companies obtain coverage in print and broadcast media.

“If your boss wants to comment on something brief and we shoot him in a news program for 15 seconds, it would be $9,000. And if your boss wants an exclusive interview for 10 minutes, the rate is much higher.”

(David Barboza, New York Times, 3April2012)

The who-knew-what about the real costs of the F-35 fighter jet Canada wants to purchase is worrisome enough. But at the heart of the fiasco is a far more serious concern about what public honesty means to this government.

It’s a sad state that few Canadians appear surprised by the auditor general’s findings that Parliament was kept in the dark over the real costs of this program and what looks to be a $10-billion overrun.

Many seem to assume that misleading and denying whenever it suits is a government’s normal default position. After all, this government seems to have done it for years on Afghanistan and with its other problems in national defence.

In my own attempts to unravel the F-35’s real costs I never once met a single soul outside government and knowledgeable about defence purchases who believed the prime minister’s promise that the planes could be delivered for a bargain-rate $75 million each.

I never met anyone inside the Canadian military who thought so either.

I’m sure thousands in the aviation industry who follow these programs, especially in the U.S. and Europe, simply assumed Ottawa was dealing in fairy tales for public consumption, from which it refused to budge.

This is why we need to see if this current mess is part of a pattern of official “misstatements” on defence matters. If so, we’ve got a serious national problem.

If we look for trends, the Afghanistan mission offers so many of these quicksand moments over direction, policy and costs that it will baffle historians for years. It certainly confused Stephen Harper’s own minister in its day.

Defence Minister Peter McKay in the cockpit of a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in July 2010. Canada is planing to buy 65 of the new jets from Lockheed Martin, but at what price? (Reuters)Remember when the prime minister was never going to “cut and run” but then suddenly switched 180 degrees to launch the 2008 election with the promise of a full pullout in 2011.

The defence department was stunned, and so was his minister Peter MacKay.

“I don’t know,” MacKay told reporter Murray Brewster when asked how the historic shift came about. “I heard about it the same time you did.”

Military officers were also perplexed when Harper reversed himself again at the Lisbon NATO Summit in 2010 and committed 900 Canadian Forces personnel to stay on in Afghanistan for some years after the pullout on a training mission.

He was under enormous pressure at the time from Washington to help out, and described the training mission as not very risky.

But everyone involved knew that foreign military trainers were fast becoming the new targets of insurgent groups, as the past many months have clearly demonstrated.

Throughout the war, inquiring journalists found our military to have become increasingly secretive and at times even untrustworthy, as National Defence and PMO communications staff snatched control of information away from officers in the field.

For long periods Canadians were denied information on the number of Afghan detainees that Canadian soldiers handled, the tally of firefights our soldiers were involved in, the number of attacks on Canada’s main base in Kandahar, even the full number of our wounded.

What’s more, they were constantly assured the Taliban was being battered into weakness, despite quite contrary evidence.

As for the total cost of the Afghanistan adventure? That was, and remains, as murky as the cost overruns of the F-35 program.

Even supporters of the war, like leading historians Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson, in their Lessons Learned? study last October revealed horrible mismanagement.

Today that study reads like a primer for the F-35 shambles. We see layer after layer of weak political leadership, jealous bureaucratic infighting, and a complete lack of strategic insight from the top on down.

The prime minister’s office has not only rigorously controlled every aspect of government communications, muting the military’s own voice, but it seemed determined to give Canadians as little information as possible on the war, the study said.

In the historians’ words: “The prime minister may have concluded that the war could not be won, was politically costly and, therefore, the less said of aims and objectives the better.”

The same attitude, of saying as little as possible, seems to have been at play again during this long process over the F-35 purchase, with the government simply refusing to retreat from its predictions that these next-generation jets would cost only $15 billion over a 20-year period.

That is quite a gap from the $25 billion lifetime cost that others, including the parliamentary budget officer (and even some DND officials, the auditor general has now revealed) felt was reasonable.

When pressed, Harper’s team even denies it has agreed to buy the plane. Yet it was the only warplane ever held up for Canada’s defence needs, while a fresh competition involving other planes was totally ruled out.

I’d like to think our top soldiers would refuse to go along with misleading Parliament. However, the public relations domination of National Defence has been eating away at even some core ethics of our military for some years now. The way it did in the RCMP.

Think of the number of events where misleading stories are put out there. Defence Minister Peter MacKay uses a search-and-rescue training flight to prolong a fishing trip. Any waste is denied, until the media shakes out the details.

Then, as payback, military officials tamely sent over information on opposition members’ flights to the minister’s office, so he could throw these back at his opponents in question period.

There was also the case last fall, when reports leaked out that Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk had used a government jet to connect to a family vacation in the Caribbean. His staff bitterly complained that he had been set up by “higher ups” in government and it’s widely believed he felt that way too.

Petty? No, it suggests just how much dark infighting is going on between defence and politicians, as the culture of secrecy and even intimidation spreads.

At times, these attempts to mislead can be quite farcical. Like last summer when one of Canada’s four submarines crashed on the ocean floor and the deputy-commander of the navy dismissed the incident as a mere “fender-bender.”

Actually, the hole in the hull was so extensive that the sub commander was relieved of his command and HMCS Corner Brook is not expected back in service until 2016.

This trend towards denial makes everything about the misstated F-35 billions a deeply serious affair.

We really need to know how deep the deception went in this case. And we ought to be much more curious about what is being carried out in our names under the cloak of secrecy.

(Brian Stewart, CBC News, 4 April 2012)

In retrospect, there’s still nothing quite as startling as this in the auditor general’s report on the F-35 program: page 27. That’s where Auditor General Michael Ferguson skewered the government with evidence that the charge dogging it for two years was true: that it concealed the full cost of the new fighters.

Ferguson’s Page 27 lays out the facts very simply to show that the government told itself the costs were $10 billion higher than the figure it gave to the public.

In one column, Ferguson shows the internal estimate that was “used for decision making,” one month before the government announced its decision to buy the F-35 in July of 2010. The figures were not made public — until Ferguson found them.

They showed a purchase price of $8.9 billion, plus personnel, operating and maintenance costs of $16.1 billion, for a total of $25 billion.

Ferguson said that’s too low — largely because the costs were estimated over only 20 years when the plane may be in service for nearly twice that long — 36 years. Still, the estimate did include those personnel, operating costs and maintenance, among other extras.

The $25 billion figure also held up well when compared with an independent estimate made nine months later, in March of 2011, by the Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Page said the “total ownership cost” would be closer to $29 billion. And the difference —even at $4 billion — seems surprisingly small considering the large uncertainties in both estimates. Does anyone know what jet fuel will cost in 2030?

The similarity of the estimates seems more striking still, considering the different methods used to reach them. Instead of the government’s 20-year lifespan, the PBO used 30 years — but the bottom lines still came out close. So did the details: the government said personnel, operating and maintenance would cost $16 billion; the PBO said operating and support would cost $14 billion. They reach those figures differently, but still end up in nearly the same place.

So, give or take a few billion — which is what you have to do with these gargantuan projects — there’s not a whole lot of difference to argue about. The problem is that the government did argue, and strongly. With an election looming, it denounced the PBO, his methodology and his total — even though it was not far off its own. What changed?

Answer: for public consumption — poof! — the government made $10.4 billion disappear.

It did that by simply removing, entirely, the entries for contingency ($860 million), for operating costs ($4.8 billion) and personnel ($4.7 billion.) At a stroke, the $25 billion figure it used internally shrank to $14.7 billion. And thereby hangs a tale.

In the wake of the auditor general’s revelations, the government has argued that operating costs were properly excluded, since those costs would be incurred with any plane we buy and are paid today for the CF-18s.

That explanation does not fit with the Treasury Board guidelines, or with previous scoldings by the auditor general, with which the government has agreed — or said it did. The auditor’s argument is that we still have to disclose and to budget for all the costs, even if we are going to pay them anyway.

The government’s insistence that operating costs are “paid anyway” also runs into two other problems. First, the F-35s will be more costly to operate and maintain than the existing CF-18s — according to the Pentagon, much more costly. So, at the very least, the difference has to be counted as a new, additional cost beyond what we’re paying now. Second, the claim that operating costs should not be included doesn’t explain why they were included in the internal estimate.

A third problem is that the government, despite having that estimate for its own use in June of 2010, insisted that it did not exist five months later. Here, the story gets even stranger.

In November of 2010, the House finance committee demanded “all documents that outline acquisition costs, lifecycle costs, and operational requirements associated with the F-35 program” be produced immediately. The Department of National Defence said this was impossible because it would take 10 weeks of work by the entire F-35 program management team. “As such, a complete response to the request cannot be provided within the required seven calendar days.” the Department huffed.

So the incredible, disappearing ten billion stayed out of sight during the election campaign. But not forever.

(Terry Milewski, CBC, 13April2012)

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