The High Road (40 page)

Several ministers actually spoke up in support of Angus, including some whom I had tagged as opponents at the beginning of the meeting. Never underestimate the McLintock powers of persuasion. The PM kept his own counsel, but listened intently, taking a few notes now and then. The debate raged for another hour. I was watching the clock and getting nervous. I caught Angus’s attention and pointed to my watch. He checked his and visibly started.

“Prime Minister, I think I’ve done all I can here, so I’ll leave you to it.”

With Angus and Coulombe agreeing to disagree, and to dislike one another for the foreseeable future, Bradley Stanton walked us out to the anteroom and then played his last card.

“Just to remind you two loose cannons, now that you’ve presented your report to Cabinet, it becomes subject to all the rules governing Cabinet security and confidentiality. You must not release this report or discuss its contents with anyone. Is that clear?”

By the look of the gathering storm on his face, I thought Angus was going to have an aneurysm. His beard seemed to twitch and vibrate. Bradley took two steps backwards as Angus appeared ready to detonate. But when the words finally came, they were calm and quiet, but delivered through a locked jaw.

“No, it is not clear. We promised to release the report to Canadians at the same time as we delivered it to the Prime Minister. That was the agreement the PM signed at the outset. Well, the PM now has our report. Caucus and Cabinet have been briefed, and we intend to keep our promise, Mr. Stanton.”

Angus turned on his heel and headed for the door. I saluted Bradley and left him standing there in stunned silence. Well, the stunned silence didn’t last for long. I caught up to Angus as we exited Centre Block to the dying strains of Bradley’s crazed cries.

“Don’t you do it, Angus! You’ll be out if you do. Danny boy, you’re through too. You’ll never …”

I watched the birth of a smile on Angus’s face as we headed directly across the street to 150 Wellington. Had Bradley known where we were going, I’m certain he’d have done more to stop us, not excluding physical assault.

“Now this is getting interestin’” was all Angus said.

I made a quick call as we walked, delivered the prearranged secret coded message, then turned off my cellphone.

Lindsay and Muriel were waiting for us in the lobby of the National Press Building. Lindsay held two Kinko’s shopping bags. When we reach them, she lifted first one bag, then the other.

“French and English. We’re all set.”

I gave Lindsay a quick squeeze. Angus seemed a bit surprised to see Muriel.

“I didnae want to drag you into the city for this.”

“Are you daft? Pity the man or beast who gets in my way today,” Muriel replied, while smoothing the shoulders of Angus’s rumpled suit. “Now go forth and be Angus.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were all set. Back across the street,
the Cabinet meeting was breaking up. Ministers expecting to run the gauntlet of reporters as they tried to get back to their offices were surprised that not a single member of the press gallery was waiting outside the Cabinet room. That’s because they were all with us in the main media studio, with cameras primed, notebooks opened, and microphones poised. Angus and I sat at the front table. Muriel sat near the back grinning almost maniacally at all who looked her way. Lindsay, looking stunning, had just about finished handing out freshly printed copies of the McLintock Report to the thirty-five or forty reporters in the room. At noon, I cleared my throat and raised my hand to quiet the buzz.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, I think we’re ready to begin.” I paused to allow the cameras to turn on and the room to settle into silence. “I’m Daniel Addison, EA to Angus McLintock, Member of Parliament for Cumberland-Prescott. You will know that the Prime Minister appointed Professor McLintock to investigate the collapse of the Alexandra Bridge just over three weeks ago. The final report is being released today and I believe is now in your hands. The Prime Minister has reviewed the report, and the caucus has been briefed. We’ve just come from Cabinet where Angus presented his findings. I’ll let Professor McLintock take it from here.”

“Thank you, Daniel. Good afternoon. I’ve not prepared formal remarks but let me give you the headline and then I’ll walk you through our findings. The Alexandra Bridge did not collapse because it was poorly designed. It did not collapse because of a buildup of ice. It did not collapse because of high winds. No, the Alexandra Bridge fell into the Ottawa River as a result of twenty years of federal government negligence in the almighty quest to slay the deficit. Had we adhered to the prescribed maintenance schedule set out by the officials of the department, the Alexandra Bridge would be serving us well for the next century. If we do not address our crumbling infrastructure, the Alexandra Bridge will be only the first of many bridges
to collapse. In short, the deficit was not eliminated, it was merely transformed. The deficit lives on in our crumbling roads, highways, ports, bridges, canals, and every other part of our rusting national infrastructure.”

Just as Angus was hitting his stride, an old man I couldn’t quite place hobbled into the room and shuffled over to sit with Muriel.

“Courtesy of the four-year electoral horizon, we’ve made poor choices in government spending. We know we’ll have to rebuild our roads. But we let them decay to the point that we’ll need to disburse much more public money to fix them than if we’d sustained an appropriate maintenance allocation all along. But inspecting bridges and repaving roads don’t seem interesting or exciting enough when the writ drops and the election campaign starts.”

Angus paused to open the report.

“Here are the key recommendations:

• Immediate inspection of all infrastructure including bridges, highways, water filtration systems, canals, ports, nuclear power plants, and generating stations, whether or not they are in federal jurisdiction. After all, a classic method of trimming the deficit has been to download programs to lower levels of government and cut back federal transfer payments to pay for it all.
  

• Immediate investment in tomorrow’s federal Budget to address some of the most urgent infrastructure problems, those that threaten public safety. We’ve recommended $20 billion over ten years with $8 billion of it committed in the first two years.
  

• A longer-term program of infrastructure investment to return our roads, harbours, power plants, etc. to the level Canadians deserve.
  

• Fund this infrastructure renewal by delaying the promised tax cuts and debt payment, while keeping the deficit at zero.
  

——

“I dislike deficits as much as the next person. But I dislike subterfuge even more. Canadians were told with great fanfare that the deficit had been wrestled to the ground. Tripe. Pure unadulterated tripe. We still have a deficit. It’s all around us in our crumbling infrastructure.”

Angus again paused for a moment. He looked out at the crowd and found Muriel and the old man sitting next to her. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“I wish to highlight a brief section in our report entitled ‘The Role of the Civil Service.’ Since democracy’s earliest days, politicians, to shield their own ineptitude, have blamed their officials for bad advice, incomplete information, and incompetence. With this in mind, let the record show that for the last twenty years, the dedicated civil servants in Infrastructure Canada and its predecessor, the Department of Public Works, have steadfastly provided Liberal and Conservative governments alike with clear and consistent advice as to the consequences of this systemic underfunding, and have continuously recommended against it. Neither the Liberal regime twenty years ago nor the Conservative governments of the last fifteen years heeded their wise counsel. As a result, our infrastructure is decayed and, in some cases, unsafe. As well, one of the consequences civil servants have often cited, and which has now come to pass, is that it will cost the taxpayer much more to rebuild our national infrastructure than it would have had we maintained appropriate maintenance programs.

“I want to thank these men and women for their professionalism and service over the years. In researching this report, and in my many sessions with them, I found them always to provide balanced and unbiased advice, never partisan. They acted in keeping with the finest traditions of civil servants, when clearly they had cause to feel discouraged, if not angry. Like our politicians, there are some outstanding officials and some who are just along for the ride, putting in their time for their indexed pension. I’ve not met too many from the latter category but I can say from
what I’ve read in the files and learned from speaking to senior officials from decades past, each government, whether Liberal or Tory, was served by talented and dedicated civil servants who acted responsibly and prudently at every turn. It is unfortunate that the same cannot be said for the politicians they served.

“Let me introduce the Deputy Minister of Public Works from twenty years ago, when this sorry saga of neglect began. Harold Silverberg fought the tide until he was swamped by it. Unable to support a government bent on undermining our infrastructure, he quietly and honourably resigned. His memoranda to the minister of the time foretell precisely what has happened.”

As the cameras swivelled to find Harold Silverberg at the back, Muriel patted his hand on the armrest they shared, while his eyes blinked and glistened.

Angus closed the report and nodded to me.

“Professor McLintock will take your questions now.”

Hands shot up and I started a list while the first question came.

“So how did the PM and Finance Minister take it when you told them you needed $8 billion in the next two years?”

“Well, I wouldn’t liken it to Christmas morning. But I think they both understand the urgency and importance of this newly discovered national priority. I’m not certain I’ll be a dinner party guest of Monsieur Coulombe’s for the foreseeable future, but I’m not even a wee bit bothered by that.”

“Will you get the funding you’ve asked for in tomorrow’s Budget?”

“I regret that the decision is not ours to make. We’ve made our case as logically and forcefully as we could, and now we’ll have to wait just like everyone else.”

I pointed at a woman in the front row I didn’t recognize.

“Sharon Stallworth,
Edmonton Journal
. Do you really think that by delaying and reducing expenditures on highway maintenance and bridge inspections we’re in as serious a situation as you have indicated?”

“Yes, I do. That’s the nature of infrastructure. It tends to look
solid right up until the moment it collapses. It may look and feel as if the need is not so great, and not so urgent. But I promise you, the evidence will pile up fast if we do nothing. And the evidence may be more serious than mangled metal and cracked concrete. We need to act now.”

I nodded to the reporter next on my list.

“You seem to have dug a little deeper than just determining why the Alexandra Bridge fell. Have you overstepped your mandate?”

“If you examine the mandate we were given, which is included in the report your hold in your hands, we have operated entirely within its confines. There is little value in reporting that a certain rivet snapped, starting a chain of failures that ended with a broken bridge in a river. Asking
why
is usually of greater moment than asking
what
. Guided by the question
why
, we quickly discovered that there were clear and pressing policy implications to this particular collapse and they are explored in the report. That was our mandate.”

“Jean-Luc Beaubien,
La Presse
. Asking a new government that campaigned on tax cuts to give them up so we can fill a few potholes and repaint a bridge or two seems to me like an exercise in futility. Am I missing something?”

“Aye, you are missing something, sir. You are. From my perch, you’re confusing politics and policy. You’re confusing the political interest and the national interest. I understand that we promised tax cuts in the campaign. I’m not an ardent proponent of the measure but I can understand the appeal of tax cuts for politicians and voters alike. But our promise was based on incomplete information and a flawed premise. We had thought the deficit was dead. We’ve now learned that it’s still very much alive. Like fiscal alchemists, we have transformed it from borrowed money into fallen bridges and crumbling highways and countless other examples of infrastructure decay. To a responsible government, that simply cannot stand.”

Another thirty minutes of similar questions flowed and Angus
handled them honestly and directly. I signalled “last call” and pointed to André Fontaine at the back.

“Angus, you’ve been a part of the national scene for a very short time, yet you seem to have found yourself at the very centre of a number of political hot spots. How do you keep emerging smelling like a rose?”

“Well, André, those who know me well may not share your view of how I smell,” Angus replied, sending chuckles through the room. “But in serious consideration of what I assume is more than a rhetorical query, I would say that I have an overdeveloped sense of why I’m here and an underdeveloped interest in what others think of me. I assure you, the latter is quite a liberating gift.”

Even though Muriel started the applause, as experienced political operatives commonly do, the reporters joined in too, which is not so common. Not common at all.

Just as Angus and I rose and the reporters came forward to scrum Angus, a breathless and red-faced Bradley Stanton burst in to the room. All heads turned his way. He saw the reporters and more importantly their cameras focused on him so he made a quick recovery. In an instant he looked calm as he sauntered up to me.

“What the fuck just happened here, Addison?” he hissed, through a large, white-toothed smile.

I smiled back.

“We just released the McLintock Report in French and English, and Angus answered reporters’ questions after giving a compelling and eloquent overview of our findings,” I whispered.