Angry in the Great White North

When's the last time you've heard of a politician, of any stripe, actually getting down and dirty in investigating a problem?

I mean, if there's a disaster, politicians will take helicopter rides over the affected areas.  Or in the case of a governmental mishap, he'll appear at the press conference to promise a response.

But men or women of action?  Real action?  They are few and far between.  Not just among politicians, but all of us.

So with that in mind, let's visit the story of John Baird and Colin Kenny:

Two men in baseball caps and windbreakers breached the perimeter of Pearson International Airport on Sunday. Stepping out of a van on a public roadway, then passing through doorways they spent half an hour lingering around the tarmac.

They spoke to airport workers, but faced no questions as to what credentials they had used to gain access to one of Canada's most important transportation hubs. If anyone had bothered to ask, they might have been shocked.

One of the visitors was federal Transport Minister John Baird. The other was Colin Kenny, the Liberal who chairs the Senate's national security committee. On that rainy afternoon they decided to leave their partisanship behind in Ottawa to fly to Toronto to check on airport security themselves.

What they found alarmed them.

What they found, of course, were two unauthorized individuals on the tarmac, namely themselves.

Now they did make any unusual effort to defeat security:

For the tour of Pearson the senator wore an orange traffic vest and made a show of carrying around a clipboard, and an array of ID cards and hotel room keys, none of which were related to airport security. He put on a baseball cap; the Transport Minister wore one, too.

Clipboards and hotel room keys.  Oh Good Lord!

Kudos to Baird and Kenny (Conservative and Liberal) for setting the bar for taking your jobs seriously.  I don't expect Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq to attempt open heart surgery, for example, but maybe a few more stories of cabinet ministers and their immediate staff bypassing the reports from their departments and actually seeing what's going on would be a good thing.  Without announcing a visit from the minister, mind you.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said in the past that the public service is Liberal-leaning.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But as an elected official, John Baird has taken a big risk.  He has seen the problem first hand.  The option of hiding behind a departmental report that told him the problem was not serious has been closed to him, by his own actions (not that I think he would have taken that route, but in any case, he can't going forward).  He's taken the plunge, and now he has to act on what he's learned.

Well done, Minister Baird and Senator Kenny.  We all look forward to hearing what will be done about the problem.

Check out other stories from the Toronto Airport Breach archive.