Ben Franklin famously opined that experience runs a dear school, but it’s the only one a fool will attend. I’ve proven old Ben right on more than one occasion. But recent events point to something Franklin missed.
Learning from experience is costly, but not nearly as costly as failing to learn from it. A few incidents over the last couple of weeks point to the price we all pay when governments fail to learn from expensive lessons. It seems our governments lack the courage to face failure, and so doom us to dump new money down old holes.
The Electronic Health Records Fiasco
Take the sorry tale of electronic health records, for example. The quiet ending of Prescribe IT, a failed federal program to nudge prescription fulfilment out of the 8-track era, signalled the waste of $298 million over 10 long years. I suppose Canadians can be relieved that former CEO Michael Green was fired from his $900,000-a-year job, but I have little doubt that Green will be well compensated for this dismal failure.
Way back in 2009, the eHealth Ontario CEO was fired for similar failures, but only after receiving a $114,000 bonus and a $317,000 severance package. Failure pays well in the twisted world of electronic health records. Of course, the eHealth mess happened after Ontario taxpayers had wasted five years and $647 million on Smart Systems for Health.
The Phoenix Pay System Debacle
Need more proof? Consider the long, sad tale of the infamous Phoenix pay system. Payroll systems are not, to quote a friend of mine, rocket surgery. Heck, a good border collie can run payroll while the sheep are having lunch. But the federal government decided to save money with a proprietary payroll system. Over a decade and a half later, the system has cost $5.1 billion and produced a backlog of over 200,000 unresolved transactions. That border collie would probably wonder if the feds wouldn’t have been better off paying folks with a columnar pad and cash envelopes.
The Vietnam War and Iran: A Tragic Parallel
Not learning from experience (by now we should be experts on how not to procure just about anything) is wasteful, expensive and downright embarrassing. But the most devastating failure to learn has been visited by our southern cousins over the past few months.
If you visit Washington D.C., spend a moment at the Vietnam Memorial. You will be faced with the sombre spectacle of two black granite walls, into which are engraved the names of the 58,320 young men who died fighting a pointless war. The first name is etched beside the date Nov. 1, 1955, during the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidency. The last carries the date May 15, 1975. For 20 years, through four presidents, young Americans were forced to die in a pointless war.
But the truly tragic part of the wall is the certain knowledge that, from at least the halfway point, all those lives were wasted in a war the American military and political leaders knew they could not win. Those lives were sacrificed in the name of finding some way to declare “peace with honour.”
And here we are again. Having started a three-week war with Iran, America finds itself four months into a stalemate. Once again, an administration is desperately negotiating to find some way to a “peace with honour” solution. Proving, of course, that some fools never learn.
