Conservatives could be dogged by RoboCon for years

When confronted by crisis and scandal, the Conservative government has a standard operating procedure.

Code Yellow: Claim average people don’t care, and say it’s time to move on to more important subjects, like the economy.

Code Orange: If that doesn’t work, toss a young Tory staffer under the proverbial bus, and say the matter’s closed.

Code Red:Blame the media, blame bureaucrats, and screech about Adscam, coalitions, the NEP and the perils of socialism. Rinse and repeat.

An important part of this process, usually, is to cite the words of commentators who defend the Harper regime. So, as the RoboCon scandal continues to spread, we can expect to see Conservative MPs getting up on their hind legs in the Commons, and quoting scrupulously neutral oracles like L. Ian MacDonald, who this week declared that “Harper won the election fair and square,” and that fraudulent phone calls about the location of polling stations wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

The problem, however, is that it increasingly looks like the Harper Cons didn’t win the election “fair and square.” It looks like they cheated. And, moreover, in ridings where Liberals were defeated by small margins — such as Nipissing-Timiskaming (18 votes) or Etobicoke Centre (26 votes) — the outcome could have been quite different, indeed.

Standard operating procedure, therefore, hasn’t worked.

The media, and perhaps the public, are paying close attention. Even traditional Harper allies, like the Ottawa Citizen and the Calgary Herald, are appalled by what they’ve seen. No less than the National Post’s editorial board has called for a public inquiry. That’s something you don’t get to read every day.

Some Conservatives are quietly telling me that the public and the media may soon get bored with all of this sturm und drang, and move on.

And that, at least, is possible: We have a national memory of seven minutes in this country. People may tire of RoboCon. True.

Except for this: This scandal is very rapidly spiraling towards the courts. And, once it lands there, there’s very little the prime minister, and all the prime minister’s men, will be able to do about it.

Case in point: The sponsorship scandal. My former boss Jean Chretien called in the RCMP to probe the sponsorship program 10 years ago this spring. A decade later, the Crown still continues its work, and proceedings still drag on in Quebec’s Superior Court.

RoboCon is different from sponsorship, however. It didn’t take place in just one province. Already, the RCMP has executed a search warrant against a Conservative-friendly firm in Alberta, and Elections Canada is probing allegations of frauds in Ontario.

The cancer’s spreading.

If the sponsorship file is any guide, there will be three phases to RoboCon.

In the first, damaging allegations will continue to leak out. Because it’s complex and multi-jurisdictional, Elections Canada and the RCMP will be investigating well into 2013.

There will be more warrants executed and witnesses interviewed. Demands for judicial inquiries and the like will be relentless, but Harper (remembering the Gomery circus) will refuse. That just keeps it alive in the House.

Secondly, as in the sponsorship affair, arrests will start in 2013-2014. Implicated Conservatives will lawyer up. None will want to take a bullet for their party, particularly since they are facing jail time.

In the final phase, from 2014 to 2015, prosecutions will start. Because of the complexity of the evidence, this won’t happen quickly.

Because some of the defendants will be facing jail time, they will be doing deals to turn in bigger fish — just like in sponsorship.

And, because the wheels of justice grind slowly, and because there will be multiple prosecutions, we are going to be reading and hearing about RoboCon well into 2015.

Which, last time I checked, is an election year.

Original Article
Source: toronto sun
Author: Warren Kinsella