But whichever minister is drafted in to defend the indefensible, the Prime Minister can rest assured that the opposition will still be hammering his government on the issue when he gets back.
This, after all, is the leader who was elected on a ticket of accountability. He asked voters to “demand better,” promising to restore integrity to government “after a decade of Liberal waste, mismanagement and corruption.”
Since then, the Tories have stumbled — Bev Oda’s orange juice constituted “waste”; the “lost” $3.1-billion in the Auditor-General’s recent report looks a lot like mismanagement. But they have always been given the benefit of the doubt when it came to corruption — particularly the really pungent kind, where Conservatives have bent the rules for personal gain.
Yet, if the allegations are true, Mike Duffy broke “very clear” and “unambiguous” residency rules to claim $90,000 in housing allowances by saying his cottage in Prince Edward Island was his primary residence. Those were the words used in the original internal Senate report into Mr. Duffy’s expenses, according to a CTV story.
Mr. Duffy then appears to have promised to pay back the money but failed to do so until Nigel Wright, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, for reasons best known to himself, decided to write a cheque for $90,172.
Mr. Wright resigned Sunday and in his statement, he said he considered his actions were in the public interest. More accurately, of course, they were in the Conservative Party’s interest by attempting to bury the bad news of Mr. Duffy’s dodgy expense claim.
After the former broadcaster promised to repay the money, a sanitized Senate report appeared effectively declaring the matter settled, while criticizing another errant claimant, Patrick Brazeau, for contravening “amply clear” residency declaration forms and ordering him to reimburse his expenses.
As Mr. Duffy knows, press statements are not issued under oath, which is just as well for him. He told CTV he’d taken out a loan, which was clearly not the case. He appears to have told the same story to his colleagues, who have now thrown him overboard. “I believed what Duffy said — silly me — that he had secured a loan through the RBC,” said one senior Conservative. “I have listened to him for years, moaning about the pay cut he took to sit in the Senate.”
Now that we know where the money came from, it raises Mr. Duffy’s May 9 public statement to Olympian levels of hypocrisy. “Canadians deserve the highest standards of transparency and clarity,” he wrote. Repaying the $90,000 was the “right decision then, it is the right decision now,” he said.
“I can only effectively represent the people of P.E.I. if I have earned their trust and respect. With the actions I have taken, I feel confident I can look them in the eye and assure them I am doing so with integrity.”
If the CTV version of events stands, it gifts the opposition parties with the Holy Trinity of reasons why the Conservatives are no longer fit to govern — they are guilty of waste, mismanagement and corruption.
Mr. Wright is, by most accounts and under normal circumstances, an able and decent man. But there’s nothing normal about political life in Ottawa, where the truth is the version of events where no-one can prove you are lying. The kind of moral relativism alleged in this scandal is a very long way from the principled government the Conservatives promised when they were elected.
Contrary to the received wisdom, Mr. Harper has made some good Senate appointments and one of them, former Ottawa police chief Vern White, raised his head above the partisan parapet to criticize the handling of the scandal. “[Party] loyalty can’t be more important than integrity,” he said.
Mr. White has hit on the nub of the Duffy Affair – a value system that is out of whack and geared to winning at all costs. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has identified five moral values that form the basis for our political choices. The tribal psychology that unites us into teams is one of the dominant characteristics of conservative supporters.
But after seven and a half years in power, the Harper Conservatives appear to have forgotten the other four values — care for others, fairness, respect for institutions and purity of action.
Canadians could be forgiven for demanding better at the next election.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: John Ivison
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