This was the day Prime Minister Stephen Harper broke faith with his base, with finality abandoning the bootstrap morality – some would say sanctimony – of his political youth. It’s the day he chose to avoid and then run from difficult but fair questions on a matter of moral import, escaping to another continent in fact, rather than meet them head-on, as a leader should.
For months, leadership speculation has simmered just beneath the surface of the Conservative party. That can’t help but grow now, as popular fury over the Senate expense scandal, and Harper’s handling of it, bubbles up from the grass roots. And bubble up it will. That is a certainty.
For consider: Conservative loyalists contributed $4.5-million to the party in the first quarter of 2013. These are the same people who’ve now been left knowing nothing more than they did a week ago about the catastrophic $90,172 “gift” from former chief of staff Nigel Wright, to former Conservative Senator Mike Duffy, that got the latter off the hook for his improper housing expense claims.
This scandal concerns the second most powerful man in Canada, after Harper himself, cutting a personal cheque for nearly six figures to a sitting Parliamentarian, in clear breach of Senate conflict of interest rules and possibly more than one law. Yet following the putative day of reckoning, carefully staged for a clearing of the air, the entire business remains shrouded in fog. How does that happen?
Has anyone seen a copy of the cheque? No. Does anyone, other than perhaps Wright and Duffy know what the latter was expected to offer or do in exchange for his extraordinary windfall? Did Harper himself approve of the transaction, if not in its specifics, then generally?
In the House of Commons yesterday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, temporarily reverting to his former role as partisan fire extinguisher, said no, Harper knew nothing about the deal until, like other appalled Conservatives, he saw it on the evening news.
Strangely, Harper himself did not say that in his speech to his caucus, at least the portion of it that was public. Nor did Nigel Wright on Sunday, in his resignation letter. Nor did the PMO last week. In his remarks Harper ignored the payment entirely. In the other two cases the language was ever so carefully crafted to allow for some knowledge on his part, though not of “the means” or “the details.”
Why the discrepancy? Those cursed with skeptical minds might wonder if the deviation was deliberate, designed to give Harper a wee bit of wiggle room, in the event evidence eventually emerges he did know and approve, if only in general terms. Otherwise, why would he not rule that out himself?
“Nigel Wright is a man of honour,” Conservatives Tweeted through the weekend, upper lips suitably stiffened, as though saluting Harper’s departed chief of staff somehow adds a veneer of uprightness to an otherwise tawdry situation. But no one has questioned Wright’s honour. The unknown now, and it is waxing not waning, is whether the PM himself understands the meaning of the term. For if he did, would he not have apologized, or at least shouldered some responsibility, for the mistakes made on his watch, and for which every Conservative MP in the House of Commons is now paying a price?
It was Harper who elevated Senators Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy. It was Harper who stood in the House of Commons to defend Wallin’s travel expenses, to the tune of $321,000 in less than three years. And it was Harper’s most senior aide, his right arm, who made the payment to Duffy. At best, the PM has shown poor judgment in his choice of appointees, and shoddy management of his office. At worst he approved of a backroom payoff that gives the lie to everything he claims to represent. Yet the best he can muster is warmed-over rhetoric about the sponsorship scandal?
There was much private Conservative chortling, during the 2005 Christmas campaign, about former prime minister Paul Martin’s tactical ineptness, in particular his establishing the Gomery inquiry into that scandal, which set the stage for his later defeat. But through that time no one, that I know of, ever questioned Martin’s moral courage in doing what he did. Following his speech Tuesday, Stephen Harper can’t say the same.
For someone who won power on an explicitly moral platform, that is shocking. More shocking still is that the Conservative leadership, even now, seems unaware this is so. How they extricate themselves, or if they can, is anybody’s guess.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Michael Den Tandt
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