Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, May 27, 2013

The fabric of corruption and moral corrosion

On the very day in December 2008 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Mike Duffy as one of 18 new Conservative senators, there were loud objections from a University of Prince Edward Island law professor that the well-known CTV broadcaster - a Charlottetown native but an Ottawa-area resident for more than three decades - could not legally be named to represent P.E.I. in the upper chamber.

"I have no doubt that Mr. Duffy maintains an emotional attachment to the Island, but he is no more a resident of P.E.I. than is the prime minister. The appointment is, almost certainly, unconstitutional," David Bulger, a constitutional law expert, wrote to the Charlottetown Guardian. "And if the Senate of Canada were not such a joke, steps might be taken to block the appointment. As it is, I guess that we'll all simply have to go on laughing."

Five years on, the laughing has long since stopped. And with Duffy's place in the Senate and his true "primary residence" now the focus of a host of government-shaking admissions and allegations - including improper housing and expense claims by the so-called "Senator for Kanata," a secret, $90,000 bailout by now ex-PMO chief Nigel Wright, and questions of interference in a Senate financial audit - the prescient P.E.I. professor is reflecting on the "Duffy Affair" and some of the wider questions raised by a scandal that has rocked the Conservative government more than any other since its election in 2006. Among them: Do seemingly "small" examples of bending or breaking the rules in politics inevitably lead to more serious abuses of power - from conflict-of-interest transgressions to outright corruption?

"It's all incremental," Bulger told Postmedia News this week in the wake of Duffy's forced exit from the Conservative caucus and the firestorm of controversy that continues to burn.

"Someone who gets away with something once may try to get away with something again," the adjunct professor of political studies says of casual political rule-flouting.

The uproar over Senate spending - which extends to Duffy's fellow Conservative appointees Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau, as well as Liberal appointee Mac Harb - is unfolding in the context of a recent spike in political-misconduct cases across Canada and beyond.

In Quebec, a corruption scandal involving bribes and kickbacks on rigged construction contracts has ensnared Montreal-area businesses, politicians and municipal officials, giving rise to the Charbonneau Commission and - among other outcomes - criminal charges against the ex-mayor of Laval, Gilles Vaillancourt.

In Labrador, ex-federal Conservative cabinet minister Peter Penashue was forced to resign his seat over illegal 2011 campaign donations but - during his failed re-election bid earlier this month - received strong endorsements from Harper and Defence Minister Peter MacKay, even while still facing possible criminal prosecution.

Governing, says Bulger, invests elected officials and top bureaucrats with control over public funds and other levers of state power. Abuses of that power - small and large - are part of the "political landscape," he suggests. "That's probably just a problem with government generally - when people are in power for a long period of time, there's the danger of corruption. Lord Acton: 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.' He wrote that - what, in the 1890s?"

It was, in fact, 1887, a time when Sir John A. Macdonald was enjoying a second and very long run as Canada's prime minister - despite having been forced to admit, during the 1873 Pacific Scandal, that he and his Conservative party had accepted huge, compromising campaign donations from railway promoter Hugh Allan ahead of the 1872 election.

It was the first of many high-profile corruption scandals to taint Canadian political history as well as the legacies of several post-Macdonald prime ministers. Among them were Liberal icon William Lyon Mackenzie King - whose 1930 vacation to Bermuda, it later emerged, was paid for by a Liberal senator promoting (and profiting from) the controversial Beauharnois hydro project - and former PC prime minister Brian Mulroney, whose acceptance of bags of cash from aircraft lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber in the 1990s was dramatically detailed in later public inquiries.

Former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien, too, weathered the Shawinigate and Sponsorship scandals without any findings of personal wrongdoing. The first was linked to controversial federal bank loans to a hotel in his riding and the second to a scheme that saw federal funds earmarked to promote national unity in Quebec fraudulently diverted by Liberal party operatives in the province.

Original Article
Source: thestarphoenix.com
Author:  Randy Boswell

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