Sneaky politicians are a plague on democracy — the dark avenue to something sinister. The prime minister of Canada is the Wayne Gretzky of sneakiness. Once again, he has been caught cheating.
This week, my colleague at iPolitics, Colin Horgan, broke an important story about the Harper government stacking the selection committee tasked with coming up with the short list for the new Parliamentary Budget Officer.
This is like pouring five pounds of sugar into someone’s gas tank. Stephen Harper has all but blown the engine of state with past sneak attacks on the institutions of Parliament. The exhaust pipe has been blowing black smoke for some time now. This latest stunt may seize up the engine of parliamentary governance altogether.
Everything in the Westminster model under which we are supposed to operate depends on information, debate and verification — all of which are missing in ‘Harperland’, to use Lawrence Martin’s ringing coinage. Also missing is that high bar of behaviour known as being an “Honourable Gentleman”.
One of the few federal bureaucrats who stood up to Harper’s cult-conservatism was the lately-departed chief of the PBO, Kevin Page. He regularly challenged the phoney books and unsupported policy of this catch-us-if-you-can government — and oh, how they came to hate him for it.
Stephen Harper, Peter MacKay and countless party bobbleheads who BS for a living on TV were caught dead to rights falsifying the cost of the F-35 fighter jet — once by Page, and then again by the auditors at KPMG.
Their response? Lie some more. The Tories crowed that the KPMG audit ‘vindicated’ their numbers. Yes, just as a conviction for violating the Elections Act was a ‘victory.’ Just as another judge confirming that there was fraud in the last federal election was “vindication”, even though the judge also said the culprit likely used the Conservative Party of Canada’s own database to perpetrate that fraud. Two plus two is five.
Harper purposely lowballed by tens of billions of dollars the true cost of these fifth-generation lemons to do yet another sneaky thing — acquire without a competitive bidding process a plane we didn’t need for reasons never truly declared and, in so doing, spending more money on a military acquisition than any government in Canadian history.
Then the PM sneakily sets up a fake review of the F-35 issue, which is really not a competitive exercise at all — just a procedural walk-about for fools. At bottom I suspect what will be found is some corporate heart of darkness — a skunky deal that could only fly if it were sole-sourced. Sadly, Canadians seem to have hit the snooze button on the most egregious financial sins and misdemeanours of the PM. Even a guy with an abacus could work out the funny numbers.
Some say Stephen Harper’s chosen sport is hockey. His true favourite game? Ridding himself of any independent assessment of his government’s performance, including that routine stream of bad fiction coming out of the PMO. Page got the boot for doing his job. You can bet that his replacement will grow old in office precisely for not doing it.
Which takes us back to the importance of Colin Horgan’s piece. Placing the chief-of-staff of the government House leader on a secret committee that effectively would be choosing the next chief of the PBO lays bare the modus operandi of the PM: dishonesty and deception aimed at getting the right people, Harper people, in all the right places. And he’s getting there. The officers of Parliament, the commissioner of the RCMP, the top dog at the public broadcaster and its board, the deputy ministers, the Supreme Court, all the boards, panels and consistories filled by the feds — it’s all Papa Doc territory now.
After reading Horgan’s story, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair went into full bearded fury. He said it was “Harper at his worst” — perpetrating a fraud to make sure no more cruise missiles would be coming his government’s way from an office once run by a man with the quaint idea that his job was to keep the government honest.
Mulcair was wrong. This was not the PM at his worst. It was standard Harper Casino rules: Load the dice, mark the deck, tilt the roulette wheel, scoop up all the chips.
Harper was sneaky in the way he changed the wording in the Atlantic Accord, cheating Nova Scotia out of what former Conservative MP Bill Casey calculated was between $500 million and a billion dollars. When confronted with legal opinions supporting his case, the PM told Casey that the words meant what he said they meant.
After Brent Rathgeber quit the CPC in disgust, the PM suggested that he resign his seat — sneakily implying that somehow Rathgeber was morally unqualified to retain it since he had been elected as a Conservative. Stephen Harper applied a different standard when he appointed David Emerson to his cabinet fresh from winning his seat as a Liberal.
Harper was sneaky when changing the federal government’s commitment to First Nations, slipping wording into their financial transfer agreements that connected getting the money to getting with the government’s program on future policy.
And what were Harper’s monstrous omnibus bills but a sneak attack on the Opposition parties right to be informed? Those bloated non-budget bills were simply places to hide things the government didn’t want people to know about. A leader declares his views and seeks support for them. A sneak conceals his intentions and challenges you to discover them.
Perhaps Harper’s stealthiest and most disgusting deception was masking his gross manipulation and abuse of the Senate as a reform-minded prime minister. Read these words and think about them for a moment: “The Senate, our upper house, is appointed, also by the prime minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers, and the like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.” Stephen Harper — the appointer of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau — said that.
And here is what sits behind all the sneakiness, lies, and prevarications. Stephen Harper wants to deconstruct the country as we know it much faster than he is able to persuade Canadians to follow him. So he has to control information, stifle politicians and the press, and reduce the national debate to the hollow dictates and studied evasions coming out of the PMO. He can’t reveal his intentions because if he did, he would not be electable.
What does he really think of Canadian institutions and traditional practices? Not much, judging by the abolitions and amputations he has busied himself with since coming to office. No Law Reform Commission, no National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, no Wheat Board, no Experimental Lakes Area, no public funding for political parties, a hobbled National Research Council, and even a new hue added to the PM’s jet — Tory blue.
And Parliament. Well, he thinks it’s as arcane as an institution can be. This is what Harper said to an ultra-right wing American group, the Council for National Policy, after resigning as a Reform MP: “What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral college. Imagine if the electoral college which selects your president once every four years were to continue sitting in Washington for the next four years. And imagine its having the same vote on every issue. That is how our political system operates.”
Some might say that Harper the political leader has evolved his view of the House of Commons since the days when he was second banana at the National Citizens Coalition — that he no longer thinks that the House of Commons, the heart of Canadian democracy, is a useless encumbrance to executive power, as unimportant as the Senate.
But it was in March, 2011, that he became the first prime minister in the country and the Commonwealth to be found in contempt of Parliament. So has he changed, or just gotten sneakier?
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