Stephen Harper’s evasive Question Period performances show disdain for transparency

Is it possible that the federal government’s profound and ever-deepening accountability problem comes down to a failure of vocabulary? After all, it must be hard for the Conservatives to be transparent when, apparently, their leader doesn’t know the meaning of the word “clear.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper used the term eight times in Question Period on Wednesday, prefacing almost every response to opposition queries regarding what he knew and when about the Senate finances fiasco with some variation on “I have been perfectly clear …”

He has not.

The story of the Wright-Duffy affair remains as fuzzy as it is fishy. We know Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, wrote a cheque for $90,172 to Mike Duffy so the embattled senator could repay improperly claimed expenses. And we know that after that cheque was issued, Duffy stopped cooperating with a forensic audit of senators’ spending. We know, therefore, of impropriety, potential illegality and the appearance of a cover-up in the Prime Minister’s Office – enough, in other words, to know we need to know more.

And yet the prime minister has been perfectly opaque. NDP leader Tom Mulcair, invigorated by the scandal, has adopted a straightforward lawyerly style in Question Period, asking short, precise questions. To these the prime minister has offered evasions that reveal nothing except a lack of respect for parliamentary scrutiny.

Asked by Mulcair last week how many times a day he speaks to his chief of staff, Harper claimed not to understand the question. Asked whether a particular aide was privy to particular discussions, he responded with a non-sequitur: “Once again … the facts here are very clear. Mr. Wright decided to take an action on his own initiative, using his own funds. These actions are his sole responsibility.” It’s bad enough that the prime minister is once again erecting a stone wall; that he claims the wall is clear insults our intelligence.

Harper came to power in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal promising a new era of openness and accountability in Ottawa. But at every turn – in his cold-shouldering of the press, his ongoing recalcitrance with the Parliamentary Budget Officer, his muzzling of scientists and other public servants, and his abuses of parliamentary procedure – he has demonstrated the emptiness of those promises.

The hypocrisy is not lost on Alberta backbench MP Brent Rathgeber, who quit the Tory caucus Wednesday citing “the government’s lack of commitment to transparency.” In a blog post explaining his resignation, Rathgeber pointed to Harper’s recent QP dodges, among other failures of openness. “I barely recognize ourselves,” he wrote, referring to his former party; “and worse, I fear that we have morphed into what we once mocked.”

Canadians, too, are concerned. Last week, an Ipsos Reid poll showed that only 13 per cent of respondents believe the prime minister knew nothing of Wright’s payment to Duffy. Evidently secrecy and blatant evasion do not build trust.

The prime minister’s political future may depend on adopting some measure of the openness he preached on his way to 24 Sussex. In any case, the two years until the next election is too long to wait for the repair of our democracy and of the public trust. Harper ought to start by offering some honest answers to simple questions in the House of Commons. He’s not fooling anyone; that much is clear.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Jordan Himelfarb