The cause of death is another matter.
Policy will have little to do with it. Policy, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. There will always be lots of voters who like pipelines, fighter jets and panda bears.
And there will never be a shortage of people who favour daycare, a national healthcare system and an environment that doesn’t look like the back forty of Hell. All will vote their preference, according to the their lights — or at least 60 per cent of them will.
Here’s the skinny on the mercurial nature of voters: Under normal circumstances, people gladly believe what they want to believe — an irrational process driven by emotions and manipulated by backroom sharks. Under normal circumstances.
Things are no longer normal. Duffy has actually provided us with the ballot question in the next federal election: integrity. Who has it? Who doesn’t? I know that boardroom boys get woodies thinking about windfalls for the one per cent from all these free trade deals. But they’re the only ones — most people’s eyes glaze over. That usually happens as the drone of political hyperbole about disputed benefits that may, in geologic time, come to pass hits third gear. That’s the BS speed where we all get to ‘move forward together’.
But I don’t know anyone who likes to be lied to, over and over again, let alone by people in power. And that includes the dudes in cowboy boots who will soon be getting Stephen Harper’s latest instalment of Senate-gate in person when the posse gathers in Calgary this week.
Duffy’s words, dropped during his last bombing run over Parliament Hill, will echo like a scream in a box canyon over the convention:
“They have no moral compass … they demonstrate every day that they do not understand the meaning of the phrase ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’”
Whether his overblown oratory was stuff for selling kitchen gadgets or not, those words hit the throbbing nerve of Tory pride: the moral high ground.
Conservatives are staunchly anchored in the old verities, while they see others as adrift on the sea of moral relativity. Conservatives, real ones, don’t believe in lying, cheating or stealing. Will they be offended by a spectacle in far-off Ottawa that offers all three? If they are, they could buck Harper off their backs like the meanest bull at the Stampede. Not even the rodeo clowns could save him.
Is there precedent for the theory that morality can pack a punch in politics? There is. Former prime minister Paul Martin was not defeated in 2006 because he bungled the books (as Mr. Strength and Stability surely has). Martin provided the incoming PM with a $13 billion surplus. He was a superb fiscal manager.
He was also a political son undone by the sins of his predecessor. He was defeated over the dirty, rotten, low-down scuzziness of AdScam — something he had nothing to do with.
But wait, there’s more. The former Progressive Conservative Party also provides proof that oblivion, not dynasty, awaits the morally bankrupt in Canadian public life.
The Mulroney crowd became known as serial liars. When the PC caucus was reduced to two people meeting for coffee, it was all the more shocking because the annihilation followed back-to-back majority governments.
Integrity is the great leveller — and that is bad news for Stephen Harper. It is the fatal deficit of all powermongers. The Harper government’s clothesline is sagging under the weight of dirty laundry.
Outcast former MP Bill Casey tells me that the PM changed the wording of the Atlantic Accord, cheating Maritimers out of the agreed-upon deal. The PM told him that the words said what he decided they said, case closed. Casey wouldn’t support his own government’s budget for that reason, and was cast out.
The Harper government fudged the numbers on the F-35 jet-fighter acquisition — by a minimum of $10 billion. When they were outed by the auditor general, the Parliamentary Budget Office and an independent audit, their response was more lies. Even Peter MacKay, then at Defence, admitted that cabinet had the higher number from DND but used the lower one instead.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada has told whoppers about new policies designed to move science to the back of the bus, while the Harper government bulldozed its way through Parliament with omnibus legislation that leaves species at risk in Canada at the mercy of megaprojects.
And then there is the cast of characters who have, at one time or another, been the apple of the PM’s eye — and, more importantly, his appointments. Bruce Carson, who came to the PMO with a criminal record and may add to it before his latest legal problems are over. Arthur Porter, who was the overseer of our spy agency, until he ended up in a Panamanian jail fighting extradition to Canada. Election expense cheater and former Harper cabinet minister, Peter Penashue. The PM’s former parliamentary secretary Dean Del Mastro, now out of caucus and facing charges for election expense cheating. Stephen Harper may have integrity, but can he recognize it?
The PM has been changing his story about the Duffy-Wright affair more often than Lady Macbeth washed her hands. Where Harper once said that he had reluctantly accepted Nigel Wright’s resignation, he now says his former chief of staff was “dismissed.” The Globe and Mail said that the PM had “revised” his story, perhaps signalling they are about to start competing with Rick Mercer.
The PM didn’t revise his story — he brazenly changed a vital detail in an account of a matter so serious it involves possible criminal acts that could topple the government. It’s not the first time. So far, Harper’s big plan — the throne speech, the CETA deal and the Calgary Convention — could turn into a face-plant followed by a bellyflop, finished off with a self-inflicted wound.
If there’s really an appetite in Conservative circles for values, forget about Justin Trudeau’s hand-on-the-Bible under oath test. How about Steve, Nigel and the Old Duff — just the three of them, centre-stage in Calgary — telling us what’s what?
No comments:
Post a Comment