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.]

Thursday, December 05, 2013

How much duplicity can we take?

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, the guy who has done so much reporting on the data leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, spoke the other day of how important it was for the media to investigate the claims of those in power.

“People in power,” he said, “will routinely lie to their population.”

Might Greenwald have used Canada as a prime example?

Never in all my years of political coverage have I seen a government get caught up in so many deceptions, falsehoods and bare-assed lies as this one.
It has reached the point where it is becoming difficult for any journalist to accept anything Stephen Harper and company say at face value.

Just a few examples:

• In June, Liberal MP Ralph Goodale put in a request for all documents related to the payment deal between Nigel Wright, the prime minister’s former chief of staff, and Senator Mike Duffy. Some time later he got a reply from the Privy Council Office. Sorry Ralph … a “thorough search” had been carried out and no “relevant records” could be found.

We then found out via an RCMP report that there were relevant records — there were, in fact, hundreds of emails. The “thorough search” had apparently missed every single one of them.

• We then learned that, in the case of former PMO legal counsel Benjamin Perrin, many of his emails — which the Privy Council Office initially claimed to have deleted — were not deleted. For some reason it took months to discover this.

• Back in May CTV’s Bob Fife reported that Perrin “helped draft the letter of understanding” involving the Wright-Duffy payment deal. Perrin flatly denied the story. “I was not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision to write a personal cheque to reimburse Sen. Duffy’s expenses,” Perrin said.

But the RCMP report suggests otherwise. It suggests Perrin played a role in the Wright-Duffy deal. It suggests he exchanged emails with Duffy’s lawyer. It suggests Fife was right. Perrin might have been engaging in a lawyerly parsing of words by saying he was not involved in Wright’s “decision.” But that dog won’t hunt. It wasn’t the point of the CTV report.

• There is then the case of Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen, a longtime close confidant of Stephen Harper. On the audit into senators’ expenses she said she and other Tory senators did the work without input from the PMO with the exception, she recalled, of communicating with Nigel Wright on one occasion. The RCMP report says, in so many words, that this is false. It shows that there was frequent contact between her and Wright and other officials in the PMO.

The RCMP doesn’t use the word “lie” in respect to the PM’s confidant. “Not consistent with the facts” is the phrase.

• There are the various versions the prime minister has put out on whether he accepted Wright’s resignation or whether he fired him. More serious are his varying versions of how many people in his office knew of the Duffy pay-out. It started with Harper’s declaration that there was only one staffer involved — Nigel Wright. More recently we have learned that there were at least 15 senior players in the PMO and the Senate who were involved in the scheming.

How could it be that, when the PM did learn about the Wright pay-out, he didn’t bother to find out from his staff if others knew, and proceeded to go public with the story that it was just Wright?

• We know that the Senate committee report was altered to make Duffy look better. (There are other examples of document-tampering by this government — remember Bev Oda?) We have learned that, according to police, Senator Irving Gerstein went so far as to call Michael Runia, a manager partner of Deloitte, which makes millions off government contracts, to discuss the audit of Duffy’s expenses. The Mounties’ emails show that the PMO was somehow able to learn that Deloitte would not reach a conclusion on Duffy’s residence.

Diehard defenders of this government would like to ascribe much of the folly to conjecture by antagonistic journalists. But these emails and other forms of documentation are real. In an extraordinary admission, even the prime minister’s director of communications, Jason Macdonald, has called what has gone on a “cover-up.”

If there were lower-level officials who were responsible, or allegedly responsible, for the duplicity, that would be one thing. But what we’re seeing here is the involvement of the government’s inner sanctum — top PMO officials, top legal counsel, top Senate officials, a close confidant.

The folly is not limited to those involved in the cover-up. Another player in the prime minister’s circle — Dean Del Maestro, his former parliamentary press secretary — was charged a few months ago with exceeding legal election spending limits. In the spring, cabinet member Peter Penashue had to resign his post after it was revealed his campaign had received ineligible expenses that were subsequently repaid. Jenni Byrne, former political director, now deputy chief of staff to the PM, was fingered by a Conservative caucus member as being responsible for running a deceptive robocalls operation in Saskatchewan. The Conservatives (and this appears to be a habit of theirs) initially denied the scheme before being forced to own up.

This is the record from 2013 alone. Go back further and there’s much, much more. The prime minister’s office and top government officials are supposed to set a standard in this country for ethical behavior — to be role models. In the case of this government, you might say they’ve done the opposite.

The question now is, how long will the public tolerate it?

Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author:   Lawrence Martin

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