Despite his love of all things militaristic, (please note I do not say military) Stephen Harper wouldn’t make much of a cadet. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, he has stood by calmly while lying and cheating was going on all around him.
Harper retained Dean Del Mastro as his parliamentary secretary even though he was under investigation by Elections Canada. Remember when the PM solemnly informed the House of Commons that Del Mastro had provided EC with all the proper documentation and that everything was hunky-dory? So hunky dory, in fact, that he made Del Mastro his spokesman on ethics during the Robocalls fiasco? Del Mastro was eventually convicted of cheating in the 2008 election and sentenced to jail.
Harper signed ex-cabinet minister Peter Penashue’s nomination papers after the Newfoundland and Labrador MP resigned and reoffered after being caught overspending in the 2011 election.
Harper promoted Tony Clement to Treasury Board — a particularly cruel joke — after $50 million in taxpayers’ money was pumped into Clement’s Muskoka riding without proper financial administration, as former AG Sheila Fraser noted.
And Harper himself has done the odd Pinocchio act both inside and outside of the House of Commons. The F-35 whopper is a prime example: Kevin Page and Michael Ferguson provided the incontrovertible proof of that, though Harper got away with his whopper during the 2011 election.
The PM claimed that there was a “contract” that guaranteed the price for 65 F-35 stealth fighter jets; there was no contract. He said that the price was $15 billion; the parliamentary budget officer found the actual price to be double that. What’s more, the Harper cabinet knew it.
That’s why this week’s stunning performance at the trial of Senator Mike Duffy by Nigel Wright, the PM’s former chief of staff, is so telling. It fits into a disturbing pattern of tolerating dishonourable behaviour that haunts the Harper record.
And that is a very big deal, since the PM is responsible for setting the ethical standard for the entire government. So when Canadians consider the sad lack of judgment that led Harper to hire the likes of Bruce Carson and Arthur Porter, both of whom were facing criminal charges, they’re right to ask questions. (Porter, the former head of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, has since died in a Panamanian jail.)
As Harper’s own information commissioner told me as I was writing my book on the Harper government, Party of One, the PM is not an honourable gentlemen in the traditions of the Westminster parliamentary model. Robert Marleau said that Harper had abused his absolute power absolutely. And despite making a lot of promises about renewing accountability and transparency in government, he said, Harper had done “nothing” to advance those issues.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair had it right: the CPC code of conduct is not taken from the Bible or some list of sacrosanct conservative principles. It’s taken from the Criminal Code. Canada has returned to the Mulroney era, when everything was okay unless it was illegal — notwithstanding Judge William Parker’s ruling in the Sinclair Stevens case. Even the appearance of conflict, the judge wrote, had to be avoided to maintain public trust in the system. Canadians now trust discount sushi more than they do Parliament under Harper.
And despite Wright’s vaunted reputation as an upright man, his defence of his actions in the Duffy affair displays the same ethical bankruptcy and dizzying sense of entitlement that emanated from the very heart of Stephen Harper’s office. This is David Dingwall’s chewing gum to the power of ten. When asked by Donald Bayne why he lied to the PM about his payout to Duffy, Wright said it wasn’t a “bad misrepresentation.” That euphemism could stop a charging rhino.
In ordinary parlance, Wright was saying that his lie was a ‘white’ lie. A public-spirited lie. But if that was true, why did Wright go to such lengths to keep the arrangement secret? And what would possess this churchified son of Bay Street to go one further? Why would he say it would be better for the Conservative party, and for Senator Duffy, for the public to believe that Duffy himself had repaid the money?
You know what all of this really means, of course. It means that, like all graduates of the Harper School for Masters of the Universe, Wright was willing to decide that it was OK to put a self-serving fable before the public in place of the truth. He, Nigel, could edit reality for the bovine masses and everybody would be better off.
But isn’t my argument skewed by the fact that Harper fired Nigel the Liar? Not at all. Remember, Harper’s first reaction was to maintain his stated confidence in Wright publicly and retain him as chief of staff … after he learned of the $90,000 gift.
When the Good Samaritan fairy tale didn’t work, the PM (reluctantly) accepted Wright’s resignation days later. And when the PMO discovered the base was still upset with these antics, then and only then did Harper “fire” Wright for deceiving him.
If we take Harper’s word on the timing, we also have to acknowledge that from the moment Harper learned of Wright’s cheque to Duffy he also knew he had been deceived. If Harper was going to fire Wright for ethical reasons, he should have done it the day he learned of the deal. He didn’t. So Wright’s dismissal had nothing to do with principle — and everything to do with politics.
Bottom line? Canadians can’t trust a single statement from a party that thinks perception is reality and actively promotes falsehoods when they are deemed to be in the government’s interest. And if you doubt that, consider the absurdity of the conflict between the testimony of Nigel Wright and the RCMP statement of former Harper PMO legal counsel Benjamin Perrin.
The PM’s current chief of staff, Ray Novak, told the RCMP that he didn’t know about Wright’s plan to “give” $90,000 to Senator Duffy to make the expenses issue go away. But Perrin told police that Novak was in on the conference call where the deal was discussed, and also received exclusive memos from Wright himself on the secret payment. Here’s what Perrin told the RCMP:
“Ray was there on the call when Nigel Wright said to Janice Payne he would do it, and Ray Novak also received an email, which you have, where Nigel says, ‘I’ll be providing my cheque.'”
So how do Wright and Harper’s spinners handle that? They claim that Novak popped in and out of the conference call and never read the emails sent to him by his boss on the number one crisis on the PMO’s plate. To paraphrase Voltaire, someone who can make you believe absurdities can get you to do anything — including vote for them.
But the absurdity of it all is getting to be impossible to ignore. Perrin also said that he was “shocked” when the RCMP Information to Obtain did not include Novak’s name as one of those who knew about Wright’s plan to repay Duffy’s disputed expenses with his own money. Now the RCMP have another question to answer in addition to the obvious one — why bribery charges were laid against Duffy but not against Wright.
And that leaves Canadians with a choice to make. Who are they to believe? The law prof who used to advise the PM on security and immigration legislation? The disgraced ex-chief of staff? The message mercenary Kory Teneycke?
Teneycke, by the way, inadvertently put out a fascinating proposition when he backed Wright’s claim that Novak didn’t know about the payment. His logic was circular: Novak didn’t know, Teneycke claimed, because if Novak had known, he certainly would have told the PM.
Now you know why the Con spin machine has gone into hyperdrive to protect Novak. And why Stephen Harper isn’t taking any more questions on individuals whose names come up during the Duffy trial.
Except … the excellent Hannah Thibedeau of the CBC goaded Harper into saying that he still had confidence in Ray Novak — the very deadly phrase the PM used in support of Wright before dumping him.
In that same exchange with reporters, Harper also made what could be a significant slip. He said that Duffy had misused taxpayers’ money and that is why he took action against him. But wait … I thought it was the Senate that took action against Duffy, not the prime minister. I wonder who really called in the RCMP?
A cadet at West Point doesn’t lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do. Stephen Harper is and was surrounded at the highest levels of his personal staff and his party by those who (he says) deceived him and the Canadian public.
Under duress, he removed one staffer, Nigel Wright. But all the others in the loop on this secret deal — including Senator Irving Gerstein, Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, and even Ray Novak (at least according to Benjamin Perrin) — continue to serve.
The Globe and Mail is running a full-page ad trumpeting their September 17 leaders’ debate in Calgary as featuring the most important issue in the election: the economy. I beg to differ.
When you can’t count on your prime minister to tell you the truth, when the highest office in the land connives against its own citizens and sees nothing wrong with that, it’s only a matter of time before Canadians bring down the Leaning Tower of Steve.
After all, what is there left to believe in? A cheque for the kids paid for with our own money — and getting frisked on your way into public meetings?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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