Nigel Wright, once Stephen Harper’s trusted aide, chaired a daily issues management meeting when he ran the Prime Minister’s Office.
Every day, top staffers to Harper would review stories that had cropped up in the media overnight and reports from minister’s offices or agencies flagging other issues of concern that hadn’t yet made it to the headlines.
They scanned and planned responses to anything that, as issues management director Chris Woodcock would tell the RCMP, “would ruin Mr. Harper’s day,” Mike Duffy’s fraud and breach of trust trial heard this week.
Harper has had a few bad days since taking office in early 2006. The G8 Muskoka spending spree, a cabinet minister’s costly glass of orange juice, another who used a military search-and-rescue chopper as a personal taxi, and the party’s repeated run-ins with Elections Canada are a few of the controversies Harper and his Conservative colleagues have had to weather.
But the scandal over the spending habits of Harper’s Senate appointees has become his most serious controversy and the one that dogs him daily now, thanks to the ongoing fraud and breach of trust trial of his once valued political ally, Mike Duffy.
The appearance of Wright on the witness stand this week and the release of hundreds of emails detailing the frantic actions of PMO staff as they attempted to quell the political crisis around Duffy’s living expenses is raising questions for the prime minister on the campaign trail.
A government in power for any length of time accumulates the baggage of errant cabinet ministers, misspent money and corruption. Some scandals stick and prove politically damaging. Others are forgiven or forgotten by voters.
Paul Martin paid the price for the Liberal sponsorship scandal, which ultimately cost his Liberals their spot in government.
Jean Chrétien had “Shawinigate,” the allegations of conflict of interest involving a hotel in his riding, the pepper-spraying of protesters at the 1997 APEC meeting in Vancouver, and a job grant program that became what opposition MPs branded the “$1-billion boondoggle.”
Brian Mulroney lost a succession of ministers — a defence minister who visited a strip club, the housing minister who quipped about a hidden gun at an airport checkpoint and the fisheries minister who overruled department inspectors and ordered spoiled tuna released for public sale.
Harper’s rigid caucus discipline has kept a tight ship. But he, too, has lost cabinet ministers to controversy. Helena Guergis was dumped in April, 2010 over dramatic — and ultimately unproven — allegations of involvement in fraud, extortion and prostitution.
International development minister Bev Oda quit politics in 2012 soon after her taste for $16-a-glass orange juice and upscale hotel accommodations became public.
“I really think everybody has had scandals and every government has to deal with issues of both incompetence and to some degree of corruption. That just goes with the territory,” said academic Paul Nesbitt-Larking.
Yet some Conservatives controversies appear driven by an underlying ideology that has put the party at loggerheads with the country’s democratic institutions, said Nesbitt-Larking, a professor of political science at Huron University College, in London, Ont.
This extends to the election spending controversies and “robocalls,” the deliberate effort to keep Canadians from voting in the 2011 election, he said.
“Those are all examples of what I would call systematic attempts to shape and limit the democratic process to the distinct advantage of the governing party,” Nesbitt-Larking said.
“If you pull together all of these elements, you do begin to develop a systematic pattern of what one would call attempts to control through manipulation, exclusion and restriction of access to information and people.”
Dominic LeBlanc, a Liberal candidate, also says there is another thread through the Conservative scandals — that’s Harper’s refusal to acknowledge the problem.
There’s a difference between the kind of scandal the Mulroney government had, said LeBlanc.
“I think the difference is first of all the sanctimony with which Mr. Harper came to power . . . . Mr. Mulroney, when people were caught in scandals held them accountable. Mr. Harper promotes them and then denies it,” LeBlanc said.
Harper launched his re-election bid earlier this year on the strength of his government’s record on the economy and protecting national security. On the Senate scandal, he has said that it was confined to two people — Duffy and Wright, who cut a personal cheque to cover the senator’s disputed expenses.
However, the scandal is the perfect storm for Harper’s office — one where his and his top aides’ worries and weaknesses come into play; their fear of media; their need for control; their demand of total loyalty, their desire to hang onto core Conservative voters, their distaste for chaotic weak players, and a poor ability to read people and their reactions.
Throw into the mix Duffy, a consummate Ottawa insider and communicator with unpredictable loyalties, and you have the makings of Harper’s worst nightmare, now unfolding in the middle of his re-election bid.
Wright got his aversion to scandals early, as a political staffer in the Brian Mulroney years. In testimony at the Duffy trial this week, he ruefully acknowledged there were “several.”
A Conservative colleague of his, party counsel Arthur Hamilton, said Wright was almost “fixated” on ensuring the party brand was not tarnished by the kind of reckless spending, influence-peddling and corruption charges that were levied loosened Mulroney’s grip on power.
Today, Wright finds himself at the centre of Harper’s most serious scandal yet.
Source: thestar.com/
Author: Tonda MacCharles, Bruce Campion-Smith
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