A string of impressive victories — but did he play fair?
It’s a good question. His modus operandi doesn’t pass the Ronald Reagan credibility test: trust but verify. How can you verify someone who makes it up as he goes along, when the truth, as my colleague Lawrence Martin so aptly put it, is a moving target?
I’m beginning to think the PM never went to Sunday school. If he did, he must have sought an early legal opinion on loopholes in the Ten Commandments. He has been practising minimal compliance ever since — mostly in regard to that part of the prophet’s tablet dealing with mendacity. But so far, lightning has not struck the Parliament Buildings.
When the independent KPMG audit of the F-35 program was released, showing that the government had low-balled the project by at least $10 billion, the prime minister boasted that the report vindicated the government’s numbers. That’s like Richard Nixon declaring that the gaps in the Oval Office tapes proved his innocence in Watergate.
More recently, the Conservatives deceived Saskatchewan residents with a push-poll they pretended was coming from Joan of Arc, aliens, maybe Elvis — anybody but them. A flat-out, categorical denial they knew to be false.
Then Glen McGregor of Postmedia got the idea of comparing Matt Meier’s voice on his answering machine at RackNine — the company whose servers were used to send out fake robocalls during the 2011 federal election — to the anonymous voice on the push-poll calls. They sounded eerily alike.
The other half of the dynamic duo, Stephen Maher, got his protons going too. He thought of subjecting the push-poll voice and the answering-machine voice to technical comparison. It turned out not to be ET, but an old friend, Matt Meier.
The Conservative party was outed, and Fred DeLorey hurriedly threw the public relations Batmobile into reverse. He apologized for the “internal miscommunication” — i.e. dirty, low-down sneakiness of the kind the Tories used against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, and which the Speaker of the House of Commons called “reprehensible.”
As for Meier, he remained true to form, answering reporters’ questions in an inscrutable language somewhere between English from the period of the metaphysical poets and a CIA encryption.
The affair left MPs like Tom Lukiwski, who initially denied that the Saskatchewan push-poll was a CPC sneak attack, gasping for air. Lukiwski hadn’t been told. He looked eastward from his home province towards the head office that had deceived him. The needle of his moral compass pointed straight at party majordomo Jenni Byrne.
The MP said Byrne was responsible for the deception and would bear the full responsibility for it. Bless him in his innocence. Byrne was predictably saved from on high. Stephen Harper appeared deus ex machina and declared that the party had followed all the rules — after the party itself admitted it had not.
Until some court or regulatory body finds otherwise, there will be no new members of the Dead Advisors Society of one Stephen Harper. Lukiwski is probably on his way to Ms. Byrne’s re-education camp. When he emerges, he will have the same devotional light in his eyes as Pierre Poilievre sermonizing on Power and Politics about the wisdom of the Great Navigator.
My all-time favourite example of the prime minister playing master-of-the-universe with the facts is his claim that he didn’t break his promise not to tax income trusts in Canada. In that case, the facts the PM countermanded were his own.
Yes, when he needed a different narrative before he became prime minister, he had penned an editorial in the National Post supporting income trusts. His opinion rested on the fact that income trusts allowed the Tim Horton’s Nation to get through retirement without eating cat food or choosing between the thermostat or their medications.
When Harper iced income trusts after becoming prime minister, he not only didn’t bat an eyelash about the monstrous breach of trust (worse than Jean Chretien’s about-face on his promise to ditch the GST), he denied that he had acted in bad faith. Instead, he simply declared a new truth.
But there are problems with blotting out inconvenient truths with self-serving Newspeak. It’s catchier than a flu-bug in a pup tent. Quite a few pairs of pants are on fire in Ottawa these days because cabinet ministers and senators have learned from the PM that the truth is what you need it to be. It can mutate, transform, even shed its skin. The trick is to say what you need to be true at a given moment.
This week the minister of fisheries told the House of Commons that there had been no change in the publication policy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Meanwhile, his own scientists are saying otherwise, anonymously. One of them even posted documents on the Internet showing precisely how the rules have changed. Whatever the minister may declare, the ones wearing the muzzle felt it tighten.
The president of Treasury Board has also caught the bug. If fox-hunting is the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, then Tony Clement is comedy in hot pursuit of farce. Too bad, such a smart guy. The man who beautified his riding with money intended for the Border Service this week gave interviews on the cause nearest to his heart — open government.
Coffee sprayed from nostrils when people read about Tony’s conversion. Until then, the conventional wisdom was that his idea of openness in government was taking pictures of himself with his cellphone and sending them out with his tweets. It’s too bad the Soviet Union collapsed. There would have been a nice job waiting for Tony at Pravda.
Senators, too, have followed the PM in declaring their preferred version of what used to be called the facts. Grown men don’t seem to know where they live anymore — except technically speaking. Oddly enough, their interpretation of the location of their domicile just happens to bring along with it a windfall of taxpayer cash. I don’t know about you, but I find the contrition levels in the Red Chamber meeting the David Dingwall threshold these days.
It is too early to say if parsing the fine print in their favour will catch up with the three senators who now face the fishy-eyed scrutiny of outside auditors. But there is one senator who has already learned the limits of trying to establish facts by simply declaring them. It was, after all, Patrick Brazeau who said that Chief Theresa Spence was not a good role model for aboriginal youth.
Perhaps the wider truth here is that we live in an age of deception.
In the banking industry, the global price of money affecting $300 trillion worth of contracts was rigged for years by the collusion of traders and brokers. Crappy mortgages were sold as blue-ribbon investments. Giant hedge funds traded on insider information and even the drug cartels found banks eager to do their monetary laundry.
In big business, accounting firms lied for important customers, companies like SNC Lavalin paid huge bribes to unsavoury but influential characters to win contracts, suppliers sent fake parts to their military customers to boost profits — and mining companies abused workers’ rights in foreign countries in a way they would never try back home.
In baseball, football, cycling and a host of other sports, the best players were the most juiced — from Barry Bonds to that incomparable cheat Lance Armstrong. The lesson in sports seems to be what one NFL player quipped after the New England Patriots were caught spying on an opponent’s practice session to steal their signals: “If you aint cheatin, you ain’t trying.”
Parties of all political stripes have had their share of liars and cheaters, just as they have had a goodly number of visionaries and public benefactors. But when lying and cheating morph into a model of governance where citizens not only don’t know, but can’t know what’s going on, democracy becomes what H.L. Mencken called a fancy abstraction for the collective fear and prejudice of an ignorant mob.
It is an old chestnut, this matter of the limits of raw power. Can you really say two and two is five, that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, that war is peace?
“Some men think the earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the king’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the king’s command flatten it?”
Sir Thomas More’s question in the play named for him is ultimately about the King’s subjects — not the king.
Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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