While grungy and irritating, the scandal itself isn’t that big a deal. It amounts, so far (of course, much more may burst out into the open) to four senators fiddling their expense claims.
Any of these who cheated deliberately to fatten their own wallets or to use public funds to pay for political expenses (flights to party meetings) should resign.
But the amounts are not huge and there’s no evidence — yet — that the transgressions were the product of systematic wrongdoing as in the manner of the highly organized and long-running construction scandal in Quebec.
Yet the Senate affair has provoked a huge public backlash. Large numbers of people are deeply outraged at what has happened.
It’s even possible to imagine that the scandal could lead to the defeat of Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the next election, or to his early retirement. No earlier scandal has had so galvanic an effect since the famous Canadian Pacific scandal forced John A. Macdonald to leave the prime ministership (he, being very canny, bobbing right back into office at the next election).
Magnifying the disparity between the size of the scandal and the potential size of its consequences is the fact that the country itself is, in most respects, in the best shape it has ever been, certainly so when compared to other industrial democracies.
Canada’s system — and practice — of financial regulation is admired and envied around the world. We have economic aches and pains all right but these are like a cold rather than the flu or bronchitis raging in most comparable countries. On the key issues in a globalized world of immigration and multiculturalism we are an international role model.
So why are so many Canadians so upset about a small-scale, if thoroughly unpleasant, scandal?
Circumstances have helped make it a “Perfect Storm.” The principal offender, Mike Duffy, has long been not just a TV star, but was widely admired for overcoming career handicaps such as his limited education and obesity. If Duffy lets us down, who the hell won’t, goes the thought of many.
Circumstantial also is the fact that Harper, despite considerable qualities — brains, toughness, an exceptional ability to focus on problems until he’s figured out a solution — is unusually inept at dealing with a challenge like a scandal.
Harper’s political defect is that he’s an introvert. He’s not a people person. He could never say with a straight face, as could former U.S. president Bill Clinton, “I feel your pain.” Maybe Harper can actually feel this; he most certainly can’t express it.
Most important, Canadians are right to be so anxious and angry. But not about this rather trivial scandal. Nor about the country’s overall condition, which at this time really is about as good as it’s ever likely to get, at least comparatively so.
One statistic defines the underlying unease of many Canadians which, or so I reckon, they are using the Senate scandal as a means to express out loud. This was the finding by the Ekos polling company that only 14 per cent of Canadians believe their children will have as good a life as they had.
That’s a real problem, and a hugely painful one. Until now, the great majority of Canadians have taken for granted that the opposite was true and have made great sacrifices to enable their children to outreach themselves.
If instead our future is going to be defined by contraction or a narrowing of opportunities for a great many of us, then Canada itself will become a less agreeable, harsher, place.
It’s not pleasant to talk about this. It’s a lot easier to yell at Duffy. Which isn’t to say that the greatest contribution Duffy could make to the country, one to which he’s contributed a lot, would not be for him to say he’s sorry and then to hand in his resignation from the Senate.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Richard Gwyn
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