Stephen Harper created Mike Duffy and, in the end, this crisis will be about one thing: What will Dear Leader do?
Flabby, self-indulgent and heart-attack prone, the Harper government has landed itself in a water-cooler crisis. Those are the political scandals that get people talking around the water-coolers at work.
In most cases, the dirt in Ottawa goes under the rug, if not the nails, of the government. Few see it or hear about it and almost no one talks about it. That’s because politics these days is on a level with trafficking in body parts. The less said about it the better.
Generally speaking, the public is tuned out and drop-dead cynical about public life. At some inscrutable level, Canadians seem disgusted by their own democracy. But sometimes the trespasses of the masters of the universe are so odious, so egregious, that to behold them requires having your stomach pumped.
At times like these the public pays attention, an indelible impression is made and the raw materials of a palpable consequence for political behaviour come together.
It’s strange what captures the public imagination. Sometimes it’s a little thing — 16 bucks for a glass of orange juice, a ministerial temper tantrum at one of the little people in an airport, or leaving the briefing book at the girlfriend’s place. It can also be a big thing — like taking hundreds of thousands in cash from a shady character and being a former prime minister of Canada.
But all these scandals share one thing in common: The cover stories used to explain them away get the needle on the BS meter twitching like a bisected snake on hot pavement. Yeah, we might be stupid — but do they take us for drooling, friggin’ idiots?
The conduct of these three senators reeks of the abuse of privilege which betokens a deep unfitness for public office.
The tripping, sipping, and double-dipping is bad enough. Their lack of remorse is epical. From the very beginning of this mess, not one of them owned up to having done anything wrong. But to have the Harper government praise Duffy for his “leadership” in the expense scandal is surely the death march of chutzpah.
By that measure, one might as well praise Pierre Poutine for his leadership in the robocalls investigation. Isn’t refusing to cooperate with the auditors, as Duffy did, the opposite of leadership — or am I missing something?
In a better world than this one, here is what would happen. Duffy, Brazeau and Harb would quit the Senate; Duffy quit the caucus, but it’s not enough. The PM’s chief of staff would resign. The leadership in the Senate would be replaced. The Senate itself would have nothing further to do with adjudicating this matter, having disgraced itself.
Why disgraced? First, because the integrity of the audit process appears to have been compromised by the Senate leadership. Senator Duffy seems to have been tipped off about what the auditors found in his case and acted accordingly. Senator David Tkachuk needs to go under oath so that people can know fully what happened here.
And then there is this, more serious fact. The Senate committee which ordered the audit in the first place has already dispensed unequal justice, disqualifying itself from any further role in being judge in its own cause.
If the rules on housing were “amply clear” and “unambiguous” as reported by CP in the cases of Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb, why were they suddenly a confused muddle when it came to Mike Duffy? If the others should have known that they weren’t entitled to their staggering housing allowances, why was Senator Duffy allowed to act as though he were confronting a problem in astrophysics? All he needed to know was where he lived.
Why should Nigel Wright resign? First, this isn’t his first brush with scandal. He was investigated, and cleared, over an alleged conflict with Barrick Gold last year.
In writing a $90,000 cheque to pay back Mike Duffy’s improper housing allowance claims, Wright completely undermined the effect of the Senate’s sanction against Duffy and the others. Since the money was said to be a gift — perhaps an exercise in strategic philanthropy — Senator Duffy got away with breaking the rules without penalty.
Bottom line? Nigel Wright subsidized an abuse of office. Was such a payment even legal? And since he did all this apparently without telling the PM, how can his judgement be trusted in the future with weighty matters like the F-35 deal hanging in the balance? By invoking an ethical wall?
But we do not live in a better world, we live in this one. Stephen Harper’s inclination is to make up the rules as he goes along. I for one do not see this as loyalty to his minions, but rather as a show of power. When, for example, the ethics commissioner has caught a cabinet minister or two in a breach of the rules, the PM has been known to simply dismiss the finding. The cases of Christian Paradis and Jim Flaherty come to mind.
So Harper’s initial instinct was to save Duffy. He began that process by taking the public on a mind-numbing sojourn into the rules and regulations of the Senate. He used the escape clause of the Deloitte audit, that by Senate definition, knowing where you live is a brain-twister. And he has never had a problem dismissing the ethical part of any problem if it collided with his agenda. Look what he did to Kevin Page for the high crime of outing the PM’s lie over the cost of the F-35s.
But dry-cleaning Duffy quickly turned into a sticky proposition. For one thing, this one has gone right up the nose of the public and people are gagging. And then there are those two mutually exclusive stories about how the senator’s debts were paid off.
Duffy says he went to the Royal Bank; the PMO says Nigel Wright slipped his friend a $90,000 gift. Only one of them can be true, so how does the PM deal with Duffy’s version of where the money came from? Now the PM has endorsed his chief of staff’s sly, secret and altogether improper intervention in the matter of Duffy’s expenses.
One enduring question is this: Why did Nigel Wright bail out Mike Duffy before the sharp pencil boys from Deloitte had even finished their damning audit?
But there is an even bigger issue. If Stephen Harper doesn’t see anything wrong with his chief of staff making a $90,000 gift to a sitting Conservative senator engulfed in scandal, is there anything he wouldn’t endorse for partisan gain?
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