With the criminal trial of Mike Duffy set to resume, the curious and controversial role that Wright played in this soap opera of trough politics and shady payoffs is worth reconsidering. A new PMO is in the process of being cobbled together and the Harper operation offers a cautionary tale of how not to do it.
Wright was thrust into the unblinking spotlight of scandal when it became known that he personally paid off $90,000 in disputed expenses claimed by Senator Duffy. On the witness stand, he quoted St. Matthew, the verse about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, to justify the secrecy surrounding this “good deed.”
It was not just secretive; it was deliberately deceitful and shabby beyond all measure. Wright was not being a good samaritan, just a good company man. Period.
Using the Gospels to justify his Machiavellian solution to the Duffy Affair may have convinced the RCMP that Wright was blameless. After all, only Duffy got charged, something the Mounties have yet to explain. But it didn’t ultimately convince Stephen Harper. He eventually claimed Wright had been fired for deceiving him.
So how did Wright, this child of the Bay Street Establishment and the ultimate party insider, persuade himself that spin, secrecy and lies were okay in the first place?
It is the heart of the matter. Wright believed that everything he did, including his chequebook damage control, was in the service of a higher cause than garden-variety ethical imperatives. He was protecting the reputation of an institution, the Senate, and the prime minister.
This is a story I have watched, with minor variations, unfold countless times. Whether it’s Arthur Anderson’s accountants lying for Enron, the CBC downplaying the ethical and criminal lapses of its “stars” until that became impossible, or Penn State turning a blind eye to football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual predation — it always ends badly.
The granddaddy of them all was the Mount Cashel orphanage tragedy. The Newfoundland justice department allowed confessed pedophiles a pass through the justice system because the damage to the Catholic Church of a public prosecution was considered to be more important than the harm done to the child victims of the Irish Christian Brothers.
I was not the only person to chronicle the fact that in all too many cases the protection of perpetrators took precedence over justice for their victims in both the legal system and the Roman Catholic Church. Michael Higgins and Peter Kavanagh wrote a book called Suffer the Little Children Unto Me: An Open Inquiry into the Clerical Sexual Abuse Scandal. They too documented the cover-up by prelates, apologists, and lay administrators who were single-mindedly obsessed with protecting the church’s corporate image.
I met Higgins when he was President of St. Thomas University in New Brunswick at a dinner party when I was named to the Irving Chair of Journalism at the Catholic university. Writing in The Irish Catholic, Higgins recently offered some sage advice to Canadian politicians on the subject of protecting major institutions from scandal — especially when they are obviously in the wrong.
Higgins points out that Pope Benedict XVI wrote in a pastoral letter about the error of “misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and avoidance of scandal” at all costs. The Pope has walked the walk. He has asked for the resignations of three American Bishops for their failure to protect children and hold priestly abusers to account. The game of musical parishes is over, where the church used to rotate pedophile priests out of parishes where they got into trouble into new areas where they were unknown.
Higgins argues that when reputation becomes the “summum bonum” and transparency and honesty don’t count, you destroy the thing you are trying to protect. And that applies to the secular world of politics in Canada as well as the ecclesiastical world. Is there a better description of the Harper years?
“When you undertake to ‘protect’ the reputation of an institution – in this case the Red Chamber – when you seek to insulate any governing body – in this case the PMO and the Prime Minister – from the taint of scandal, and you do this through spin, sophistical argumentation, and lawyerly legerdemain, any gains are provisional, any result pyrrhic.”
Harper got his pyrrhic victory in the Senate scandal. Wright and Duffy were not only scapegoated as the sole architects of a sleazy arrangement, but the senator whose only crime may have been playing by flawed rules now groans under 31 criminal counts.
But Canadians seem to have viewed the whole affair as an exercise in choral lying and abuse of power. There are too many documents that have come to light showing that the Harper PMO as a team manipulated the whole Senate scandal. The PMO directly fiddled Senate reports to their own specifications and breached the confidentiality of a Senate forensic audit by Deloitte. In the end, voters didn’t believe any of the key players — including the former prime minister when he said he didn’t know how Duffy’s expenses had been settled. October 19th settled all outstanding accounts.
The lesson from the Wright/Duffy Affair for prime minister designate Justin Trudeau and the PMO he will create around him is clear. Canadians were falsely promised transparency and accountability in 2006 and all too often got self-interest and lies from the highest office in the land. The mendacity reached its crescendo with the Senate expense scandal.
With all his great promise, and with every good wish for success coming Trudeau’s way from the voters who just elected him, Canadians now expect a much higher standard than the one offered by Wright’s notion of loyalty in Harper’s PMO. Michael Higgins put it this way:
“Nothing short of honest accountability will work… The Catholic Church learned the cost of choosing institutional ‘well-being’ over the ethical imperative to speak and act truthfully. The Canadian government can benefit from the Church’s experience.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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