While few Canadians can recall every tangled aspect of this long-running political fiasco, the broad outline is clear enough. And for the Conservative grassroots, it is a discouraging picture of wrongdoing in high places.
Harper’s ineptly hand-picked trio made what the Senate alleges to be improper expense claims to the tune of $277,000, charging for expenses they did not incur while contending that it was technically within the rules. When called on the carpet they grudgingly repaid the money, protesting that they were being hard done by. That was damaging enough to the Tory brand.
The ham-fisted response by Harper, his freelancing staff and the party brass made things exponentially worse.
In Duffy’s case, Harper quietly demanded in February that Duffy repay the money, no doubt hoping that would be an end of it. When Duffy claimed he didn’t have the cash, Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, secretly wrote him a cheque in March for more than $90,000, to “sweep a political embarrassment to their Tory base under the rug,” in Duffy’s lawyer’s words, shielding him from the scrutiny of an independent audit.
Then when that improper deal came to light in May, Duffy says Sen. Marjory LeBreton and Harper aide Ray Novak demanded that he resign from the Tory caucus or face expulsion from the Senate. Finally, this week Harper gave his full backing to controversial and divisive motions by the Conservative majority in the Senate to suspend Duffy and the others without pay for “gross negligence” toward the taxpayer’s hard-earned dollar without giving them much of a chance to plead their case.
The unflattering portrait that emerges is of a Prime Minister who stacked the Senate with cronies who mistook the taxpayer’s dollar for their own. Who in Duffy’s case sought to cover up a scandal. Who was left out of the loop as Wright told others in the Prime Minister’s Office of his bid to fix the problem. Who wrongly told Parliament that Wright acted on his own. And who ultimately cut Duffy adrift with scant regard for the niceties of due process.
This is about scandal, cronyism, coverup, evasion, bullying and ruthless expediency. Multiple Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigations into fraud on government and breach of trust. A doctored Senate committee report. Stonewalling of auditors. And a Senate in chaos, thoroughly discredited.
That’s what most Canadians are likely to take away from the government’s mishandling of this mess. So much for the “open, honest, accountable government” Harper promised before his election in 2006. The Tory brand has become irredeemably tainted on his seven-year watch.
The crisis has left the Conservative party clawing at itself. Hard though it is to believe, there’s sympathy in the Senate for the entitled trio, if only because others fear the same pitiless fate. Wallin, for her part, claims she was a victim of an ugly “personal vendetta.” She says LeBreton and Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen resented her for her “activism” and orchestrated leaks of damning information about her own expense problems to cast her in the darkest light possible after she became a “perceived liability.” Like Duffy, she says LeBreton and Novak pressured her to resign from caucus.
Once broken, the chain of trust between Prime Minister, party leaders and followers is hard to repair.
Harper and his aides appear to be bungling this file from A to Z. And Conservatives have reason to fear that they are nowhere close to Z just yet.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Editorial
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