The Sixth Estate

Update: Since I wrote this, Duffy announced his resignation from the Conservative caucus. Although the Prime Minister’s Office presumably hopes this will quell the controversy, and is probably right given the generally pliant state of the conservative-leaning media, in actual fact the Duffy resignation merely illustrates the self-serving character of the government. The most important information to come to light this week was that Duffy’s announcement  few weeks back that he was voluntarily repaying $90,000 which he bilked from taxpayers was actually a carefully stage-managed part of a conspiracy in which Duffy received money to make the payback from Harper’s chief of staff, even as Harper’s office praised Duffy for coming forward with his own money. So it’s, at the very least, unclear why Duffy should be required to take the fall for this operation, while Harper expresses “full confidence” in his chief of staff. It’s unclear how, in Conservative minds, only one side of that transaction could be morally in the wrong.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, the National Post’s Matt Gurney has a useful summary of Mike Duffy’s corrupt antics in the Senate, up to and including the decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to bail out Duffy with $90,000 in cash from Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, which Duffy then used to pay back his $90,000 in ill-gotten gains bilked from the taxpayer via fraudulent expense claims. At the time, the PMO praised Duffy for “voluntarily” paying back the money. It now turns out there was nothing less than a conspiracy to rescue Duffy from having to make good on the expense accounts, and then to cover up the truth.

It’s illegal for Duffy to accept these sorts of payments in connection with his job as a Senator, so Gurney’s colleague, Andrew Coyne, is probably a little off base when he suggests that the matter wouldn’t have been nearly so awful if Duffy had disclosed the payment when it was made. In any event, I do thoroughly endorse the calls from both Coyne and Gurney (and many, many others) for Duffy to resign.

But there’s a broader observation to be made here, and I’m going to draw on another recent and scandalous episode in order to make it: where the hell has Stephen Harper’s admittedly self-interested sense of ethics gone?

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I’m not terribly interested in speculating, at least for the moment, about why the pollsters would be devastatingly incorrect — again — about a provincial election campaign. My guess is that in this case it has something to do with young people not voting, but again, the answer will become clear over the next couple of weeks. Mainly because that’s what the media will be focusing on.

Instead I have something else to get off my chest. I’m disappointed every time a far-right anti-government political party led by ignorant, unimaginative, corrupt, pro-global warming oligocrats wins an election. But to be honest, I’m not entirely surprised, and I’m actually surprised I’m not more disappointed. Being a leftist of my generation — I’m almost 30 now, so I can no longer truly claim to speak for the youth, but I am part of a generation that elects not to vote in unprecedented numbers — is a lonely lot. It’s also a thoroughly depressing lot, to the point that you sort of get inured to this kind of thing.

In my lifetime, I have not witnessed the creation of a single truly significant social program of any kind. I almost share a birthday with the Constitution, which I revere, but it’s pretty much downhill from there: the erosion and now open elimination of universal healthcare; the rise of free trade and the consequent devaluation of Canadian citizenship; the selling off of most of the profitable elements of the public sector at both the federal and provincial levels; the beginning of the end of Employment Insurance, public pensions and Old Age Security; the rise of a political culture of naked deceit and overt criminality of a sort not normally tolerated in democratic countries with the rule of law and not seen in Canada for a century; the slashing and burning of public education…

And, last but quite the opposite of least, the great turning away from scientifically informed climate policy. That one may sound a bit unfair, since my lifetime also saw the rise of scientifically informed climate policy. However, since the year I was old enough to vote, there has been nothing but setbacks on the question of whether dangerous climate change will be mitigated, let alone prevented. Emission regulation ideas surfaced, and were defeated by the right on the grounds they were inefficient. The carbon tax arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was a punitive move. Cap and trade arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was unnecessary government intervention in the economy.

Speaking of the economy, it’s worth noting that so called “centre-right” political parties have correctly judged that the vast majority of Canadians are simply not interested in voting for anything other than a promise of budget cuts, tax cuts, and job growth, basically at the cost of anything else, whether it’s social services or accountability or even a minimal level of integrity and honesty in politics or the environment or our international reputation or anything else. This is precisely the result which my series on evolution and the future of humanity was building towards, so I’ll probably feel a little vindicated on that front if nothing else. These people will be basically evenly split between those who don’t bother voting at all and those who vote for whatever party they have a vague hunch will move in those directions.

Which is why, if there was an actual far-right-wing party, one defined by an actual commitment to the free market or an actual commitment to social conservatism or anything like that, it would actually garner very few votes. Because nobody would vote on principle for that either. I believe that most people assume that the social services they personally require will always be there for them, just as they assume that the environment they need to survive will always be there for them. And they vote, or don’t vote, accordingly.

Yesterday I published a fairly scathing review of CBC’s attempt at a fact-checking service, which appeared to conclude that the right-wing BC Liberal Party (a former Social Credit gang which is now a close ally of Stephen Harper) was spreading untruths about the record of the opposition NDP when they were in power during the 1990s. Which was fine with me, except that CBC then bizarrely suggested that the Liberals “want [voters] to remember” what happened in the 1990s. Of course the very nature of false propaganda is that you want people to remember what didn’t happen.

Anyways, even that piffling critique must have been just a little too salty for the likes of either the premier’s office or some snivelling bureaucrat in the upper echelons of CBC, or perhaps both, given the miscegenation that has occurred between CBC News and the BC Premier’s Office in recent years. I went back to the offending article on Monday evening, and discovered to my amusement that CBC’s editors had tacked on a disclaimer:

CBC’s Reality Check team has determined Clark’s statement, while technically correct, is political spin.

Clark’s statement, so referenced, is the claim that under the NDP the B.C. credit rating received six consecutive downgrades. The original version of the CBC piece, which for the moment is still visible at Yahoo, did not conclude with this statement. The original version’s verdict was that Clark’s claims and actual reality “[are]n’t quite the same.” The revised version hastens to add that even so, Clark is “technically correct.”

How you can be not quite accurate but still technically correct is left up to readers to decide. CBC’s own story claims that BC received six rating downgrades between 1997 and 1999, in total, from four different ratings agencies. Since (to my knowledge) each agency publishes an annual rating assessment, and since the DBRS rating for the province (which CBC helpfully charts) was not downgraded in either 1997 or 1998, it’s fairly obvious that there cannot possibly have been six “consecutive” downgrades using any normal meaning of that term.

But don’t take it from me, take it from then-Liberal leader Gordon Campbell himself, speaking in the legislature in 1999:

Today the Canadian Bond Rating Service has downgraded B.C.’s credit rating to double-A-minus. It is the second consecutive downgrade of this NDP government.

Oops. One, two, six. Whatever. Coming up next week: after voting for deficit budgets several hundred times during their decade in office,** will the BC Liberals finally be kicked to the curb by voters?

One of the problems with operating an inoffensive “fact-checking” service is that sometimes the facts don’t check. In my opinion “CBC’s Reality Check team” has kind of stumbled out of the gate here by softening their report. I wait with baited breath to see what non-falsehood they’ll locate next. Sooner or later, they’ll have to tackle the Dix Memogate affair, and that’s sure to kick up a fuss no matter what they say.

** Sixth Estate’s numbers are, while technically correct, political spin.

Well, at least we have it confirmed for us. The reason that Vic Toews is a Cabinet minister despite being convicted of election fraud, the reason that Peter Penashue is allowed to stand as a Conservative candidate despite being responsible for similar violations of the law, the reason Peter Van Loan is still House Leader despite committing similar violations of the law, the reason Gary Goodyear is still science minister despite violating the elections law, and the reason that Tony Clement was promoted in Cabinet despite a Sponsorship Scandal-sized diversion of border security funds into park-building in his cottage country riding, the reason so few Conservatives are troubled that their party committed election fraud in 2006 and is under investigation for doing so in 2011, is that to Harper’s Conservatives, corruption isn’t actually a vice at all. It’s a virtue:

“I attained and pushed for managed to get $85 million for the road, on the Trans-Labrador Highway. I will tell you this. If I was not there, that road, that money would not be spent there. The money would be spent somewhere else,” Penashue said.

“I will tell you a secret. I did not sign the approvals in Newfoundland until I had my $85 million for the road in Labrador, and I held their project for six months,” Penashue told a cheering crowd.

That’s Cabinet minister turned disgraced Labrador candidate Peter Penashue, explaining to his former constituents why they should re-elect him.

What’s interesting about this isn’t which project in Newfoundland was delayed so that Labrador could get its highway, although that’s the question the few journalists who even care about corruption anymore are clamouring for an answer to. The question is how Conservative supporters have become — if indeed they have become, as Penashue and his handlers seem to think — so greedy, morally degraded and contemptible that baldfaced lies about how corrupt their politician is will somehow be appealing to them.

Some of us are old enough to remember that before stepping down to run in the by-election, Penashue was Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for questioning whether the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs has the final signing authority on any multi-million-dollar investment projects at all, let alone that he withheld one or more for months as leverage to secure investment in his own riding. In the past fiscal year, his proactive disclosure report shows exactly zero grants or contributions. (No doubt that’s because he’s withholding his signature until the federal government agrees to move its payroll centre to Happy Valley-Goose Bay or something.)

The worst-case scenario, of course, is that Penashue is telling the truth. As unlikely as that may sound. I can’t imagine what projects he would be able to delay, but it would be a spectacular admission of willful negligence on his part (since he is the Cabinet representative for Newfoundland) and a very useful insight into how the Harper Cabinet works. It would be useful to know whether Cabinet ministers treat all non-Cabinet ridings as bargaining chips to feather their own nest, or whether only opposition ridings are singled out for this sort of collective punishment.

In less than a decade, this country has moved from sponsorship scandal being a national embarrassment to sponsorship scandals being something to brag about. And you can thank Harper’s Conservatives for that.

In the meantime, at least we have one question answered for us. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Prime Minister’s Office is actually not, as some columnists have claimed in recent days, carefully scripting every word that comes out of Penashue’s mouth. It’s hard to imagine the PMO deciding that this would be an intelligent thing to say. Although I suppose I shouldn’t put anything past them.

The Cyprus banking crisis is a useful teachable moment about banking and taxation — so I guess I’m not surprised that this opportunity is being entirely missed by the media, most of whom probably don’t know what’s actually going on, either. Both the left and the right are incensed at the Cypriot government’s proposed solution: a 6.7-9.9% tax on savings account balances will raise funds which will then be used to bail out the banks. That didn’t go over well. The result was that the government backed away and is now frantically considering other options. It needs to raise a few billion euros to qualify for a bailout loan from the rest of the European Union. It doesn’t have the money.

But what intrigues me is the controversy over the bank account tax. News of this tax flashed around the world. Various left-wing outlets are describing this as a grand theft organized by European technocrats. The right is playing populist by denouncing the seizure of hardworking Cypriots’ money to perpetuate bad government policy (although credible rumour has it that the largest accountholders in Cyprus are actually Russian oligarchs).

The trouble is, I don’t think a lot of people really understand how banking works. Because if they did, I don’t think they’d find the savings tax all that upsetting. If you’re going to have bank bailouts, then savings account taxes are probably one of the best ways of financing them. A better way would probably be to hand over ownership of the bank to the people with savings accounts, which I’ll get to later. But the important thing is that we discuss these things with the proper background knowledge of what’s going on. The media evidently doesn’t see its role as providing this sort of education to the masses, and neither, evidently, is the school system doing so, which leaves anyone who has never taken a macroeconomics course a few steps behind, understanding-wise. Ain’t modern democracy grand?

The most important reality that I think the vast majority of people don’t understand is that despite what your monthly statement may say, you don’t actually have (almost) any money in the bank. Bank accounts are not like safety deposit boxes. A savings account is actually a loan. You loan the bank whatever you “deposit.” In exchange, the bank promises to pay you a trivially small amount of interest, plus to pay up on the loan whenever you demand it, in the form of a “withdrawal.” Then, the bank takes your money and loans in to other customers.

This system, called fractional reserve banking, works because the bank knows that its creditors — meaning, you and me — will only demand a small fraction of their collective deposits on any given day. So, it only needs to hold back a few percent of that pool to give out on an as-needed basis. The rest of that money, it can do with as it pleases. It can take it and invest in Greek government bonds, for instance, like Cyprus did. Whoops. Or it can loan it out to other bank clients as a mortgage. Or whatever. As long as the investments don’t go up in smoke and as long as the account-holders don’t all show up on the same day demanding to withdraw all their money, the system can appear entirely normal.

Governments try to limit the damage through vehicles like deposit insurance, although the net effect is that in exchange for preventing all small-scale crises and bank runs, you create an appearance of total normalcy until a really big crisis comes along. In Canada, for instance, we feel that our accounts are “safe” because they’re insured by the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. CDIC currently guarantees that the first $100,000 in your account is safe, no matter what. But that’s a total of about $650 billion right now. CDIC doesn’t have $650 billion to pay out. Instead, it has around $2 billion.

What this means is that, despite what everyone (including the banks) tell you to think, you really shouldn’t think of your savings account as a pile of money waiting for you to use it. It’s a loan to the bank, plain and simple. That’s why you earn interest on it every month. The banks don’t pay us very much interest, because of supply and demand: they don’t have to. We loan them money anyway, habitually, because we’ve all been raised to think that it’s entirely normal to loan the bank money every time you have more cash on hand than you absolutely need for the day’s expenses, and because banks have such a good track record for paying off loans on demand that it doesn’t really feel like there’s any risk involved.

But there is risk involved. Canada is only one mass trip to the bank away from being the next Cyprus (except it can’t be: more on this in a moment.) Every so often, a combination of bad government policy and bad private bank investment activities — it doesn’t actually take both of these, but they usually go together — combine to cause multiple large banks to be unable to meet their financial obligations. At that point, the governments bail out the banks, to the tune of trillions of dollars if necessary. The right screams that this is distorting the market and the left screams that the banks should just be nationalized. The “centre” takes the worst of both worlds by offering exorbitant taxpayer-financed bailout packages to private corporations.

Which brings us to Cyprus and its controversial bank account tax. Never mind the fact that without a bailout (or a nationalization) in some form, the people with these savings accounts will be totally broke anyways. If the money isn’t raised somehow, the banks will collapse. So they’re protesting that writing off 7-10% of their savings as a tax is an unfair way to save the other 90% of their savings.

But notice that everyone is still behaving as if “their savings” are involved. As I’ve explained here, “their savings” are already gone. They’re not customers waiting for service, they’re creditors with amounts owing that can’t be paid up right now. If you’re one of the unlucky millions who has just found out how the banking system really works, well, tough luck. If you’re upset at the prospect of the government taxing one-tenth of your savings, think about the prospect of losing 100% of your savings.

But there’s almost no question, anyways, that there will be some sort of bailout. The question is, where will the money come from? This is where the Cyprus case could give us some real lessons, if we want to learn them.

Traditionally, the way that governments keep the banking system solvent is by creating more money. Outside of a major crisis, they do this a little bit at a time. The result is that there’s more money to go around, but each dollar is worth a little bit less in terms of what it can get for you in the market. It’s a steady trickle of devaluation so gradual you barely even notice. In Canada, the official goal for the inflation rate is 2% per year. Right now, it’s lower than that. In the past it’s been much higher; during the 1970s, it rose above 10% for a number of years.

Notice, though, that inflation has exactly the same effect on bank account balances as the proposed Cyprus bank tax would. 5% inflation is equal to a 5% tax, except that instead of actually taking money away, it’s just making the existing money worth less. So the inflation associated with printing money, or inflation for any other reason for that matter, is the same as a savings tax. The difference is, inflation affects all money. The Cypriot bank account tax would only affect people who deposited their savings in bank accounts. In practice that’s pretty much everyone, so the net effect would be similar, but as a means of bailing out failed banks, a bank account tax is actually fairer than inflation because you would only suffer in the taxation case to the extent that you’d loaned money to the banks in question.

All that said, even if a savings account tax is the “fairer” option, it’s also a completely unmanageable one. As Cyprus quickly learned, if you tell everyone that 10% of their savings accounts will be confiscated on, say, next Wednesday, then everyone will try to make sure they don’t have any money left in their savings accounts on that particular day. But the banks don’t have the money. So they can’t process all the withdrawals. And you end up with a bank run anyways. It would be hard to implement a savings tax specifically on bank account balances without creating some sort of mass financial panic, and even harder to do it as a one-time-only event, which is what Cyprus has tried to do.

There is another option which seems reasonable to me (and I would be interested to see it discussed by anyone who actually knows anything about business): allow a bank, perhaps upon authorization from the relevant government department, to convert bank account balances into equity shares in the bank. Capped at, say, 10% of the total balance. As far as I can see, this would make it the same loss to account-holders as Cyprus’s proposed bank account tax, except that it would leave the account-holders with something tangible for their loss: an equivalent amount of ownership in the bank.

Under the circumstances, of course, that may not sound terribly attractive to you: who wants to own shares in a Cypriot bank which has already been downgraded to junk status by the bond rating agencies? As unattractive as it might be, I propose this option because (a) the people are probably going to lose at least this much money one way or another anyways, whether it’s to inflation, bankruptcy, or a savings tax; and (b) this is how things normally work when a company goes bankrupt. The people who are owed money come first in line before the people who own stock, and one way of making up the shortfall between what they are owed and what the company actually can give them is made up through ownership.

The result is that the current owners’ shares are worth less, the creditors take on ownership in the ailing company, and hopefully a new management is able to put things back on a sound financial footing. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing, which is what the Cypriots are being offered in the case of a tax. It would be different if the tax was for actual government revenue. In this case my understanding is that the tax is simply being imposed to raise funds for the banking sector, so it’s basically equivalent to just chopping 10% off of everyone’s account balance.

It’s possible to trace, year over year, the increasing negligence and partisanship of the Canadian media by how they react to government budgets. Take this year’s budget, for instance. If a Liberal or NDP government anywhere in the country, let alone federally, tabled a budget that blew past its previous deficit projections by billions of dollars, I cannot imagine that the most exciting part of the new budget would be the new cut to tariffs on children’s sports equipment. Hardly. The media would be screaming about the evils of big government deficits.

Which is why it’s worth poking a hole in this week’s balloon, conveniently floated for the government by the major corporate media in this country, that the new Harper government budget is somehow “chipping away at the deficit” by developing a plan for balancing the budget in 2015-2016.

Nope. This is sanctimonious bullshit. It would be naked dishonesty if it came from the Conservatives themselves. I’m not sure what you call it when it comes from the Globe & Mail and even the Toronto Star. Smug commentators often claim that voters have short memories. Apparently they’re projecting their own inadequacies onto “the voter,” which is hardly surprising, since they do that sort of thing all the time.

Here’s the thing about this supposed “plan to balance the budget by 2015-2016.” Now, I suspect they will produce a balanced budget in 2015. How, I’m not sure. Perhaps they’ll lie. Perhaps they’ll obfuscate. Perhaps there will be a massive economic recovery in the next two years which will inflate government revenues. My guess is they’re hoping for the latter. But the truth is, we’ve had multiple “plans to balance the budget by 2015-2016.” Like most addicts, the Conservatives have blown one of these vaunted “plans,” and then another, and then another. This time, their latest blunder will add billions of dollars in debt. I’m not sure why this is something worth crediting them with “sound economic management” for.

To wit, when the Conservatives came to power in 2006, they inherited a Liberal budget surplus. This surplus ended in 2008. The 2009-10 budget ran a $33.7 billion deficit, but the Conservatives promised that by 2013-2014, they’d be back in surplus territory again. It’s worth noting that this is the 2013-2014 budget we’re talking about now, and we’re nowhere near surplus territory. That was the first plan to restore a budget surplus.

The year after that, as a result of Economic Action Plan spending, the deficit ballooned to an estimated $49.2 billion. The 2010-11 budget was also the first time, for those who care to keep track, that the Conservatives laid the necessary framework to balance the budget in 2015-16 (in that case, by drawing the deficit down to near-zero for the previous fiscal year). By 2011, they promised, they would have made good progress towards that goal, by reducing the deficit to $27 billion.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the next year the budget projection for 2011-12 was tweaked to be a $32 billion deficit, but the Conservatives insisted — in an election year, notably — that even though they’d missed their deficit reduction goal, they were actually balancing the budget even faster than they had thought: now a surplus would be regained in 2014. And, they promised, they were going to get started on that right away by reducing the deficit down to $18 billion in 2012.

Once again, that didn’t happen. Instead of $18 billion, the 2012 budget deficit was recast as $21 billion, and the Conservatives moved the balanced budget goalposts back to 2015. But they still promised that they were going to get to work on that right away, by reducing the deficit to just $10 billion in 2013. That would be the lowest it’s been in years. We’re slowly getting back to Liberal-style spending, the Conservatives promised, although they didn’t exactly phrase it that way, of course.

Well, it’s budget time again, and, surprise! The Conservatives have missed their deficit projections. Again. And they’re promising that this will in no way affect the schedule for achieving a balanced budget. Again. Exactly how many times do we have to listen to this broken record before the editorial boards of the major newspapers take notice?

Instead of a $10 billion budget deficit this year, the Conservatives now say they’ll be running an $18 billion deficit. Instead of a trivial $1 billion deficit next year, they now say they’ll be running a $6.6 billion deficit. And they’ll balance the budget in 2015, they say, but only by a few hundred million dollars, not by $3.4 billion, as we were initially promised. At best, this means painful cuts are ahead.

If I had a shred of real optimism left, I’d say the wheels are starting to fall off of the Harper bus. But I have no such shred left. Instead all I have is a sinking suspicion that yet another wave of pro-government editorials will soon sweep the free press, everyone will comment mindlessly on the latest poll from Nanos, and then it will be back to normal again.

Which is why the recent surprise resignation of minister Peter Penashue should not be allowed to pass unmarked. To recap, Minister Penashue stands accused of vastly exceeding his election spending limit (illegal), and then, having done that without raising sufficient funds to pay the bills, engaging in a stream of further illegal behaviour to try and cover up the debts: soliciting corporate donations (illegal), soliciting a virtual corporate donation in the form of a massive write-off of his airfare bill (illegal), failing to pay back loans on schedule (illegal), and arranging a massive bail-out loan from an aboriginal development organization (not necessarily illegal, although it was originally reported as being interest-free, which is illegal but was apparently done in error.)

In response, this past week, Penashue resigned his seat and says he will now run again to let the voters of Labrador decide whether he can remain in office. What’s more, the Conservatives have stated that in the ensuing byelection, they will be selecting Penashue as their candidate.

Penashue’s decision to run again is less extraordinary than the Conservative decision to keep him as a candidate. The reason is this: contrary to what the Conservatives now claim (and contrary to what the media appears to have bought, hook, line, and sinker), when it comes to election fraud, Penashue is not accountable first and foremost to the voters of Labrador. He is accountable to the law, just like every other Canadian. With this latest announcement, the Conservatives have indicated that they accept that illegalities occurred but that the guilty parties should be given a free pass as long as a plurality of voters in a riding agree that he’s still their guy.

Several remarks are noteworthy here. First, I have not noticed any professional journalist yet asking the obvious question: what happens to Elections Canada’s ongoing investigation of Penashue’s illegal behaviour? Has Elections Canada, behind the scenes, agreed to suspend its investigation in exchange for him running in a by-election? This would be an extraordinary breach of public faith by our elections regulator, especially because nobody involved — least of all Elections Canada — has yet stated formally and on the public record exactly what transgressions the voters of Labrador should be taking into account when they cast their new ballots. In 2011, Elections Canada agreed to withhold vital information from the public about the profligate misspending of Government House Leader Peter Van Loan until after ballots had been cast. The best-case scenario is that this is more of the same.

It’s also more of the same in the sense that the Conservatives are once again claiming that there is no such thing as political responsibility. Everything, we are told, was done by an inexperienced staffer. There can be no blame laid at the feet of Penashue — not even the blame for hiring this allegedly incompetent person in the first place. I can just imagine, in contrast, how the Canada Revenue Agency would react if I sent them the following letter (which, I’ll take pains to emphasize, refers to entirely fictitious circumstances):

Hi, CRA. With respect to that audit of $50,000 in unpaid taxes you notified me of, I want you to know that some mistakes were made by somebody else. Whoops! I guess I shouldn’t have given that homeless dude a $10 Tim Hortons gift card in exchange for filling out my tax forms. I want you to know that I’m going to hire a real accountant this time around, and I’m even going to file a new tax return in place of the old one. So no hard feelings, right?

Right. Frankly, the fact that the Conservatives don’t simply boot him to the curb is extraordinary. It’s not as if Penashue is an influential or accomplished politician. The fact that they don’t see the need to simply replace him with some other warm body, of which there must be more than a few in Labrador, shows what a kleptocracy the Harper Cabinet has become. With this action they’re saying that if known and self-confessed election fraudsters, scam artists, and other miscreants want to run for election under the Conservative banner, well, that’s jolly good. They’re a big tent party, and all that!

Which is where we get to my “Rubicon” comment. Voters have not yet been given an opportunity to cast a ballot with the final results of the “in and out” scam in mind — although, in fairness, the pro-Conservative minority which elected the present government has already given every indication that election fraud is just fine and dandy with them, too. Voters did go to the polls in 2011 with the question of contempt of Parliament in mind, or should have at any rate, and at that time the winning plurality determined that unwritten conventions of Parliamentary good conduct are not important to them. That’s a decision I find hard to stomach, but whatever. They did.

What no Canadian voter has been asked to do in recent memory, at least that I can think of, is to cast a vote in favour of someone who freely acknowledges that their campaign attempted to win an election by fraud. The symbolic implications of letting Penashue run at this point in the game, let alone of him winning, should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of critical thinking capacity. If Penashue is re-elected, it will send a strong signal to those in Ottawa — those of all parties — that the election laws are mere token scraps of paper.

I should think that Conservatives would understand, if nothing else, the value of law and order. I guess I was wrong on that. Canada’s “law and order” party has become Kleptocrats R Us.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I maintain a sort of quixotic respect for our late lamented friend, the principle of ministerial responsibility. You’ll find it in the obituaries section of the Canada Gazette. It’s the principle which, until really very recently, obligated any senior politician in government to accept responsibility for the actions of their staffers. Under the principle of ministerial responsibility, ignorance of the action is not an excuse. As a member of the Cabinet, you get all of the credit — and in exchange, you also get all of the blame.

Until the recent right-wing ascension, anyways. This week saw right-wing parties dip to new lows across Canada, and both instances are worth charting because of their sheer Orwellian absurdity.

First, there’s the BC Social Credit government. I speculated this weekend that B.C. premier Christy Clark wouldn’t even make it as far as the May election because of the recent leaking of a Jason Kenney-ish scheme hatched by the Premier’s Office to use government resources to build voter ID databases of “ethnic” voters and offer various cheap “quick win” tokens to “ethnic” communities, like apologies for various historical injustices. Over the weekend, some backbenchers went on record — anonymously, of course — suggesting that she resign.

Clark has survived the weekend, so the BC Liberal plane has resumed its historic dive straight into the Coastal Mountains. In order to prove to everyone that she was taking this matter seriously, Clark has…

… fired Multiculturalism Minister John Yap.

This would be extraordinary under any circumstances — Clark demanding that Yap step aside because of a plan within Clark’s own office. It’s doubly extraordinary because Yap is a comparatively recent appointee to the multiculturalism post. He wasn’t even in Cabinet when the memo detailing the Premier’s Office’s new “ethnic votes” scheme leaked. Apparently ministerial responsibility just means that some minister — any minister, it doesn’t matter which one — be held responsible when something happens. It’s government by Russian roulette.

But that pales next to the genius move taken by the federal Conservatives this week. They’ve got a little legal trouble of their own: Harper’s appointees to high-level posts keep turning out to be, well, con men. Con cons, if you will. The most recent one is Arthur Porter, who is now wanted on various charges, has fled the country — and, until a year and a half ago, chair of the committee that reviews top secret files at CSIS. While holding that position, he continued to donate to the Conservatives, in flagrant violation of federal rules.

So, spin the ministerial responsibility bottle again, no? Who will it point to when it stops? Harper? Toews? Fantino? Peter Penashue?

Nope: as it turns out, the people responsible for hiring a potential criminal as an intelligence oversight official are…

The NDP!

While Harper was minimizing worries about Porter’s top secret security clearance and privy councillor status, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews attacked the opposition parties for not challenging the government on the appointment.

Wow. I don’t think I’ve heard that one before. “The Opposition is responsible for our actions!” Everyone’s been wondering how long it would take the Conservatives to give up saying “the Liberal did it too.” Well, they’ve done it: now the new story is “the Liberal are responsible even when we do it.”

The fact that the Harper government isn’t concerned about the potential compromise of CSIS goes without saying. In 2011, the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs was caught in flagrante with a Chinese intelligent agent. That didn’t seem to bother Harper, either.

I mean, I knew it could happen in theory. But it might actually happen in practice.

Not the federal government, of course. A provincial one, though: the Social Credit-turned-Reform-turned-”Liberal” Party that currently holds a majority in British Columbia under one Christy Clark. Later Sunday she will be hauled onto the carpet in front of her own Cabinet, and the odds are better than even that she won’t leave the meeting as premier. If she does, the odds are even higher that the caucus will do her in some time during the week.

It’s worth noting, before anyone in the professional media gets too gleeful, that worse things than Clark’s government stands accused of in this “great scandal” is done by the federal government on a more or less regular basis. Anger has been growing for years, but the proverbial straw on the camel’s back is the leak of a Jason Kenney-ish plan to mobilize “ethnic voters” for the upcoming May 2013 election. It also included planting several party operatives in key government ministries and using ministry resources to build databases of likely “ethnic” supporters. “Ethnic,” “ethnic,” “ethnic,” and then, in the middle of it all, a truly ironic warning:

If not done correctly, we will appear opportunist.

Yep. That’s true!

Anyhow, for some reason, Clark’s disillusioned gaggle of MLAs apparently feel that this latest scandal is the worst of all. My expectation is that she will be out by week’s end. She will be replaced by a relatively untainted insider who it is felt will “rally the troops.” Maybe Kevin Falcon.

This person will probably cancel the planned May 2013 election by whipping his newly reminted caucus to repeal B.C.’s fixed election law, and move D-day to the fall. He will then spend the next six months persuading disillusioned Conservatives to rejoin the fold, which, with a full-court press by the province’s almost unanimously right-wing media, is actually a fairly decent strategy. Chances of Liberal re-election: ironically, much higher than they looked like a week ago.

Which is unfortunate, but in my short life I’ve gotten used to things never getting better, politics-wise, so really it’s just more of the same.

Update: Michael Smyth of the Province reaches a similar conclusion, with the assistance of the usual bevy of anonymous sources, amongst which can be found this zinger:

Many Liberal insiders I consulted want Clark to resign, and there was furious research underway to see if there was a way to force her out.

Good Lord. Either they’re leading poor Smith up the garden path, or they really are unfit for their positions. How much “research” can such a question possibly require? Call a caucus meeting and tell Clark she’s no longer welcome as their leader. This isn’t rocket science.

I suspect that very process is underway in parts of the caucus right now, but we’ll know in the next couple days.

I’m not sure there’s a more delicious irony than the fact that the Conservative Senator now being publicly alleged to have defrauded the public of tens of thousands of dollars in wrongfully claimed living expenses, on the dubious grounds that his vacation cottage in PEI is his “primary residence” and the home he uses in Ottawa is merely his “secondary” home, is none other than former journalist Mike Duffy. This man is an even greater dunce than his colleague, Olympian skier turned climate change denialist Nancy Greene. A couple of years ago, Duffy demonstrated the full extent of his stupidity by giving a lecture at a journalism school in which he denounced what he saw as a wave of “critical thinking” — his words, not mine — overtaking the media.

Sixth Estate has accused Canadian journalists of many things, but I don’t think I’ve ever been nasty enough to accuse them of thinking critically. Yikes!

Anyhow, Senator Duffy has a loyal defender in none other than Speaker of the Senate Noel Kinsella, who, asked to comment on the scandal, provided the following fantastically preposterous explanation of why it’s all not so simple as it sounds:

“The instrument that has created the Parliament, which includes the Crown, the House of Commons and the Senate, was written in the latter part of the 1800s in the language of that time,” Kinsella said. “So I’m not sure of the fullness of the meaning so this is why [the review is] a good thing.”

Heh. I guess they decided that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s golden excuse for fiscal indiscretion — that he hadn’t read the ethics code and therefore wasn’t bound by it — could only possibly work once. So they went with the second best choice: we don’t have to follow the rules if we’re too stupid to read them.

It so happens that I have a degree in history, albeit not in law, so I decided to check out “the instrument” and interpret it for them — the word is Constitution, but Conservatives in this country are having increasing trouble uttering the word ever since Jason Kenney called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms “stupid” and their lawyers argued in court that Constitutional rights do not apply to decisions made by Cabinet ministers. Rule of law, schmule of schlaw.

Anyhow, I digress. I dusted off my copy of the Constitution and proceeded to find the relevant section so I could help Dr. Kinsella — who, by the way, is a former professor — parse the bizarre, convoluted, arcane, and indecipherable prose. I’m sure you’ll agree that the relevant section is a doozy:

The Qualifications of a Senator shall be as follows:… He shall be resident in the Province for which he is appointed;

I was going to use my evil “critical thinking” skills and put it in simple language for the Professor, but frankly, I don’t know if I can put it any more simply than it’s already written, complex 19th-century language and all.