Conservative Lawlessness Reaches its Rubicon
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.
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Purple Library Guy
When people care about law and order but don’t care about justice, it always turns out the law and order is only for other people.
Dave Dawson
A phrase from the dim reaches of the ancient past popped into my head: “Abusing the public trust.” Well, these days you could make the case that there is no trust left to abuse. What next?
me-me-me-its-all-about-me
Sixth, I think you miss the point here.
In a Neo-Fascist-style government, the laws are whatever the government says they are.
Note that we are still waiting for Elections Canada to come back to us about all those “Robo-Call” incidents in the last election. And of course there are still some cases from the 2008 election. So we can expect Elections Canada to come back long, long, long after the actual answers mean anything.
I could go on. Tony Clement? Well, mistakes where made and somehow the money voted by parliament for one thing ended up being splashed around Clement’s riding. Sure, mistakes were made, the minister was in charge, he’s sorry, and he’ll try not to do it again.
And with the MSM forming the outer bulwark of the regime’s defenses, we can expect a round of Tut-Tutting from the MSM and then a collective moving on to something else.
Derek
There’s supposed to be a report released today on how to improve accounting of political parties use of GOTV practices. I have a deep-rooted feeling that the so called “investigation” will result in nothing more than a report on recommended changes to improve or enhance so called transparency.
I wonder if there could be a case put forth that aimed to block Penashue from running again until the fraud-allegations are settled. Shouldn’t we expect that, at the very least, elections involve those who are free from criminal suspicion or civil wrongdoing? That should be a pretty easy benchmark to set for those who want to run, non?
the salamander horde
The Run of the Idiot Red Herring .. A never quite ending procession of small fry ignorance & incompetent bungling, so Canada and Canadians (and the rest of the world) can roll our eyes, shrug our shoulders and say ‘that’s government eh..’ And .. ‘that’s Canada eh..’
But wait ! There’s more.. When a tasty western BBQ’d shite sandwich is served up by Stephen Harper.. all those Red Herring screw ups tend to mask the stench of really dangerous stuff.
Penashue is small fry, so is Duffy or Del Mastro or an aging politician hiring his new girlfriend.. or Rob Anders nodding off.
We need to know who planned, and orchestrated the Election Fraud in 2011. We need to identify and prosecute everyone involved. No deals, nobody too big to jail, no government lawyers defending the accused. Without being capable of holding fair elections, our house is out of order.. and we can’t function coherently as a nation of Canadians. When we have that critical task successfully underway, we may find we can go after a lot of other big fish.
Like the infected farmed salmon cover up. The secret trade deal with China. The farce of the NEB hearings on the pipeline. The Afghanistan torture cover-up. The G 20 fiasco. The Procurement Scandals. Ever growing tailings ponds. The anti Environment omnibus ‘budgets’. Attempts to undermine First Nations treaties. Unregulated fracking practices and chemicals. Systemic muzzling and obstruction of important science. Listeriosis deaths. The Nation Deficit growth. Greenhouse Gas. Government advocacy for Israel. Prorogation and other anti-democracy dirty tricks, Litigating against our retired or injured military. Poverty.
This government has a lot to answer for.. and as a country we’re now having to ask ourselves or Elections Canada, or The Supreme Court if they are actually a legitimate government or complete and utter frauds. Certainly their legislative actions and tainted policies seem hostile to anyone other than petro entities or evangelical ideologues. Does anyone in Canada actually want what Stephen Harper is serving ? If so .. please explain.
Sandy
“free press”?
Ron
Would it be possible for a citizen to launch a prosecution if our “authorities” let us down and give this miscreant a pass?
Ron
I do not like the sound of this
“Wells says Penashue has been working closely with Elections Canada.”
Slap on the wrist time?
Just like the plea-bargain to keep the in-and-out Senators out of jail?
ugh
“Wells believes Penashue has the support of the people of Labrador, and that he will be elected again.”
Scotian
For the years I was warning about how dangerous Harper was to the health of our system of government if he ever gained the PMO, especially as a majority PM I was derided as a hysteric who was over-blowing the risks (for whatever reasons, I got this from both sides of the spectrum). Indeed, it was back while Martin was still PPM that Harper showed exactly how much respect he had for the concept of the rule of law when it came to his quest to gain and hold power when he used clearly and obviously edited recordings to fraudulently claim two senior Lib MPs and cabinet members at the instruction of the PM was trying to buy the vote of one of his MPs, a man named Grewal. At the time I raised holy hell over it because of what it showed Harper was willing to embrace in terms of illegality when it served his political interests, and that if he would go this far while still the LOO what he could and clearly would do once he held the reins of of the PMO would be unlike anything we had ever seen before. Alas, time proved me correct, and this latest example you are discussing in this post simply underscores yet again why I wanted him stopped, why I said he and his were unlike anything we had ever seen before, that calling them Tories was a slur on the name and those that were truly such in the past, and why the NDP refrain of Liberal Tory same old story was totally wrong when it came to Harper and his circle.
That it has come to this open an example of his contempt for the rule of law and the need for all to be equal under it is no surprise, nor that it is in, what should in any self respecting democratic governing nation whatever the way it chooses to be so, the core of how power is granted legitimacy for the purposes of governing is any shock either, Harper telegraphed exactly what he was before he ever set foot in the PMO. What too many people failed to understand all along is that these things can happen here, that Canada is not immune from this kind of corruption, indeed thinking it can’t happen here is almost a prerequisite for whatever it is actually happening in my view. That while issues of policy and ideology may be important, so at least as much are process issues even though they are technical and not terribly sexy. especially since to get to those policy and ideological issues you have to have a working process to begin with, and it is the process side of the ledger that Harper always terrified me about, and I said so all along.
Harper has done more to damage the core workings of our political system and our system of governance (not the same thing) than any prior PM, arguably at the rate he is going he may end up being more damaging to such than all combined (well, yes that might be a touch hyperbolic in nature, what is really scary is that it is only a touch instead of massively so which it would be talking about any prior PM). His attack on the very basis of our electoral processes for power is a cornerstone of his approach to power, and that should be enough for anyone that cares at all for what we call the Canadian way of life regardless of where they are on the ideological/policy spectrum to recognize that this is something unlike anything we have faced before and needs to be dealt with accordingly.
What I fear most is that even if Harper and the CPC go down in massive flames in the next election is that too much damage will have been done to be undone on the process side of the ledger, and that we are seeing crap like this by-election with the same candidate that stepped down for it being needed did so because of these election scandal issues the government’s continued candidate just underlines how far gone down this path/road we have already gone.
If we went back to the waning months of Martin’s government and listed all of the known scandals just on the process side dealing with election concerns (let alone actual governing ones which are horrifyingly enough a much thicker file) of the Harper regime to date it would be called even by so called serious political observers as fear mongering of the worst sort because who could and would believe any Canadian political leader would go to such extremes (let alone not face massive legal and social repercussions for even trying, or so people would want to believe) and show such contempt for the law. I am sure of this because I know when I tried to make these points showing the actions he had taken especially in Grewal which telegraphed so much of this what kind of response it got.
Sorry, I know this was a bit long winded, even for me. Thank you for being one of the better bloggers out there when it comes to process issues and caring about them as you have been doing, as well as providing IMHO excellent overall analysis and opinion. I know it is too late to change the past and that we must look to the future, but I also get frustrated at how few people are willing to look into the past enough to see how we get somewhere let alone to do so to figure out how to get somewhere else in that look to the future. It has been one of my most long standing frustrations with how most Canadians across the spectrum have acted where our politics are concerned over the past few decades now, especially this last one. Process issues are the cornerstone of how our systems of governing are defined for functioning, letting anyone trash them the way Harper has hurts all citizens and the nation as a whole, this is civics 101, and that even to this day so many fail to really get this does not offer much hope for the future changing in this regard for me, and that is something I truly weep for.
thwap
Sixth Estate,
I like reading people who can put two and two together and who recognize the significance of things. When one reads the snivelling hypocrisy of most of our official gate-keepers and hears the more ignorant among the electorate, it sometimes causes a loss of faith that things will ever change.
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Saskboy
I enjoyed this article, and all of the comments, very much. Thank you.