The Sixth Estate

Like all Canadians who respect the rule of law and the importance of firm law enforcement against reprobates, I was disgusted by yet another case of activist judges and left-wing prosecutors putting criminals’ rights ahead of the rights and needs of the general public. It is a travesty of justice when prosecutors claim they have evidence to convict someone on a serious charge but they let them plead guilty to a lesser one just so as not to waste the court’s time.

Now that that’s out of my system, I want to address the wave of commentary which swept the Internet yesterday. First of all, the Conservatives have now admitted they are guilty of doctoring their books and breaking our election laws. They have confessed to submitting misinformation to Elections Canada and in doing so attempting to defraud the public purse by seeking government compensation for expenses which were not legally incurred. This is now on the record, in court, and needs to be mentioned on every possible occasion.

Second, those who are irate that they were allowed to cop to a lesser charge are right to be upset, but should also be realistic. In the majority of countries in the world, a charge of fraud against the ruling party would never have progressed as far as it was allowed to here. It’s true that the government would have insisted on full prosecution of an opposition party in the same circumstances. It’s true that we deserve a public inquiry to find out what happened. It’s true that we won’t get it. But we also don’t live in a genuine democracy.

All that said, I want to get a couple of reflective thoughts out of the way. First, the Conservative spin on this should be seen as what it is: the final nail in the coffin of democratic responsibility. This government has repeatedly argued that senior politicians are not responsible for actions of their subordinates. This compromise, and the Conservative claim that they have been exonerated, takes that claim to its full extreme. The party pleads guilty; in exchange, it is stated, no individual did anything wrong and therefore no individuals need face any consequences. It is, in legal guise, the same argument offered for why half of Harper’s Cabinet still have their jobs despite a litany of misdeeds ranging from embarrassing gaffes to outright crimes committed by their staffers.

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The National Post has published another op-ed by Keith Beardsley. Last time, they correctly called him out as a veteran Conservative strategist. This time, they didn’t bother. What makes the omission particularly unforgivable on this occasion is that Beardsley is using the op-ed to argue that Canadians shouldn’t (and don’t) care about the fact that his party has been charged with money laundering under the Elections Act. Don’t the editors think it would be relevant for Canadians to know that Beardsley was a senior insider in the party at the very time the offences he says don’t matter were occurring? This is tantamount to asking a Mafia capo whether organized crime is a serious problem in Montreal.

Let’s run through Beardsley’s history again, just for the record. He joined the Progressive Conservative Party during the Trudeau era. Except for a brief break during the late Mulroney period, he’s been there almost ever since. He joined the Leader’s Office in 1998 and then worked with Jean Charest, Joe Clark, Peter McKay, and most recently Stephen Harper. Keith went with Harper during the move from the Opposition Leader’s Office to the Prime Minister’s Office. That would put him in Harper’s office not just for many years, but at the exact time that the In and Out scheme was occurring. The Post is doing a serious disservice to its readers by putting this man forward as a wise voice on the matter.

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In the Globe & Mail, an adviser for a group which bills itself as the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform has come out in favour of the new security perimeter agreement with the United States. As usual, the Globe is very sparing in its gloss on author James Bissett, who is said only to be “a former Canadian ambassador” and a member of the group in question.  “Fear not, Canada,” says Bissett: we are at a “historic moment” and the ceding of sovereignty will turn out just fine. He is surprisingly unable to articulate a single strong reason why this is actually a good agreement, aside from vague suggestions that it is only “natural” to pursue integration and that we must calm American fears about Canada being an easy port of entry for terrorists.

Like most think tanks, the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform claims to be both independent and non-partisan. It’s certainly not non-partisan. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s independent because it doesn’t disclose potential conflicts of interest.

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Stephen Harper’s control over his caucus (or rather, the Prime Minister’s Office’s control over the caucus) is now legendary. After five years, not only the MPs themselves but, more disturbingly, the Ottawa media have largely come to accept the new political reality that every single public moment is carefully planned out by agents in the PMO. As a country we will eventually suffer very serious consequences of this affront to democracy, if it takes root in the institutional culture rather than being an aberration, peculiar only to this particular manic bunch of secretive managers.

In the meantime, I was sifting through my archive of old Wikileaks material when I came across a superb example of this disturbing trend. Wikileaks received a “Constituency Week Caucus Package” sent to Conservative MPs in May 2009, with the theme “Protecting Canada’s Future.” As usual the document is a masterpiece of vague flimflam: the implication is that Canada’s future is under threat, though nowhere is there an indication of what this threat is. The bulk of the package is a “May Constituency Week Stump Speech,” which is not merely a list of key party talking points (that I might expect) but in fact a word-for-word speech which Harper apparently wanted every single riding in Canada to receive. Note the pathetic attempt to make the speech sound “local”: (more…)