The biggest political scandal in Canada today isn’t the federal Conservatives’ creative election accounting, nor is it the new charges in the Liberal sponsorship affair that refuses to die. The real scandal is that the entire political fate of this country has been hijacked by an obsession with improprieties best left to the courts, while the current government makes major policy changes virtually unchallenged.
Last week’s Elections Canada raid on Conservative headquarters in Ottawa opened up a window where more Liberal politicians than before expressed a willingness to pull the plug on Harper’s minority government, which the Official Opposition has been propping up since the Bloc Québécois abandoned the job several months ago. But a new Sponsorship Scandal arrest at week’s end tarnished the Liberal halo, and slammed the window shut, to mix my metaphors.
What changed, precisely, during last week which made a general election unlikely on Monday, a decent shot by midweek, and a faded opportunity by Friday? And will this week’s battle between Elections Canada and the governing party change the electoral calculus yet again?
Tory government policies have remained the same in the last couple of weeks, as far as I can tell. And I don’t detect any major shifts in Liberal policy (such as it is) either. What also remained constant is that a lot of people in both parties believe strongly that the side with the least dirt on it will win the next election. What changed is, until last week, that side appeared to be the Tories by a wide margin.
This focus on scandal is not surprising, since the 2006 election campaign turned around for the Tories based on the NDP publicizing a new RCMP statement on the investigation of certain government officials. The content of the statement didn’t matter: the mere mention of police involvement reinforced swing voters’ perception of the Liberals as a party needing a time-out to cleanse itself of corruption.
Like generals fighting the last war, many federal strategists clearly expect sleaze perception to be a key vote-driver in areas where the two major parties are close in popular support. That’s why the Liberals had a cameraman at the Tory HQ raid last week—a belief founded on experience that a picture can be worth 1,000 votes or far more.
We voters are justifiably sensitized to allegations of financial malfeasance. We don’t want to see anyone gain electoral advantage through criminal means, nor do we like to think of ourselves as dupes. But we may forget that one reason we see more stories like this now is that federal elections legislation and reporting requirements are more stringent than they used to be, on everything from nomination races to third party spending. This does not in any way excuse contravention of the law, but it does change one’s perspective. We are by no stretch talking about a Watergate-level rot of the machinery of government in any of the cases pending, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people talk.
It is reasonable to be angry at campaign officials who break such laws, and in many cases to be angry at the parties they represent. But I would argue that to base one’s vote—one’s choice among potential governments—on these overblown scandals is not reasonable.
If Elections Canada allegations about Tory spending in the 2006 campaign are proven in court, we can expect some heads to roll, as they should. And if Liberal Benoît Corbeil is convicted of fraud, he will be fined or go to jail or both, as anyone in that position should. And voters would have the right to demand from both parties that they take steps to ensure that such actions are not repeated. (It would be in the Liberals’ self-interest in particular, since Corbeil is alleged to have taken $100,000 of his own party’s money.)
But we degrade ourselves as citizens and voters if we overlook the larger issues, the ones that affect our lives every day and shape what we will be able to do as a country in the future.
The current government led by Stephen Harper has been making enormous changes, and the scandal-chastened Liberals have been letting them get away with all of it. Two GST cuts and tax breaks geared to businesses and higher-income voters have sharply constrained federal government income not just for now, but for the future. This will certainly provide the logic for spending cuts down the road. The Tories are also bent on devolving powers to Quebec and other provinces that can never be recovered, and have made a mockery of environmental protection.
This most top-down of Canadian governments in living memory has also muzzled entire departments, like Foreign Affairs, not to mention MPs and longtime experts and professionals in the civil service. (You don’t hear as much about climate change from Environment Canada these days.) The Tories are making critical changes to our security partnership with the United States and have set the stage to indefinitely extend our military involvement in Afghanistan.
These may be policies that Canadians favour, but we are not being given the opportunity to air all the issues involved, since the Liberals let everything fly through Parliament regardless.
The Liberals deserve a lot of criticism for their weakness, their failure to develop coherent policy alternatives, and their crude political calculations. But we as voters are the ones who make those calculations necessary. People get the politicians they deserve.
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