Several Conservative MPs. planning to vote the Canadian Wheat Board into nonexistence, have boasted that they will make money by doing so.
Obviously unethical, right? Surely the parliamentary ethics watchdog will bark?
Both the NDP and Liberals had asked [Ethics Commissioner Mary] Dawson to look into allegations of conflict of interest after a number of Tory MPs made no secret of the personal benefit they stood to gain from passage of the bill.
Oh, wait.
The federal ethics watchdog says there’s no conflict of interest in allowing Conservative MPs to vote on a bill that could benefit them financially.
Mary Dawson says Tory MPs who are involved in grain farming are free to vote on a government bill to scrap the Canadian Wheat Board.
While they have a personal interest in seeing the bill passed, Dawson says it’s an interest “that is shared with a broad segment of the public.”
In a nutshell: if sufficient numbers of electors support the government position on a Bill (which is surely the case on every Bill), conflict of interest rules for voting Conservative MPs don’t exist.
Poof! And all it took was one wave of the ethics commissioner’s magic wand.