TheUnreasonableSideOf
“….In 2010, a former Liberal MP had asked the RCMP to examine spending in Tony Clement’s Muskoka riding. The former MP claimed that the spending on projects to ready Muskoka for the G8 summit somehow violated the law.
Over seven months, the RCMP reviewed the ex-MP’s charges. The RCMP found the charges groundless and have dropped the case.
Story over?
Maybe yes. But maybe not. The former Liberal MP herself, Marlene Jennings, previously representative of the Quebec riding of Notre Dame de Grace-Lachine, will likely fade from public view. Yet she has bequeathed Canadian politics an ugly legacy — unless Canadians act promptly and decisively to quash and repudiate it.
One of the most impressive differences between Canadian and U.S. politics is that Canadians are much more reluctant to use criminal law as a tool of politics.
Make no mistake: Canadians despise corruption and expect legal action against those guilty of it.
But until the Jennings action, Canada maintained an effective distinction between, say, bribe-taking and, say, locating a Canoe Museum in the riding of the prime minister of the day….”
“…The honest politician does not shrug — and of all the hundreds of politicians I’ve known in my life, I’ve never met one more honest than Tony Clement, a friend of 25 years’ standing. The honest politician suffers from an attack on his reputation in a way that few people outside politics can imagine or understand.
But the outrage in the Jennings’ accusation is not the attack on Clement. It’s the attack on the norms of the Canadian political system. Possibly — probably — the complaint will prove a squib, a freak, a forgotten incident. But it could also prove a premonition, a harbinger, a warning of something new in Canadian public life.
In which case, this closed case may prove a very significant event — and Marlene Jennings’ otherwise not very notable political career will have culminated in one genuine if sinister achievement: Canadians will remember her as the person who imported American-style politics of personal destruction into the Canadian political ecology….”
