Author: Dan Zorg

 

What if the leader of a mature democratic country got up, routinely, in the official political forum of his/her country and lied, over and over?  Wouldn’t that have consequences?  Admittedly, perhaps not in every country, since voting, like politics itself, is about prioritizing, choosing lesser evils over greater, being guided by ideology and gut sentiments, and so on.  (And Canada in 2013 is clearly a different place than Canadaduring other eras, when altruism and idealism may have figured more largely than they do today.)  But one simply has to believe that, in many advanced countries, the public would not tolerate a national leader who got up in the nation’s foremost political body and lied, repeatedly and without compunctions.

 

So the Senate scandal wends its tawdry, time-consuming, costly way.  The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, remains locked into his “deny, deny, deny” strategy, pretending—no, obviously, duh, lying—that he knew nothing about what everyone in his office—his top assistant, strategists, lawyers, party executives, communications people, etc. etc. all knew—that the government was making illegal payments to Senator Mike Duffy.  He got up in the House of Parliament and said that Senator Pamela Wallin’s expense claims were just peachy, something neither the public nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police nor auditors from Deloitte accept.  All this from possibly the most controlling, calculating leader the country has ever seen.  Why has this story not turned?  Why are no pundits going from disbelief that they won’t state for fear of legal ramifications, to asking outright just how the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, could be so astonishingly out of the loop that a baker’s dozen or more of his closest officials knew what he didn’t?  If Harper didn’t know, then who, just who, is minding Canada’s store? Has Stephen Harper got a hobby we don’t know about?  Does he do Sudoku 15 hours a day?

 

Buuuuut. . . so what. . . . 

Sure, the Tories are down a bit in the polls, but the Tories know that all they need is the base +5%, so, so what?  CTV’s Todd Battis visited the riding of Provencher, MB, Vic Toews’ old riding, and found that most people there imagined a Tory would win again.  In other words, Canadians in Provencher are so ideological that they support lying and, if they are Tory donors, don’t mind submitting money to the Conservative Party so that it can pay off Mike Duffy’s illegal expenses.   If I were a Tory, sending money to the Tory party, knowing it was going to pay off Mike Duffy, would I be happy?  Apparently many Tories are.  You wonder about these people. Having a lying Prime Minister is bad; having thousands of voters who condone and support lying is beyond depressing.  How do these people bring up their children?   

Don’t answer.  I don’t think I want to know.  I’ll be old soon, and unless I can get a Senate appointment, I’m going to need health care.  (Can anyone believe the crocodile tears of Duffy and Wallin on how they need health plans?  Didn’t they say their greatest honours were to serve in the august body of the Senate?  Where is the vaunted “Private Sector” on this one?  Shouldn’t Wallin and Duffy be in the same boat as most Canadians, depending on Medicare to help them when they ail?  Apparently not.  No, no matter how much Duffy and Wallin say they were wronged, they still believe they were exclusively entitled to medical plans, via the Senate, that the vast majority of Canadians do not enjoy.  Funny that didn’t bother them in the slightest when they were sitting politicians touting the private sector.  And how can they possibly, possibly have frittered away the millions they have accumulated during their careers?  Are they represented by Mike Tyson’s agent?  No-one can accuse Stephen Harper of sound judgment, but if you were considering someone who had made millions for a top appointment, and that person indicated that s/he was so dirt-poor that they didn’t have a pot to pee in, wouldn’t that kind of go to their characters and arouse a little uncertainty about their personalities and stability?  I mean, how does Pamela Wallin’s mother, or people in Wadena, SK, get by?  How do they do it if Pamela can’t?  Precisely who is Pamela Wallin collecting money for, and who is she putting down in her will to receive it?  Are there any journalists out there willing to ask the questions only bloggers like me will as to where all the money went?  Any?  Nope.  So the next time you see a journalist complaining about unqualified bloggers, remember that that journalist, in Canada, is in the pay of owners who donate to and support the Conservative Party of Canada.)  All Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy expressed was that they were entitled to their entitlements, sentiments that, in another, but recent, time did huge political damage.  Why doesn’t anyone care now?

 

Let’s be honest: the “sponsorship scandal” that had such devastating consequences for the Liberal party was a tempest in a teapot.  Morally and fiscally, it was penny-ante stuff compared to what the Conservatives have done.  But, somehow, that “scandal” found the mean and petty streak in many Canadians.  Who knows—maybe it really was a racist thing on English Canadians’ part—those Quebecois again.  I hope not, but the more I try to understand it, the fewer answers I find, and the more I believe that maybe it was English racism.  But the only thing that often seems to bug English Canadians more than Quebecis the thought that Quebecwould actually separate.  Chretien faced a situation in which the country might break up; maybe he threw some money at it.  What leader would not do the same?  What leader would want to go down in history as overseeing the demise of his/her country because s/he didn’t pull out every stop to avert it?  How does Stephen Harper use your hard-earned tax dollars?  He uses it on blanket TV, radio, and internet ads virtually every Canadian with electricity hears numerous times every single day.  This is what happens in fascist dictatorships, not democratic countries.  (Besides, by slicing and dicing and gerrymandering in ludicrously corrupt ways as in Regina, Harper has avoided the issue of having to appeal to most Canadians by deciding to appeal to just 1/3 and stay in power that way.) I was never a Paul Martin supporter, but I acknowledge his achievements and ultimately believe that he did, as a public servant, have Canada’s best interests at heart and in his own mind.  He didn’t need to just keep being Prime Minister, like Stephen Harper, who wouldn’t go back to being a billionaire business tycoon, like Martin, if he quit politics today.  I admired Martin when he confronted the “sponsorship scandal” head-on by appointing an inquiry; I really didn’t think it was all about just getting back at the Chretien supporters (I may be Pollyanna-ish here to Liberal supporters, but I really think Martin was appealing to the Canadian public even more—misguidedly and hopefully, perhaps, but appealing to them all the same).  But I also realized it was also probably political suicide, and it was.  It is a terrible, terrible shame, and it says something terrible about us as Canadians that, when a leader of the very same party appoints an inquiry into corruption, we punish him by electing a government that promisesto do things differently, but then behaves arguably more corruptly than any government in Canadian history, and we keep on electing it and apparently not caring as the legacy of abuse and corruption builds and builds, seemingly almost daily.  It is as if 35% of the 60-70% of Canadians who vote are saying “here, here are my tax dollars—please, please do something corrupt and venal and dishonest with them and spend them on self-promotion.  But whatever you do, whether it’s helicopters or orange juice, never, ever tell me the truth, because, while I don’t mind my money being wasted, the one thing I cannot countenance is having my ideology unsettled.”

 

Let’s face it: Harper cannot and will not tell the truth about his work on the Duffy and Wallin and corrupt Senate appointees files.  It’s sad because he pitches himself as a family man and a religious man, and so on, and all along he probably rationalizes that he’s teaching his kids what he thinks is real private-sector know-how, real realpolitik–yet really it has a simpler name, lying.  Most parents do not want their kids to lie, if only for purely selfish reasons—parents don’t want to be lied to by their own offspring.  Theoretically, Canadians should not want their leaders to lie to them, but so jaded and partisan have we become that we actually hug the knees of those who lie to us and use our tax dollars for their private purposes.  If Stephen Harper thought he would step down any time soon, he might consider telling the truth.  But Harper can’t; he has never actually had a career-based private-sector job or done any work of any kind that is not of a political nature.  If he weren’t a politician, he would have to re-invent himself as someone who wasn’t, and who is taking odds on Stephen Harper re-inventing himself?  Therefore, he will keep on lying, and playing the only game he knows: politics.  It would be nice to think that Harper couldat least slightly tell the truth and say something like: “well, I knew some things but I had to keep the best interests of the country in mind so I made the best decision I could out of a range of bad ones.”  (That’s what he initially started out trying to say—anyone remember “protect the taxpayer”?) I mean, if one regards the lengths he went to to concoct a story that he wasn’t lying, then you’d have to believe that he could kick back for a few minutes when he’s not doing handshake photo-ops with his staff and concoct a plausible story about how he waslying, but how it was really the right thing to do, under the circumstances.  If, heads on their pillows, he and Laureen talk at night, surely he must do this all the time.  But—and this is actually probably a huge point—Harper is probably personally incredibly stung that these people to whom he gave plum appointments and emoluments—Wallin and Duffy (what, what, what in the what would “Patrick Brazeau” ever, ever do in real life if he weren’t a senator???—or what does he do when he is a senator???) that these people who he’d showered with riches got caught acting badly.  Harper probably thought: “Look, I’m giving you people a license to fleece Canadian taxpayers, so I know you’ll thank me.”  When the calls from Duffy started coming in, asking for private cars and so on, Harper probably thought “Honestly, I’ve given you people enough already.”  A lot of people would somewhat understand if Harper actually was honest and said that he did a bad thing but it was the best of a range of bad alternatives (though he did appoint them, he was hardly the first PM to appoint toadies).  Or at least they would have, once upon a time.  Once upon a time, most people would have said, “well, politics is a dirty game, and sometimes you just have to do something you know is not ideal, but it’s the best thing to do at the time.”  But Harper just keeps on lying, and will keep on lying.  He knows he will never be held to account, and he is creating new federal Tory ridings to assist his lying.  No doubt every voter in those ridings knows that, in exchange for their votes and wasted tax dollars, they, too, will at least get a few gazebos and some roads out of the deal.

 

Since Harper will just keep on lying to Canadians, the opposition will never really get anywhere.  Seemingly within hours of Andrew Coyne’s comments on CBC’s _At Issue_, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair adopted a serious and brief approach to questioning.  As with those Canadians who would like to see their elected representatives act like adults, I was more or less in favour.  The media called this, ad infinitum, a “prosecutorial” approach.  Well, of course, “prosecutorial” only works if there is at least some onus on the questionee to tell the truth.  Such onus does not exist in the Parliament of Canada, though it ought to be the one place in the land where it does.  One almost thinks, now, that the opposition should go back to the idiotic grandstanding they always used to do, for at least that would get them in tv clips, instead of letting the media play the bland, deflective non-answers and lies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.   In the latest rotation of Harper TV supporters, we see that, for this scandal in particular, he has brought out the dyed-blonde nubiles in his caucus, some with scandals of their own—but if it’s a nubile blonde, who cares, right?  If one has seen tapings of parliaments in places like Britain or Australia or New Zealand, one sees much less of the instant leaping-to-one’s-feet to applaud slavishly and juvenilely than one does in Canada.  The Conservative TV caucus never ceases to amaze me in their child-like ability to sit firm and rooted and studious when THE MAN speaks, but then, the minute his shoulders soften, spring U-shaped to their feet and start grinning and clapping, tongues lolling, like kindergarten kids on sugar highs or dogs who haven’t seen their owners or food in days.  These, these are supposed to be adults.  If an alien saw this, an alien would surely think that the Speaker was holding a big placard that said “CLAP!!!”   Honestly, if I were these Conservatives on TV, I really don’t know what I’d regret more, later in life: selfies of me doing silly things nude that I’d only imagined one or a few people might see, or actual tv clips of me rocketing out of my seat grinning like a drunken game-show winner to support a lie my grey-haired sugar-daddy had said.  It is to wonder.

As for Justin Trudeau, the heir with the hair, he’s still dyed in the pur-laine of politics.  He asked the Prime Minister to “testify under oath” about what the PM knew about the senate scandal.  These questions are so throwaway that taxpayers’ teeth should grate as they hear yet more politicians stand up for cameras only, while the nation’s business is beggared, to ask pointless rhetorical questions.

Nevertheless, it did cross my mind as I saw Trudeau, “what if Harper testified under oath”?  And the sad answer was, well, Prime Minister Stephen Harper would just keep on lying.  And this is sad for Canada and Canadians, and really for the world, if you believe that Canadais an advanced democracy that can be an influence for good in the world.  We’re in a situation now in which Canada has a liar for a leader, and that just isn’t good for anyone.  It’s just really dismaying.  To think that the Tory base derives joy out of its leader’s lies because, in their minds, there’s something worse than lying suggests to me how unevolved we are, or have become.  I get liking the military, liking guns, liking tax cuts, and so on—I get all that.  But is having a gun so important to you that you have to vote for lying?   Sadly, apparently yes.  Shoot first, lie later, and never forget you’re from the proud 35% of Provencher.

 

–zr