Four perceptive newspaper columns enclosed.
Slush fund provides missing link
By Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, June 8, 2013
For weeks, questions have swirled as to why Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s then chief of staff would give $90,000 of his own money to Mike Duffy, a Conservative senator he barely knew. Now we have a plausible answer. It seems that former chief of staff Nigel Wright also controlled a secret Conservative Party slush fund that at times contained almost $1 million. Which meant that he was in a position to repay himself for his generosity. The slush fund ties everything together.
The Conservatives’ defence of the fund is complicated. They admit that the prime minister’s office can draw on it. But they denounce the CBC report that first revealed its existence. Late Friday afternoon, party spokesman Fred DeLorey emailed me to say that the Conservatives use only one bank account for all expenditures.
Earlier in the day, Conservative backbencher Chris Alexander was given the unenviable task of defending the fund on CBC Radio. He said all political parties defray the partisan activities of their leaders, which is true. He also said, “All of those expenses are reported to Elections Canada.” Which is not true. And he said anything the Conservatives do as a party is “overseen as to its appropriateness by Elections Canada.” Which is also not true.
In fact, as an Elections Canada spokesman confirmed Friday, the monitoring body has limited jurisdiction. Parties must reveal all donations to Elections Canada, which then makes the list public. Parties must account for money they spend on activities during the relatively short period of an election campaign. But political parties are under no obligation to tell Elections Canada, or indeed anyone, how they spend their money at other times. “We do not regulate how parties spend their money between elections,” the spokesman said.
If the Conservatives want to channel funds secretly to the Prime Minister’s Office, they have every legal right to do so. And, provided expenditures don’t take place during a formal election campaign, they may use this money for whatever they want — from polling to massage therapy to $90,000 salary bonuses.
It’s worth noting that political donations in Canada are heavily subsidized through the tax system. This means that, in effect, any money spent from the Harper slush fund on $90,000 bonuses would contain a public component.
The Conservatives insist Wright won’t be repaid for the money he spent on Duffy. And I expect he won’t. Now that his involvement is public knowledge, that would too politically damaging.
But when Wright initially and secretly agreed to cut a cheque to Duffy this spring, did he expect to be repaid from a fund he controlled? That is a question of a different order.
Throughout this sad business, money is the common link. Harper appointed Duffy to the Senate not because the former television journalist has an abiding passion for public policy but because, as a media celebrity, he promised to be an ace fundraiser. Certainly Duffy knew his financial worth to the party. That is why he approached Conservative bagman Irving Gerstein and suggested that the prime minister provide him with a car and driver.
In such circumstances, it is easy to understand how someone might think it fair to use party funds raised in part by Duffy to help extricate him from a situation already embarrassing the government. So what do we know?
We know that when Duffy came under scrutiny for his Senate expense accounts, he raised the matter with Harper. We know that Wright, then Harper’s top aide, viewed the investigation into Duffy’s expenses as a serious political problem. We know Wright cut Duffy a cheque for $90,000 to repay dubious expense claims, after which the senator stopped co-operating with the investigation. And now we know that Wright controlled, at the same time, a secret Conservative party fund.
The government’s response so far is that all parties have dodgy funds. In another time, that explanation might have sufficed. These days, however, there is growing dismay within Harper’s own party over matters ranging from the government’s fiscal stance to the prime minister’s iron-fisted approach to his caucus to his refusal to permit debate on abortion.
Which is why, at this time, for this prime minister, the slush fund story hurts.
Harper losing control of own destiny
Chantal Hébert, Toronto Star, June 8, 2013
With every passing day, the notion that Stephen Harper could pack it in before the next election and let someone else try to keep his fractious party whole enough to hang onto power in two years sound less and less far-fetched.
Only a few months ago speculation that the prime minister would not seek a fourth mandate in 2015 was the stuff that rainy day columns were made of. When I discussed a summer book leave with my editors earlier this spring, we agreed that l would come back to the column front early if circumstances warranted. Back then, I thought I was setting the bar safely high when I used Harper’s resignation as an example of such a circumstance.
I still expect this to be my last column for the Star until Labour Day, but the topic of Harper’s departure is no longer academic.
Most successful leaders tend to overstay their welcome. Some go into one campaign too many. Others wait to see what the lay of the land will be like closer to a campaign before hastily saying goodbye, only to end up forcing their successor to face the music without much time to make an impression.
A rare few manage to take everyone by surprise, leaving before they are seen as a spent political force. Lucien Bouchard is a recent example. In early 2001, the thenQuebec premier stunned everyone when he resigned at the midway point of his second mandate.
In contrast with Harper’s Conservatives, Bouchard’s PQ government was still riding high in the polls. But the premier could see the writing on the wall. The party was growing increasingly restless over his inability to come up with the so-called winning conditions for another referendum on sovereignty. Quite a few péquistes felt that, under his leadership, the PQ had betrayed its progressive ideals. Many rued his ironclad rule on the government. With his base demobilizing, Bouchard knew winning another mandate would be tough, regardless of what the midmandate polls suggested.
There are more similarities than differences between Bouchard and Harper’s current predicament and regardless of the prime minister’s actual intentions as to his future, his position has been deteriorating extraordinarily quickly this spring.
Over the past two weeks, serious but also eerily familiar cracks in the party have surfaced. In the wake of the abrupt replacement of the prime minister’s chief of staff, issues that should have been resolved behind closed doors are playing out in public. Some of them have festered into unfixable crisis. The resignation from caucus of MP Brent Rathgeber falls in that category. But the malaise is not limited to the back rows of the government.
Jim Flaherty, Harper’s long-standing minister of finance, keeps insisting he loves politics and his job. He sounds like he is either A) publicly campaigning to be maintained in his central role in an upcoming shuffle or B) scrambling to reassure a jittery corporate Canada that the noise out of Ottawa is not that of a government spinning out of control.
Peter MacKay, who remains the leading figure of the progressive wing of the party, has threatened to leave if the terms that he agreed on to bring the Tories under the same tent as the Canadian Alliance a decade ago are amended at an upcoming national convention.
Jason Kenney — a key architect of Harper’s majority victory but also a would-be aspirant to his succession — has been looking like an unhappy camper for all to see. If he is enthusiastic about the party’s choice of a counteroffensive on the ethical and senate front, he is hiding it well.
Meanwhile, morale is low in Conservative ranks in both houses. Leaks are suddenly bringing sensitive internal party information to the surface.
Harper may still be in full control of his PMO but it, on the other hand, is less and less in control of the government and the political agenda. Unless that changes quickly, the prime minister will not remain the sole master of his political destiny for much longer. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column will return in September.
Journalists have no business in the Senate
Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail, June 8, 2013
Stephen Harper has always been allergic to journalists. He doesn’t like them and he doesn’t trust them. He has always suspected that they have only one agenda, which is to destroy him.
But the two journalists who’ve done him the most damage were supposed to be the ones on his side. Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, appointed to the Senate for their celebrity status and devotion to the party, have wounded him far more gravely than squadrons of investigative reporters ever have. They have helped to demolish the Conservatives’ claim to integrity in government and respect for taxpayers.
And the Harper government’s inexplicable response to the scandal has disgusted much of his own base, who say they no longer recognize the party they thought they belonged to. “I fear we’re morphing into what we once mocked, ” said Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber, who quit the caucus this week.
It’s hard to embarrass the journalism profession, but Mr. Duffy and Ms. Wallin have done it. Journalists are, after all, supposed to be in the business of holding governments to account and exposing public abuse. It is awkward, to say the least, when two of the most prominent former journalists in Canada become part of the problem.
Superannuated journalists have no business sitting in the Senate, which is often seen as essentially a reward for party loyalty. It makes a mockery of any claim they may have had to the appearance of impartiality. You can’t appear to hold powerful people to account if you at the same time allow yourself to be eligible for a reward of a nice sinecure, a housing allowance and a readymade retirement plan from those same people. Journalists with any self-respect would do their jobs in such a way that they will never, ever get a Senate offer. If they want to go into politics, let them run for office like anybody else.
Mr. Duffy has attracted most of the heat because of Nigel Wright’s baffling decision to cut a cheque to help him pay back his illegitimate expenses. But Ms. Wallin is in deep trouble, too. Forensic auditors are now scouring her expense claims to determine whether she claimed expenses for personal or other business unrelated to the Senate. She has already paid back $38,000 in expense money she wasn’t entitled to, and, according to CTV sources, there’s more to come.
The picture that has emerged is of a highly energetic networker who parlayed her political connections into a lucrative career in the private sector. According to a report in the Toronto Star, Ms. Wallin has earned approximately $1-million in corporate board fees and stock options since becoming a senator in 2009. Until last month, she sat on the board of Gluskin Sheff & Associates, a private money management firm for wealthy individuals. That was worth $330,000 in cash, deferred shares and options. She collected almost $648,000 in cash and options awards from Oilsands Quest (now defunct). She has also collected more in undisclosed, but likely healthy, fees for sitting on the boards of directors of Porter Airlines and of CTVglobemedia, purchased by Bell in 2011. Presumably she didn’t need a loan to pay back those improper Senate expenses. (Disclosure: I know Mr. Duffy, Ms. Wallin, Gerald Sheff and Ira Gluskin. We media-political-business elites live in a small world.)
Senators of all stripes have been mixing business and politics for years. There’s nothing illegal about it. Senators can carry on business so long as they report it to the Senate ethics officer. But citizens of all stripes might be forgiven for asking why the Senate should serve as a handy base for lucky appointees to enrich themselves – and whether the nation’s business and the senators’ business are really so interchangeable. And despite other senators’ cries of shock and horror, it’s hard to escape the impression that the last people on Earth who want the Senate reformed are the senators themselves.
We can already infer that a good chunk of the $321,000 that Ms. Wallin claimed in expenses over a period of 18 months was illegitimate. How much? Eventually we’ll find out. Ms. Wallin also has another problem – the residency trap. Public filings by Gluskin Sheff list her residence as Toronto. Ms. Wallin, of course, insists that she lives in Saskatchewan. It’s hard see how both things can be true.
Yet I’m not entirely without sympathy for these people. Ms. Wallin and Mr. Duffy have been around Ottawa for decades. They knew how the Senate game was played. You take a little more than you’re entitled to, and hope nobody notices. Senators have never been subjected to the kind of basic oversight that’s routine in the private sector, even for CEOs. Some senators are frugal with public money. Others aren’t. No one ever cared about these matters until now. The rules changed retroactively, and nobody told them.
And now Ms. Wallin, the ultimate insider, is an outcast in Ottawa and beyond. She will likely no longer by an attractive candidate for lucrative board assignments. And she will be forever haunted by that damning image of her splayed hand thrust in front of an invasive camera – a gesture journalists love, because it makes their prey look guilty as hell.
Naturally, the media – the people Mr. Harper detests so much – are riding this for all it’s worth. The CBC is talking darkly of a PMO slush fund that may, theoretically, have been used to compensate Mr. Wright for making Mr. Duffy’s problems go away – or at least that is the insinuation. (Mr. Wright, a wealthy man, certainly doesn’t need the money, and the PMO denies that a secret fund even exists.) Mr. Harper, who has a very large left brain but a wholly inadequate right brain, looks as if he has no idea how to make his own problem go away.
As for the public, it’s no wonder so many of them doubt that journalists can be trusted to act impartially in the public interest. With examples such as these, who can blame them?
Rathgeber returns politics to normal, where conscience does not submit to power
By Andrew Coyne, Postmedia, June 8, 2013
It is tempting to describe the resignation of [MP] Brent Rathgeber from the Conservative caucus as an extraordinary event. And in some ways it is: It surely required extraordinary commitment to principle, not to say courage, to walk away from his party as he has. The consequences, in terms of personal friendships as much as career prospects, may be severe.
But in a larger sense, this is simply a return to normal. This is what people of principle do, when they find themselves in a position their conscience cannot abide: They resign. This is what normal politics looks like.
There is, ordinarily, a tension between the needs of power and the demands of conscience, between pragmatism and principle. Those whose interests lie mainly in power push in one direction; those more inclined to principle push back. That is one of the constraints that a prime minister, in particular, must usually take into account: the need to keep peace with the base, and with its parliamentary representatives on the backbench.
But for the longest time, there was no such tension in Canadian politics. The prime minister and the pragmatists around him pushed, and pushed – and no one pushed back. They turned Conservative policies inside out. They abandoned foundational principles on the fly, broke the most solemn promises, pandered and tacked about so recklessly that they ended up pursuing an agenda that was, not just uninspiring or indeterminate, but the very opposite of what they had once stood for: higher spending, bigger deficits, more regulation, more intervention. And the response was … crickets. The base was quiet. The caucus was compliant.
Perhaps it was the credit Stephen Harper had earned with them, through the long years in the wilderness when he was their guy, the conservative’s conservative. But that unquestioning loyalty seems to have unhinged him. He could, he found, do anything, almost literally anything – tax income trusts, appoint his horse proconsul, anything – and no one would object.
I think it went to his head, and those of his team. They became cartoon bullies, full of their own wisdom, contemptuous of the opposition, but contemptuous of their own supporters most of all. The worst insult in the Conservative lexicon became not “liberal” or “socialist,” but “purist.”
And so those early compromises of principle multiplied, and mutated, until over time they became compromises of a darker kind. It was as if they were carried along by their own momentum, unable to see where they were headed, or to stop themselves if they could. Until this spring, when at long last they pushed things too far.
The funny thing is how little it took to upend them. At the Manning Conference earlier this year, I marvelled how none of the conservative constituencies who filled its seminars was actually represented by this government: neither fiscal conservatives, nor social conservatives, nor democratic conservatives, nor any of them, really. And yet they still professed to support it. I wondered how long this “cognitive dissonance” could last.
They became cartoon bullies, full of their own wisdom, contemptuous of the opposition, but contemptuous of their own supporters most of all
A couple of weeks, it turned out. All it took was a single backbencher, Mark Warawa, who wished to have Parliament vote on a motion condemning sex-selective abortion. Or more particularly, it took the government’s unbelievably heavy-handed response, not only ordering the motion be set aside by the Standing Committee on The Fix Is In, but forbidding him even to object to this treatment in Parliament.
That opened the floodgates. First a raft of Conservative backbenchers, a sort of democratic caucus, took to Warawa’s defence, defying the whip in a series of speeches in Parliament and winning a favourable ruling from the Speaker on a motion of privilege. Then the social conservative movement outside Parliament began signalling it had had enough. This week the Canadian Taxpayers Federation added its voice to the din, with a harsh critique of the government’s fiscal and economic policies.
And how did the government respond? Did it learn from its mistake? Yes, indeed – and repeated it almost exactly. Rathgeber’s private member’s bill, requiring disclosure of senior bureaucrats’ salaries and opening the CBC’s books to public scrutiny, was eviscerated – a gross offence against a traditional prerogative of MPs, and done with the PM’s signature flourish of contempt. But plainly this was only the last in a long train of abuses.
I do not think they quite know what they have done. Rathgeber is not some loose cannon or disappointed office-seeker they can easily laugh off: He is an unusually respected MP, with a record of speaking, always in measured tones, in defence of basic principles of parliamentary government. His statement explaining the reasons for his resignation is respectful, cogent and devastating.
And yet I think his decision sends a message as much to his peers on the backbench as the “boys in short pants” in the Prime Minister’s Office. What it shows is that party discipline, as such, is a myth. It isn’t the whips who force MPs to vote as the party tells them, to speak only when the party allows, to read out party talking points and jump to their feet applauding every time a minister burps. It’s themselves. The discipline is self-imposed. It is MPs’ own embrace of the “team player” mentality, their own hopes of advancement, their own readiness to stifle their conscience and rationalize their self-interest that has turned them into the proverbial “trained seals.”
What Rathgeber has proved is that MPs do not have to accept this humiliation. They can maintain their self-respect. They can stand up for their constituents and their principles. They have a choice, and if instead they end up as the leader’s footmen they have no one to blame but themselves.
