Scheer’s silence is baffling, or suspicious
‘Yes.”
That’s all Andrew Scheer needed to say.
The Globe and Mail reported this weekend that the Conservatives hired a consulting firm, Daisy group, to dig up dirt on Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party, with a goal of keeping him out of the leaders’ debates or, failing that, just generally discredit them as much as possible.
It’s all very interesting. It’s potentially mildly embarrassing, inasmuch as they didn’t hire a better consulting firm. And honestly, no one should need outside help to raise questions about Bernier’s various, shall we say, unconventional candidates. (Maybe they outsourced it because it was so easy? Like data entry?)
But there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly scandalous about it, by the wretched standards of Canadian politics. “It is legal for parties to hire outside firms to assist with political campaigns,” the Globe notes. Who cares whether in-house opposition research or a contractor digs up the dirt that gets flung around the campaign trail? Furthermore it’s obviously true, or else the party would deny it.
Nothing in the report remotely justified the spectacle Scheer created at a Saturday-morning press conference in Toronto, where reporter after reporter asked if the report was true, and Scheer repeated over and over and over again some variation of the statement the party gave the Globe: “We do not comment on what vendors or suppliers we may or may not do business with.”
Twice, four times, six, at least 10. I lost count.
Many Conservative partisans will blame the media for creating said spectacle. (It would have been a hell of a show had the report landed a day earlier: Frederictonians loudly booed reporters asking far less confrontational questions at Scheer’s Thursday-morning press conference in the New Brunswick capital.)
But undecided voters may see a would-be prime minister failing to answer dead-simple yes-or-no questions for no discernible reason — failing, even, to explain why he won’t answer. We’ve had plenty of such prime ministers already, thank you very much. And we’ve had plenty of governments — which is to say all of them in my lifetime — which treat the most basic information as radioactively proprietary despite endless promises of “openness by default.” We have one such prime minister, and one such government, right now. Conservatives will tell you that’s one of the reasons we need replacements. Scheer looked like part of the problem, for no obvious reason.
The other option, of course, is that there’s something very very nasty waiting to be unearthed in this alleged business relationship. Either way it was not a good morning for the Conservatives.