Clement faces three kinds of sexting trouble
Political trouble often arrives in threes. It’s rare, though, for one politician to get in three kinds of trouble all at the same time.
Tony Clement, the now-former Conservative, the long-time MP from Parry Sound-Muskoka, has somehow pulled it off.
With the revelation this week of Clement’s confessed, sexting adventures with a would-be extortionist, this former minister and leadership contender has landed on the wrong side of at least three big themes in the political news. The #MeToo movement; Digital hacking, security and personal privacy concerns;
And finally, but not insignificantly, an emerging drama at Queen’s Park, with provincial Conservatives going through their own controversies over alleged sexual misbehaviour. We may never know what motivated Clement to place his long political career so close to the flames of self-immolation, but we do know it took a particular detachment from some high-profile current events.
Start with the growing number of allegations about Clement’s relations with young women, which were popping up virally all over social media on Wednesday. Even if only the admitted case is correct, how did the #MeToo movement escape the notice of this MP?
Was Clement away during the last few years when Parliament — no, the whole world, really — was talking about sexual harassment on the job and in public life? The sins to which Clement has confessed — improper exchange of sexual information with a young woman online — were so obviously wrong, said Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, that the official Opposition doesn’t even need a code of conduct to cover it.
“I don’t know that too many people would have to be told not to share explicit video and images with people that you haven’t met,” Scheer told reporters on Wednesday.
The Conservatives have been trying to appear more female- friendly in the run-up to the next election, knowing that women’s votes could be crucial to any hopes of regaining power in 2019. Clement’s alleged type of friendliness with young women — sadly not the first we’ve seen around Parliament Hill — wasn’t exactly the look they were seeking. One does wonder about the persistence of this behaviour, despite all the bad attention it’s received over the past few years, but that’s another sad story.
Next, take this whole business of personal privacy and hacking. For the past two weeks, Conservatives have aggressively jumped on this issue, leading every day in the Commons with pointed questions on what they say is a data grab by Statistics Canada on Canadians’ banking information.
Clearly, Scheer and his caucus believed they had tapped into a powerful vein of concern in the population — the very real, 21st-century fear that none of our personal information is safe. Clement’s imbroglio, however, threatens to turn all the Conservatives’ attack lines into a punch line. The very same political party setting itself up as the champion of privacy included, up to this week, an MP trading online in some of the most sensitive information around.
Clement was well aware that personal security and hacking are a large public concern in the fall of 2018. In fact, less than two weeks ago, Clement was sitting in a Commons committee, grilling a Google representative about the danger of digital hacking and “human error.” In the unlikely event that this Clement story is adapted into a movie or fiction, this would be called dramatic foreshadowing.
“We’re all susceptible to hacks,” Clement said at the Oct. 23 committee meeting. “I’d be very surprised if there were no hacking attempts in the next federal election campaign in Canada.”
Speaking of that next campaign, Conservatives have been starting to feel pretty good about their chances, especially with their new allies in Doug Ford’s government at Queen’s Park. Scheer and Ford have been building an alliance to challenge Justin Trudeau’s Liberals at every turn..
Just imagine what kind of sharing the two leaders might be doing this week — tips on how to manage allegations of sexual misbehaviour against colleagues? While Ford has lost a senior minister and a top adviser to such scandal, now Scheer has lost an MP the same way — someone with lots of experience in Ottawa and Queen’s Park. Somehow one doubts that this is the kind of common cause they sought.
It’s an unfortunate coincidence, image-wise, for Conservatives at all levels. But if allegiances are formed in adversity, perhaps the silver lining is that it will bring Scheer and Ford further together.
The tale of Clement’s downward spiral isn’t over. There will be lingering questions about the damage he may have done to more than his Conservative party, in his capacity as a member of the national security committee. We’d best hope that this fallout doesn’t arrive in triplicate as well.