Liberal record far from spotless
HYPOCRISY AND DECEIT HAVE BEGUN ACCUMULATING AROUND THIS GOVERNMENT
The government of Dorian Gray is showing its age.
Some months ago, I suggested an analogy to the portrait in the story: the prime minister out in public, smiling, unblemished, seemingly ageless, while in an attic somewhere his face was accumulating the marks and lines of his government’s many sins.
But something has gone wrong. Justin Trudeau does not seem so visibly unburdened by office any more. The image of youthful idealism is wearing thin. The cracks are starting to show.
Indeed there is accumulating around this government, and more and more around the prime minister himself, an unmistakable odour of hypocrisy and deceit, made more sickly-sweet by the sanctimony in which both are in the habit of expressing themselves.
It won’t show up in the polls yet, but they are storing up trouble. Liberals have always to guard against arrogance and self-satisfaction — envy and resentment are the Tory equivalents — and this current generation of Liberals are, let us just say, immensely pleased with themselves.
That kind of smugness can lead to overreach and unforced errors, and if not checked will eventually give rise to public loathing.
People fall out of love as quickly as they fall in it, as any number of once popular leaders can attest.
They are clever, these Liberals, there’s no denying it. They ran a brilliant election campaign, and have handled several files adroitly: the delicate climate change-versus-pipelines dance being perhaps the best example. But on a number of other fronts they have crossed the line separating clever from too-clever-by-half.
There is, first of all, the matter of the pay-to-play fundraisers at which Liberal cabinet ministers keep popping up, and the tone-deaf response from the party and its leader whenever the subject is raised. That ministers of the Crown should not be offering privileged access to themselves as an inducement to party contributors is axiomatic. That the amounts are smaller than in years past, or in some provinces today, is no defence — still less so that other favourite Liberal talking point, that no law explicitly forbids it.
Indeed, the practice would appear to be in direct violation of the prime minister’s own ethical guidelines for ministers, notably the bit about how “there should be no preferential access or appearance of preferential access accorded to individuals or organizations because they have made financial contributions to politicians and political parties.” That the prime minister is himself the latest to be caught in this compromising position, at a private dinner with some Chinese billionaires — with an echo of Clintonian side-dealing, in the form of a six-figure donation to the Trudeau Foundation and a $50,000 statue of Trudeau père — only adds to the sense of an ethics code whose first line is “do as I say, not as I do.”
Then there is the matter of the prime minister’s “nonpartisan” Senate appointments. This is, to be polite, a con, as is the claim that they represent a glittering “diversity” of backgrounds. They may come in different skin colours and chromosome counts, but their professional backgrounds are almost comically uniform, virtually every one drawn from Liberal client groups in the state sector and activist community, and while they may not be active Liberal partisans, the likelihood that they would pose any obstacle to the Liberals’ agenda is nil. That’s fine: so long as the Senate is unelected they shouldn’t. It’s when another government, of another party, comes to power that the potential for crisis looms.
A third point where the government’s devious slip is showing: electoral reform, and the public consultations in which a special parliamentary committee has been engaged these past several months. There is no debating this: as a matter of public record, the overwhelming majority of the representations made to the committee, whether from experts or members of the public, favoured some form of proportional representation. Yet the Minister of Democratic Institutions, Maryam Monsef, in what can only be described as an attempt to gaslight the committee, maintains that the consultations revealed “no consensus” on the way forward, while the government readies a separate consultation process, developed in secret, with which to cast doubt on the committee’s findings.
Where should we turn next? To the “interim” purchase of 18 new Super Hornet fighter jets as a replacement for what are universally described as “our aging CF-18s,” with an “open” competition for a more permanent replacement to follow — a competition that cannot possibly be truly open, in the circumstances, and that will now formally include the F-35s, in either case in violation of explicit Liberal campaign promises?
To the military mission in Iraq, and the ever more absurd logical and linguistic contortions needed to maintain the government’s original pretence that our forces are playing a “non-combat” role?
To the ongoing fraud that is the federal budget: not only the officially announced deficits, nearly three times what were promised, but what is widely acknowledged to be a massive effort to manipulate the numbers to fit the government’s political needs?
Are these the worst examples of government cynicism we’ve seen? Hardly. The Harper government set new records in that game. But this is a government that asked people to believe they were different, that made a great show of their sincerity, offering as a token of their good faith no less a surety than the prime minister’s smiling, unlined face. Only he seems to have acquired a few wrinkles around the eyes.