PM’s apology too little, too late
Given expanding details of the scandal, it’s also hard to believe
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, despite being off in sunny Peru addressing vital affairs of state, took time out of his hectic schedule to say he’s “sorry,” “frustrated, “and “extremely angry” about the Senate expense scandal that has broadsided his government and vaporized what remained of its spring agenda.
This show of contrition Wednesday, together with the PM’s first explicit denial of any knowledge of the infamous $90,172 payment to former Conservative Senator Mike Duffy by former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright, was the exculpatory statement many had been waiting for. But was it enough?
Short answer: No. Nor did a follow-on scrum in Colombia Thursday improve matters any.
It’s only fair to note that uttering the words “I’m sorry” cannot have come easily to this prime minister. I am not aware — I stand to be corrected — of a single instance in which he has publicly said those two little words in conjunction, ever, in the context of incompetence, bungling or bad judgment on his part or that of anyone who works for him.
True, the apology did not include any quaintly old- fashioned shouldering of personal responsibility. Instead Harper hustled his former consiglieri with alacrity under a bus, a space grown increasingly cramped in recent days. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. For those who’ve waited patiently all these years, like Linus in the pumpkin patch, for the prime minister to display humility, it can only be counted as progress.
The trouble is that it’s a day late and a dollar short — as the damage-control campaign has been from the start. Perhaps because this PMO is so accustomed to perpetual assault, it has not managed to get ahead of the unfolding mess. Rather it fights to the last man over every hillock, abandoning each new position a day or two after it should, guaranteeing the next will fall as well.
For example: In his cride coeur from Peru, Harper said that “immediately upon learning that the source (of the payment) was indeed my chief of staff, Nigel Wright, I immediately asked that the information be released publicly. That is what I knew.”
Well, yes. But that release came Wednesday, May 15, the day after CTV’s initial report about the Duffy payment. Two days later, PMO communications director Andrew MacDougall was still telling reporters Wright had Harper’s “full confidence.” Even last Saturday, after Duffy and Sen. Pamela Wallin had departed the Tory caucus, there was no suggestion Wright had done anything wrong. Instead Conservatives such as Ted Opitz and James Moore were making him out to be a hero.
Last Sunday morning, even as Wright resigned, buried under an avalanche of opprobrium from the Conservative base, the prime minister did not denounce the payment to Duffy, let alone disavow all knowledge of it. Instead, he thanked his outgoing chief of staff for his yeoman 2-1/2 years’ service.
Nigel Wright is, as far as I know, a bright, hardworking fellow. He runs 20 kilometres daily and is a devout churchgoer, the Globe and Mail reported last Saturday. Good. But here’s the thing: He presided over a period of unprecedented decline in Conservative fortunes, due to inexplicably bad strategy. It began last fall with the cretinous “$21-billion carbon tax” talking point assault on the New Democrats, which arguably has made it tougher politically for the Obama administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. It continued with the F-35 debacle in December. It continued further with the auditor general’s report in April, which found that $3.1 billion in antiterrorism funding had got lost in someone’s sock drawer. Now this.
Is it too much to expect that the PM — assuming he knew nothing whatever about the Duffy payment, as he says — would have been sorry, or perhaps even frustrated and extremely angry, before he made it to Peru?
For Harper’s problem now has morphed into something considerably more serious than a trio of Conservative senators making questionable expense claims, and a one-time lapse in judgment on the part of his most senior appointed official. There’s the Senate Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration; in particular, revelations that two of its Conservative members, Sen. David Tkachuk and Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen, forced a rewrite of a Senate audit into Duffy’s expenses, deleting the bits that made him look bad.
For a party that won power on a promise of probity, this is beyond toxic.
Olsen is among Harper’s most senior and loyal confidantes, having served as his adviser and director of strategic communications before being rewarded with a Senate post in 2009. To believe the latest PMO narrative, we must accept that Harper, and his chief of staff, and his most loyal friend in the Senate, were managing the potentially explosive problem of Mike Duffy in hermetically sealed silos. They don’t speak among themselves about such things, apparently. Mum’s the word.
Now, this may be true. But is it likely? Is it reasonable? And will Canadians believe it?
Increasingly, it doesn’t matter what revelations come next. The stench is high. It is a matter of time, now, until the knives come out.