Have the Tories wasted their chances?
Problem files are gone — but trust may be too
It has the hallmarks of a massive writedown; as when a public company, facing headwinds, “takes its medicine” by writing off the value of wasting or non-performing assets — sometimes causing the stock in question, paradoxically, to rise, due to the sudden removal of the overhang. Could this be what the federal Conservatives had in mind last week, as they sustained one crushing blow after another on key policy files, tossing losers overboard like so much ballast?
We can at least assume, as the Tories shift into defensive formation amid the shelling they’re sure to draw this week from the opposition, that the thought at least will sustain them — the prospect of taking a nasty, short-term beating, after which it mercifully ends. It’s even plausible, to a point. Consider the number of serious problems that have suddenly, to one degree or another, been scrubbed out of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s personal appointments calendar. It’s an important list, measured against the public controversies that have rocked the government these past two years.
Former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright? Check. Wright will not be charged in connection with the notorious $90,000 payment to former Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy, the RCMP decided earlier this month. We don’t know if Wright may yet be called to testify, should charges be laid against others, but we know he won’t be testifying in his own defence. If the PM did approve the payment to Duffy, something he has long categorically denied, Wright’s testimony would presumably have held the smoking gun.
Robocalls? Check. This was by far the Conservatives’ biggest political headache of 2012-13, before Clusterduff came along. Elections Canada will lay no new charges.
Keystone XL? Check. Last week Bloomberg News published an exhaustively researched piece that shed new light on how relations between Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama foundered, as Canada sought approval of the pipeline linking Alberta’s oilsands with refineries on the Gulf Coast. That this article should be published now, with extensive sourcing — albeit anonymous — from senior levels of the Canadian government, is the clearest indication yet that the PMO has set this fight aside, written it off, in hopes the next president will do what Obama couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
Temporary foreign workers? Check. Employment Minister Jason Kenney’s move from zero to 60 on this controversy — addressing CBC reports about Canadian McDonald’s employees displaced by temporary foreign workers one day, shelving the entire program for restaurants the next — was surprising, and uncharacteristic for this government. It indicates a new-found desire to douse brush fires before they become conflagrations.
Then, in no particular order, came Friday’s colossi: the humiliating climbdown by Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, and total capitulation by the prime minister on any manner of Senate reform, following the Supreme Court of Canada’s opinion that such would require buy-in by seven provinces with half the population and, in the case of abolition, unanimity. Check, check. Poilievre’s belated amendments to C-23, Tory strategists have to be hoping, will draw the venom out of a growing backlash against the bill, which was seeping into the Tory caucus. And as for the Senate reform conundrum, well, it’s just gone.
It’s difficult to imagine any branch of government with the power to make an enormous issue go away, like David Copperfield disappearing a 747. But that’s what the Supreme Court has done, in effect. Senate wonks insist reform can still happen, if there is leadership, if there is popular will — if, if, if. There is no such leadership, and no such popular will, which makes the question moot. Incidentally, should NDP Leader Tom Mulcair be unwise enough to campaign in the ROC in 2015 on a pledge to make his first term all about reanimating the Charlottetown accord — which any conference on Senate abolition would necessarily become — then there may be no helping him.
All of which leaves us with this: a Conservative government miraculously, albeit painfully, shorn of its most troublesome files, and free to talk about the economy, which is all it really wants to talk about anyway, and how it intends to “give back” the growing budgetary surplus, which amounted to $5.1 billion in February.
And it would all be tenable, quite plausible indeed, were it not for this: How many times can a government lose face, and faith, before it has exhausted its store of second chances? Given the track record — the in-and-out affair, the self-serving prorogations, the omnibus bills, the F-35 affair, the serial attacks on officers of Parliament, the Nadon dodge, C-23 and now the utter ruin of a decade’s worth of promises of Senate reform — few fair-minded observers will believe that what comes next is anything but a way station, before the next self-inflicted crisis.
It is a problem, in other words, not of strategy, but of fundamental trust in the character and integrity of leadership; an asset that cannot be written off and that, once wasted, tends to remain that way.