A former police officer under fire
Tactless Fantino is wearing out his welcome
A better politician than Fantino would have understood that in a televised discussion with a decorated veteran, the correct thing to do is do your cap. –
Michael Den Tandt
Julian Fantino has the worst luck, doesn’t he? Everywhere this man goes, a snow-filled ditch presents itself. And darned if, time and time again, he doesn’t bury his big ol’ government-issue SUV in it up to the axles.
Last time it was International Cooperation, with the one-time star candidate from Vaughan, Ont., finessing his way around Canada’s Haiti aid mission with a diamond cutter’s precision; the time before that, the nagging F-35 procurement thing, which this minister deftly solved by overseeing its vaporization. Now it’s Veterans Affairs, a politically very delicate file that Fantino has botched so deeply, so thoroughly, as to make his earlier contretemps seem modest by comparison. And his legend continues to grow.
Is it his fault? Not entirely. It’s not the current minister’s responsibility, surely, that Veterans Affairs has given more than $1 billion of its budgetary allotment back to the federal treasury since 2006. It was not Fantino’s preference, probably, to close nine dedicated veterans’ offices across the country. The fact that the $200 million in recently unveiled new spending on veterans’ mental health will actually be paid out over 50 years — making it a rounding error on an annual basis — is a communications snafu that probably caught him by surprise.
It may not even have been Fantino’s preference to be out of the country last week, at a Second World War Italian Campaign commemoration in Italy, when auditor general Michael Ferguson issued his fall audit, which included a damning review of mental health services for veterans. In this, as in so much else, Fantino has dutifully read his lines and moved according to a script developed for him by others.
But the inescapable fact is that, whatever tough situation he finds himself in, Fantino invariably makes it worse, through a combination of reflexive combativeness, insensitivity and bluster. Those qualities, the Prime Minister’s Office must see, have made him a clear liability to his party — regardless of his street cred as the former head of four different major police forces, and regardless of his electoral drawing power in suburban Toronto.
It is just a matter of time until they drag him offstage with the shepherd’s crook, as they once did former international co-operation minister Bev Oda. A mini-shuffle, perhaps in the spring, would be the ideal time.
A better politician than Fantino would have understood that in a televised discussion with a decorated veteran, the correct thing to do is doff your cap. The same politician would have intuitively grasped that the wife of a struggling veteran is someone to be brought into the office for coffee and a talk, not shunned — again, in full view of TV cameras.
Any politician worth his expense account would have known that, with the auditor general on the march, the safest place to be is under the hot lights, taking one’s punishment. To avoid this not only appears cowardly, as NDP leader Tom Mulcair gleefully noted Monday, but is bound to evoke resentment among one’s peers. Nobody likes being told by the headmaster to bend over, Monty Python-like, for 10 of the best. All the worse for cabinet ministers to suffer this ignominy, as a handful of them did last week, when their departments aren’t even the ones in the soup. It’s false to say that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s caucus has no power: It has tremendous power, when it unites to cast out one of its own who has become a threat.
So, Fantino must go. But when? No PM likes to ditch a minister under fire. In his day, prime minister Paul Martin circled the wagons to protect Judy Sgro, who was eventually hounded from cabinet over a couple of free pizzas. It is this kind of attack-and-harry that parliamentarians live for. The Liberals and New Democrats are feasting on Fantino now because he is available, and Harper is defending him, as he did again Tuesday, because that is what prime ministers do — until they can’t.
Fantino’s position is complicated by the fact that, even within Tory circles, he has many detractors. His role in the Caledonia affair, scrupulously chronicled by my colleague Christie Blatchford, is not forgotten; his bumptious, heavy-handed interventions into political matters, when he was still a police officer and public servant, have left a mark.
And then, there’s this: the veterans’ file is materially different from all the rest. These are not latte-sipping liberals or pencil-necked bureaucrats lining themselves up against the government: they are warriors, a force to be reckoned with, and they have public support massively on their side.
Fantino could have rescued himself, even last week, with a timely appearance before the cameras, during which he might have acknowledged the failings of his department, arranged a sit-down with veterans, and promised to do better. The fact that he was allowed or directed to do otherwise, even as former chief of the defence staff Walter Natynczyk and now a trusted PMO communications staffer, Stephen Lecce, are parachuted in to manage his department, suggests nothing so much as short-term damage control. Beyond that, his future in politics is bleak.