Andrew Coyne,
Both Adams, Trudeau claim high principle
The chief ingredient for success in Canadian politics, it is every day more apparent, is a bottomless capacity for self-humiliation. Some jobs require an ability to do things that other people can’t do. Politics more often entails a willingness to do things other people won’t do — usually because it would be too hideously embarrassing.
Consider — just as a for instance — the case of Eve Adams, the newly defected Liberal Member of Parliament for Mississauga-Brampton South. The script for these events calls for the defector to say something like “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.” In this case, oddly, it happens to be true.
The Conservative party had been trying to put as much distance as it could between itself and Ms. Adams ever since she was caught trying to bigfoot her way into the nomination for the nearby riding of Oakville North-Burlington, which struck her as offering a better shot at winning than her present constituency.
Not content with using her privilege as an MP in one riding to mail promotional flyers into the other, improperly accessing a confidential party database, and terrorizing a party meeting or two, Ms. Adams also sought to exploit the position of her fiancé, the party’s then-executive director, Dimitri Soudas, who made hundreds of calls from the same database on her behalf,
in plain violation of his contract.
Amazingly, things ended badly, with Mr. Soudas turfed from the position to which he had only lately been appointed — by the prime minister himself — and Ms. Adams barred, not only from seeking the nomination in Oakville North-Burlington, but as she was informed in a letter from party president John Walsh two weeks ago, in any riding in the country.
Had Ms. Adams gone before the nation’s media and confessed that the reason she was joining the Liberals was because no other party would have her, that would have been excruciating enough. But it could not have been half so mortifying — to anyone capable of it — as what she
actually said, which was that this was all a matter of high principle.
The Conservative party “no longer shares my values,” she declared (which seems unfair: surely there’s still a place in the modern Conservative party for someone whose “values” include winning at any cost). “I can no longer support mean-spirited leadership” — whoa, maybe she has had a change of heart — “that divides people instead of bringing them together.” She was especially offended by the party position on income-splitting, a policy she said, in words that might almost have been written for her, “benefits only the richest few.”
You understand. Ms Adams has been a member of the Conservative party for 25 years. She has been a member
of the Conservative caucus under Stephen Harper for four years. She is engaged to Mr. Soudas, once the prime minister’s most loyal retainer and a central figure in the Conservatives’ 2011 election campaign. But only now, this very week, did she discover that she could not support “fear-mongers,” “bullies” or “mean-spirited leadership.”
But it was not Ms. Adams who was called upon to deliver the day’s most crawlingly demeaning performance. That honour was reserved for Justin Trudeau. Ms. Adams, after all, was desperate. Mr. Trudeau had a choice. That he chose to receive her, not with a shrug of “hey, a seat’s a seat,” but in the same spirit of feigned highmindedness, proves beyond a doubt his fitness for the rigours of high office.
Not many would be capable of declaring, with a face that betrayed not a hint of the gut-emptying shame that roiled within, how “impressed” he had been in recent weeks with Ms. Adams’ “commitment to public service.” In a particularly painful flourish, the Liberal leader paid tribute to the amount of “soul-searching” she must have gone through before taking such a momentous decision.
At a guess, a search of Ms. Adams’s soul could be conducted in the course of your average smoke break, if not between cigarettes. ( Soul
searching? Are we entirely certain that when she looks in the mirror, an image appears?) Yet Mr. Trudeau professed to be delighted with his new recruit, as untroubled by her serial loyalties as by the voluminous baggage she brings.
The comparison has been made with an earlier press conference, and a similar display of jaw-dropping self-abasement: that day in 2005, when Belinda Stronach crossed from the Conservatives to the governing Liberals, just in time to deliver the single vote (“the margin of heiress”) they needed to cling to power, and Paul Martin assured everyone “this is not about politics.”
In this case, by contrast, the real business of the transaction would seem to lie elsewhere: namely, in securing the behind-the-scenes co-operation of Mr. Soudas, and the secrets he possesses. For that, Mr. Trudeau would endure any indignity, though we will probably not see Mr. Soudas beside him on a stage any time soon.
“Paris is worth a mass,” the future Henry IV declared, on converting to Catholicism. And power, it seems, is worth a mess.
Trudeau professed to be delighted with his new recruit, untroubled by her serial loyalties