Liberals are superspreaders for arrogance
WEALTH MUST BE
CREATED BEFORE IT
CAN BE DISTRIBUTED.
— JOHN ROBSON
Pandemics aren’t much fun, and COVID- 19 proves it. That said, if you’re handed a coronavirus outbreak, you make coronavirus stew. Just add a pangolin and stir. Clever operators that they are, the Liberals are trying to blow off further parliamentary hearings on WE Charity and speaking fees for the Trudeau family with the grasping claim that all that matters is the pandemic. The pandemic must be their sole focus. The pandemic!
The prime minister proved his point while also undermining it when he darted off to ban plastic straws two weeks ago. He did lose his focus on the pandemic, and proved that a government with scores of departments and agencies and hundreds of thousands of public servants can actually do more than one thing at a time.
Setting that aside, the premise of his argument is wrong. Understanding what went wrong with WE is highly relevant and tightly connected to the COVID response. Indeed, WE was part of the government’s COVID response, so let’s do the full autopsy on that vile cadaver to ensure it doesn’t happen again elsewhere in government.
Deep scrutiny of the WE scandal should help ensure that the hundreds of billions in pandemic spending yet to come is apt to be spent with rules, oversight and enforcement. Nailing a body or two to the door will also be a good warning to anyone who might be tempted to cut corners or fill their boot with the flood of pandemic spending.
The previous hearings uncovered serious taint in government processes and decision- making. There were inconsistencies in testimony. The House of Commons law clerk, a neutral official, states that the government seems to have redacted far more than was necessary, which itself warrants investigation. Isn’t openness and transparency a good thing, even during a pandemic?
Canadians deserve answers to the great game of WE Charity Clue. Who murdered competent, transparent and ethical decision- making on a $ 900- million program? Was it Craig Kielburger with his shifty corporate structures in the Hall of Honour? Was it Diversity Minister Bardish Chagger with inconsistent testimony in the Minister’s Office? Was it the prime minister with a feeble excuse in the Parliamentary Library?
Former Liberal MP Andrew Leslie took to Twitter in support of opposition scrutiny of the WE affair. He quoted the parliamentary website noting that it is the opposition’s job to hold the government to account. That is how bad systems, broken processes and conflicts of interest get exposed.
And it’s not just the WE Charity. There is the supercluster mess ( if only we could think of a salty name for a failed supercluster), new revelations about the Public Health Agency and the misfires at the Canada Infrastructure Bank. There are the hair-raising deficits.
Like all governments, the Liberals need to be held to account. It helps keep the arrogance from travelling from minister to minister as though it were, you know, a virus, infecting decision- making and inflating egos. Ultimately it’s this virus that sickens the public while leaving the superspreaders blissfully unaware.
All politicos try to turn an emergency to their advantage. That’s natural. But the best way to do that is to do a good job of handling the emergency in the first place, and to then wait for the praise to come rolling in. “Great job, government! You had all that personal protective equipment set aside for just such an emergency. You got the emergency funding out without a hitch. You closed the borders immediately to hot- spot countries. And you were decisive and consistent.” None of that happened.
As a sort of consolation prize we did get the prime minister in front of us every day with his daily COVID-19 update, announcing his policy intentions and his moist assurances, each sentence trailing off with a kind of hushed wet wheeze, as though he was actually on a ventilator. The best remedy for that concentrated power is ongoing, thorough and relentless parliamentary scrutiny, the very thing he is trying to avoid.