Evasion just deepens trio of scandals

plants; say the story is “ridiculous,” without specifically denying it. As the facts prove hard to reconcile with these, stonewall, refuse to answer questions, stave off or subvert parliamentary inquiries. you obstruct a forensic audit, get a Senate committee to whitewash its investigation, declare the matter closed; you deny that relevant documents exist, then discover they do, then prorogue the legislature indefinitely; you hide from the press for days on end.

But it just gets worse. So, while the politicians are keeping up appearances in public (the senator repaid the expenses because “it was the right thing to do,” we had no idea the plants would cost as much as they did, “I cannot comment on a video I have never seen, or does not exist”), you quietly take steps behind the scenes to prevent those stubborn facts from surfacing. In each case, the same player is involved.

In Ottawa, the prime minister’s chief of staff writes the senator a personal cheque for $90,000, to pay off the very expenses that are the subject of the audit. At Queen’s Park, the emails of the departing premier’s chief of staff, along with those of several other staffers working on the gas plants file, are surreptitiously deleted. And at City Hall? Here, thankfully, the pattern breaks down. When it is reportedly suggested to the mayor’s chief of staff there might be a way to retrieve the allegedly incriminating video, he refuses, and instead informs the police of the conversation.

yet in every case the end result is the same. The scandals, far from fading, grow more serious. As each cover story gives way to the next, the focus simply shifts, and intensifies: from the senator’s expenses to the chief of staff ’s payout to stories of a secret party fund run out of the Prime Minister’s Office; from the cancellation of the gas plants to the lowballing of the costs to destruction of evidence; from the video to the changing stories about the video to suggestions that people might even have been killed for the video. The stories are not going away. There are too many moving parts, too many people to keep under wraps or on message, too many leaks coming from who knows where, in the service of who knows what agenda. And in the meantime, the continuing refusal of those at the top to give a full and frank accounting of events only adds to public suspicion.

The prime minister continues to pick and choose which questions he will answer — when he is available to answer questions at all — beyond his insistence he had no idea what his chief of staff was up to. The former premier has said little about the gas plants matter since his sudden retirement last fall, other than an irritatingly smug appearance before a legislative committee in May and a statement last week in which he, too, disclaimed any knowledge of his chief of staff ’s activities. The mayor is reduced to a muttered “anything else” in response to every question.

It is a trifecta of denial, a hat trick of evasion, a threeringed abdication of responsibility that has left each of their respective governments in chaos and confusion, culminating in the police being called in. Can there be a more degrading spectacle?

I can understand how difficult it must have been for all three men to make a clean breast of it; whether out of personal stubbornness, political calculation or legal jeopardy, every instinct would be to refuse. But suppose they had. Suppose they had ordered every document released, every question answered, not belatedly and in part, but instantly and in full.

Suppose Mike duffy had been made to pay whatever penalty faced him; suppose Nigel Wright had been disciplined immediately, rather than held up as a selfless example of public service; suppose, even now, both men were to tell everything they knew about the transaction. Suppose dalton McGuinty had owned up to the full cost of the plant cancellations from the start, and the cynical considerations that led him to keep these from the public. Suppose Rob Ford had admitted to smoking crack as he is alleged to have done on that video, or at least provided his own explanation.

I don’t say any of this would be easy. There would be consequences in every case, some probably severe. But honestly, could it possibly be any worse than it is?