Mulcair compounds his flubs
Thomas Mulcair travelled to France this past week to burnish his credentials as a potential prime minister. Instead, the opposition leader ended up doing the opposite. His partisan comments on the train tragedy at Lac-Mégantic — utterances that preceded any facts about the cause, circumstances and responsibility for the disaster — reveal he is not ready for prime time.
Following the crash, CTV News ran a video in which Mulcair effectively blames the federal Tories for the disaster because of an ostensible failure to ensure public safety with adequate funding and proper safety regulations. Here are a couple of snippets of what he said: “... we are seeing more and more petroleum products being transported by rail, and there are attendant dangers in that. And, and the same time, the Conservative government is cutting safety in Canada. ...
“Governments have to regulate in the public interest, nothing (is) more important in what governments do than taking care of the safety of the public. And this is another case of where the government has been cutting in the wrong area.”
Mulcair may not be blaming Stephen Harper’s government directly, but the implication of that is abundantly evident. In any case, his premature — and blatantly self-serving — remarks earned the NDP leader a few slaps up the side of the head, metaphorically speaking, from various commentators. And deservedly so.
You have to wonder how a politician with Mulcair’s experience could make such a public relations misjudgment. He certainly seems to have recognized that he’d stepped in it with his ill-judged claims. In a subsequent interview with CBC, Mulcair actually denied saying what he’d said. “You won’t find that quote from me,” he said. “That’s an amalgam and a shortcut. And it doesn’t reflect anything I said.”
Dumb move. It would have been far better, both in terms of his personal sense of integrity and his political concerns, to acknowledge the earlier flub. People can forgive something said in the heat of the moment, but to actually deny what he’d said when it’s so easy to refute that claim smacks of delusion and desperation. It also suggests someone who regards everything through the lens of self-interest.
To be sure, politicians, including prime minsters, are inevitably partisan. But Canadians rightly expect a prime minister to set the partisanship aside in times of tragedy and speak on behalf of the nation as a whole. Mulcair seems to lack this prime ministerial quality.