Other shoe drops for disgraced MPP
Provincial Tory leader Patrick Brown has got ahead of the cascading Jack MacLaren scandal, stripping the west- Ottawa MPP of his portfolio in Brown’s shadow cabinet and sending him on a leave from Queen’s Park until he cleans up his messes.
Finally it’s competent damage control, except for the part where it’s obviously damage control.
MacLaren, who represents Carleton-Mississippi Mills, got in trouble two weeks ago when the Toronto Star reported he’d dragged federal Liberal MP Karen McCrimmon up to the stage at a Carp Fair fundraiser to tell dirty jokes about her and her husband in front of a crowd of 350 people. Since then, we’ve revealed tapes of MacLaren reading a stream of filthy jokes at the same fundraiser in 2015 and using fake names and pictures pulled from random parts of the Internet to go with testimonials to his great constituency work on his website.
He’s since apologized to McCrimmon — though not the Carp Fair people — and taken his website down.
Brown first condemned MacLaren’s treatment of McCrimmon. Then he stripped MacLaren of his ceremonial position as chair of the party’s Eastern Ontario caucus. Then on Monday morning, he announced he’ll “reassign” MacLaren’s jobs as natural-resources critic and vicechair of a legislature committee, and send him for “sensitivity training.” He’ll remain an MPP and a member of the party, but he’ll stay away from the legislature to focus on his constituency.
Brown himself was running in the Boston Marathon on Monday and not available to talk about his decision, a spokeswoman said.
“I have been clear that there is no room for anything less than respect and tolerance in the Ontario PC Party and Caucus, in our Legislature, and society,” Brown said in a written statement. “Reassignment of MPP MacLaren’s roles will remain in effect until such time as I determine that appropriate corrective action has been taken.”
It’s hard to know what good sensitivity training might do here. MacLaren didn’t choose his words poorly.
The idea that he just didn’t realize that degrading a female politician might come across as nasty is ridiculous. He needs judgment training, decency training, basic-readiness-to-be-out-in-public training. I don’t know who offers that to adults.
The real trouble with Brown’s move is that it comes so late, after a pileup of bad-news stories. Maybe it was the recordings of MacLaren reading the earlier jokes, voicing the obscenities himself, that did it. But the worst news about MacLaren came first, with the account of his subjecting a woman to a form of public sexual humiliation for kicks. If you actually believe that there’s no room for anything less than respect and tolerance in your party, that’s when you act.
Not that it would have been easy. Few political calculations are simple and this one is more difficult than most.
One thing that makes doing the right thing easier in politics is surrounding yourself with good people who don’t commit errors and abuses that are constantly blowing up in your face — and if one does, it’s such a rare and appalling thing that everybody understands instantly that punishing the person responsible is not only necessary but obviously the right thing to do.
But MacLaren was one of Brown’s early supporters when Brown was a nobody running an insurgent candidacy for the Tory leadership. The fact he meted out only ceremonial discipline at first shows there is a little bit of room for disrespect and intolerance if Brown owes you one.
Just like there’s room for political skulduggery in the Liberal party if Kathleen Wynne likes you, and certainly room for ministers to ask people who depend on their decisions to donate to the Liberal re-election effort (right up until the premier realizes how many people find that revolting).
Wynne, in fact, seized the moment Monday to release a letter to the Speaker of the legislature proposing a code of conduct for MPPs and training to go along with it. “I believe that we must not tolerate inappropriate conduct by or against our members as they conduct their work, be it in the legislative precinct or at events in their ridings and elsewhere,” she wrote.
No, we mustn’t. Whether the legislature as a whole ought to enforce such rules is another question. Who gets to be an MPP is up to voters, not other politicians.
But at least, however belatedly, Patrick Brown has realized that it’s not in his interest to have Jack MacLaren sitting with his party.