If the PM sets standard, why is it inconsistent?
There are many questions raised by this affair, but there is only one issue. Their Senate colleagues will pronounce on whether Senators Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau are fit to sit among them. The courts will rule on whether any laws were broken. One day we will learn what prompted Nigel Wright to pay off Duffy’s expenses, what the precise terms of their deal was, and whether the prime minister knew.
But all of these are outgrowths of a single overarching issue. That is: By what means do we hold senators and other public officeholders to account? What is the standard? How is it enforced? Is there one set of rules, independently and impartially applied? Or is there a sliding scale, depending on whether those involved are in or out of favour with the prime minister?
That is where the public interest in all this lies. As diverting as these tales of petty vendettas and double-crosses and he saids-she saids may be, it is important not to lose the thread. We can marvel at how much this or that senator claimed on his or her expense account, we can debate whether it was smart tactics to threaten so and so with such and such. But what’s essential is to ensure that the integrity of public office is upheld. That’s what makes this such a big story. That’s why it matters.
Because running throughout this affair, at every stage, is the suspicion that such has not been the case. What elevated a relatively minor tale of expense-account fiddling into a political crisis was the suggestion that those involved, as members of the governing party, were the beneficiaries of preferential treatment: that powerful people had looked the other way at their bogus expense claims, whether out of sheer indulgence, or because they were helpful to the party’s interests, or perhaps in fear of what they might reveal if called to account.
Latterly there has been a wave of public sympathy for the same disgraced trio, out of concern that they are now being singled out for harsh treatment, scapegoated for sins of which others are no less guilty, or for which they might even have been explicitly authorized. At the least, many feel, they should not be punished without a fair hearing.
But these are not two different stories, the one the opposite of the other. They are but different aspects of the same story: of arbitrary standards, selectively enforced, in the service of political expediency rather than public integrity.
This is what makes the prime minister’s interventions in the House this week so problematic, in hindsight. Granted, he has been suspected from the start of having directed the secret payment to Duffy, and the subsequent whitewashing of his misdeeds. And indeed Duffy’s peculiarly blinkered sense of outrage, that the prime minister should have demanded he repay expenses he had falsely claimed, gave him the opportunity, as I wrote last time, to turn the situation to his advantage. No, he had no knowledge of Wright’s activities. But had he ordered Duffy to repay? “Darn right I did!” Was he in support of the Senate motion to suspend all three senators without pay? “Unequivocally.”
But in so doing the prime minister, more than anyone has to date, made himself the issue. By boasting of how he had been the one to bring Duffy to account, he was in effect saying: I am the
standard. I am the enforcer. The rules are what I say they are, and I will decide in any given case what punishment should be given out.
Which is fine, as far as it goes. We are in a strange grey area here: not only is it not clear as yet whether any laws were broken, but the Senate rules themselves are unclear (and even where they are clear, laxly enforced). That hardly exonerates the individuals involved, who indisputably helped themselves to funds to which, by any common sense standard, they were not entitled. If they were members of Parliament, they would surely be held to account in the court of public opinion, at the next election. But as senators? Senators he himself had appointed? Who else can sit in judgment of them, but their creator?
But if the prime minister sets the standard, then we are entitled to ask: Why has this standard been so inconsistent? On essentially the same set of facts, the senators in question have been held to three entirely distinct standards: total indulgence, in the first stages of their tenure, when they were viewed as assets to the party; total ostracism, since the scandal broke, when they had become political liabilities; and in between that strange interlude, at least with regard to Duffy, when he was both being punished — pay back your expenses! — and indulged: play along, keep quiet and Nigel will pay.
So if the prime minister seeks to be congratulated for cracking the whip now, he must also accept responsibility for doing nothing before, when the same senators were touring the country attending Tory fundraisers and speaking at campaign events on the public dime. Can he pretend this was a secret? Indeed, he must earnestly hope the auditor general, in the course of his investigations, does not find others of the senators at his command have done the same — as of course must they. For then the hypocrisy would be total.
This is why the Watergate question — what did the prime minster know when — while important, is not the issue. Whether he specifically approved the decision to bail out Duffy, he was the author of the climate of expediency in which it was made. He is responsible, because he is the standard.