Chipping away at public trust

The last thing Canadian voters need is another reason to be cynical about politics. What with a long litany of spending scandals, coverups, opportunism and outright lying on all sides, there’s more than enough to go around.

So it’s particularly disappointing — though not perhaps entirely shocking for those accustomed to the low standards of our political life — that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has once again chipped away at the foundations of public trust with his embarrassing two-step with Conservative defector Eve Adams.

There may be times when it’s entirely appropriate for a politician to make a principled decision to cross the floor of the House of Commons and sit with another party. This, clearly, was not one of those times.

Until the very day of her defection, Adams was a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government as MP for Mississauga—Brampton South and parliamentary secretary to the minister of health. She had given no public hint of disagreeing with Conservative policy.

Indeed, as the Star’s Bruce Campion-Smith reported on Tuesday, a few weeks ago she was pleading with Harper himself to be allowed to run again under the Conservative banner — despite being disqualified from seeking another Tory nomination because of “misconduct” in a fight for the party’s nod in the riding of Oakville North—Burlington.

Yet there was Trudeau on Monday morning, trying to put a bright shiny bow on what was obviously a crass move on both sides. He praised Adams’ “passion and commitment” to public service and went on about how impressed he had been with her in recent weeks.

For her part, Adams disclosed a previously unknown distaste for the “mean-spirited” leadership and “divisive” politics of the Conservative party — the same party she had been a faithful member of for 25 years. “I want to work with someone who inspires, not with fear-mongers and bullies,” she said.

Despite this unseemly switching, Trudeau can at least claim to have lured a prominent Conservative into his ranks. If his intention is to build a bigger Liberal tent, that’s something. And the possibility that Adams’ fiancé, the former top Harper aide Dimitri Soudas, might also share his secrets with Team Trudeau must have been a factor as well.

All this would be just another day at the office for our national politicians if it weren’t for the corrosive effect on public trust in major institutions. That has been sliding for many years — no matter the partisan complexion of the party in power. And it shows no sign of stopping: just over a year ago an EKOS Research poll found that 59 per cent of Canadians see our democracy as sick, up 22 percentage points from 2009. Asked what worried them most about the country, respondents cited “the acute decline of our democratic and public institutions.”

Trudeau himself is clearly aware of all this. It was just weeks ago that the Liberal leader told the Star in a year-end interview that almost nine years of Conservative rule have produced a legacy of “cynicism” among voters.

He was right about that. Too bad he has chosen to add to that legacy with such an opportunistic manoeuvre.

Liberal decision to welcome ex-Conservative Eve Adams into the party feeds public cynicism