Tories face high cost of mishandled scandal
The sad reality of political scandal is that everyone touched by it is presumed guilty. More painful, for the innocent, is that out of loyalty to those who deserve the ignominy, they must remain silent. It happened in Watergate, in Patti Starr, in Gomery and in Charbonneau.
The dozen Tories who have been named so far in the Mike Duffy affair range from innocent bystander to culpable mastermind. That is not how their reputations will look when the smoke clears. They face months of lying awake asking themselves, “Why didn’t I tell my gang that they were playing with fire?”
The sad answer is usually simple. You didn’t because you didn’t see the fire until too late. You didn’t sit down when the crisis exploded and ask yourself three essential questions:
What do we need to know that we don’t?
Can we develop a bulletproofed strategy for coping with the worst case?
How can we stay ahead: decide fast, execute faster and not look back?
The hapless Harper team shattered each one of these rules. They are paying the price in the toughest election they have ever faced.
Through months of hand-wringing — November to February! — they dithered. With each pummelling by Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne, new levels of incompetence are revealed. Sending each other emailed high fives on successfully planting today’s lie? Threatening, impertinently, senators if they don’t shut up? Dissing colleagues in emails sent all over the Langevin Block? This is not high school; this is the executive arm of a G7 nation, for Pete’s sake!
As one veteran of the place from a more mature administration put it, “The Langevin is not big. You just walk down the hall. I always did . . .”
And the essence of this crisis was brutally simple.
Had Duffy lied about his residence and therefore his expenses?
Were the expenses incurred “serving the party”?
If not, could he be forced to repay them?
It should have taken hours to analyze and act, not three months and enough printed emails to paper the Senate chamber. Like many predecessors, Harper had cast a blind eye to the home province of his appointees.
Duffy could not be lying — from his appointment the traditional fib had been allowed to stand. Weeks were wasted figuring out new fibs about where the senator lay his head at night.
Yes, he was doing party work like dozens of senators before him. Did he double dip? Possibly. But that was not as damaging to the party as proof that taxpayers had paid the expenses of the amazing Duffy Donor Dollar Digger.
Could he be forced to pay? Uh, no.
Could he threaten to pull down the temple? Are you kidding? In a party that brags daily about their fiscal integrity and transparency?
This assessment of the realities facing the PMO should have taken an afternoon. The short list of choices it revealed would have shone with painful clarity: pay his expenses after a chin-wagging and a promise of a “tough new regime.” Or, brazen it out and hope that “events” would take the story off the front page.
The hopeless Harperites tried three different strategies, sometimes two at the same time: Tell fibs, threaten Duffy, then fold and pay him secretly with a secret personal cheque. But there is one outcome they should have collectively pledged to prevent over their dead bodies: a criminal trial.
Issue management of criminal trials is mostly impossible. Judges, tough defence counsel and unreliable witnesses don’t script very well. Even if Duffy had not retained one of Canada’s most dangerous criminal defence lawyers, even if the de- fendant was not one his generation’s great journalistic storytellers, and even if they had a credible story to tell, it would have been a big gamble.
But these 20-somethings, with scant experience in NHL-level issues management had all that facing them, and they had a shape-shifting and totally implausible story.
Their best version of their tale so far is: “Our government is directed by a daily meeting that the PM usually chairs. We assess risks and issue management files. Over three months we did not discuss the proposed solution to this crisis that threatened the core brand of our party with the PM. Even though it was discussed by more than a dozen senior colleagues in hundreds of emails and dozens of meetings, it was never discussed with Mr. Harper . . . ” Really? Not once did anyone involved say, “You know, maybe we should run this by the boss . . .?” In a government where failing to get the PM’s approval on a change in the boiler plate of a press release could be suicide? No one?
If his hubris had not tempted him into a 77-day election extravaganza, Harper would be almost halfway home by this week. Instead, he has another two months to watch the ripple effect of the collapse of an amateurish attempt to cover up an initially rather meaningless scandal.
What can he say to those whose reputations he will have scarred for life by this fiasco?
What does this scandal say about his competence in managing under fire? It is to laugh.
What does it say about integrity? It is to cry.
Especially for those who joined him in a Reform-led revolution to clean up Canadian politics almost two decades ago.
The hopeless Harperites tried three different strategies, sometimes two at the same time: Tell fibs, threaten Duffy, then fold and pay him secretly