A cynical, wasteful wild goose chase
We need more good people in public life.
They pay a heavy price for a thankless job. But we’ll all pay a price if they eventually say, no thanks.
Keep treating dedicated politicians as undeserving and we’ll ultimately get the politicians we deserve.
Exhibit A for the kind of people we need to attract to politics — and the perils they face in public life — is Glenn Thibeault, Ontario’s minister of energy.
Before entering politics, he ran the United Way in Sudbury. Before that, group homes for people with autism.
That’s more than most of us will ever do by way of good works. We need more like him, but only a fool would follow in his footsteps after what he’s gone through lately.
Politics is not for the faint-hearted. Yet you’d need a heart of stone not to feel his pain.
Today, Thibeault stands accused of corruption. Accused, but not charged.
Presumed innocent until proven guilty? No, it’s reversed.
Presumed guilty without the chance to proclaim his innocence in a court of law.
To call his situation Kafkaesque would be an understatement. Such reckless cries of corruption are a perversion of our democracy — disgracing our political system and discrediting our legal system.
To watch the opposition, police and prosecutors weaponizing the law — lobbing firebombs into the legislature — is a dispiriting spectacle.
Coming so soon after Donald Trump’s demonization and the FBI’s recriminalization of Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential campaign — and his post-election admission that the charges were trumped up, just play-acting — we should know better by now. But for the opposition, criminalizing an incumbent party is now a proven path to power.
When I sat down with Thibeault this week, he choked up describing what it’s like to tell his two young children that he has done nothing wrong, just as he teared up in an earlier encounter with reporters. On Wednesday, the opposition Progressive Conservatives mocked his words and tears in the legislature.
Thibeault doesn’t feel sorry for himself. But he feels guilty, far from home, that family members are now in the line of fire.
The so-called scandal in Sudbury is a long and twisted tale, covered at length elsewhere in the pages of the Star. A Liberal staffer, Pat Sorbara, has been charged — not under the Criminal Code (the charges wouldn’t stick), but a never-used section of the Election Act, a provincial offence — with trying to bribe him to run in a 2015 Sudbury byelection. Sorbara is also charged with trying to induce a previously defeated Liberal candidate to step aside for Thibeault (even though the premier had already declared she wouldn’t sign his nomination papers).
The opposition wants Thibeault’s resignation, arguing that a minister who stands accused should not sit in cabinet until clearing his name. Would that he could — but he can’t, actually.
Thanks to a bizarre loophole in the law, Sorbara is charged with allegedly bribing Thibeault, but he isn’t being charged for supposedly seeking one. Moreover, Thibeault has never been told precisely what he is accused of.
Nor will Thibeault ever have an opportunity to defend himself in a court of law with his own legal counsel, which introduces another form of jeopardy. Let us suppose that when Sorbara has her day in court, she offers an unpersuasive defence, or that she is an unlikeable defendant, leading a judge to convict her. Does that mean Thibeault should go down on account of another’s alleged transgressions or weak defences?
In our system, one defends oneself. One doesn’t depend on others to clear one’s name.
Thibeault tells me that many in Sudbury — New Democrats and Liberals — urged him to demand a cabinet job to run, but he thought better of it. Thibeault insists he asked only to be considered in future if he proved himself a worthy backbencher.
No matter. We now live in a province where prosecutors and police conduct investigations into conversations that are part of the normal give and take of politics — not to be confused with politicians on the take.
Recall how Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown rewarded a sitting MPP, Garfield Dunlop, for resigning his riding so that Brown could run in a byelection last year. Dunlop was promptly placed on the party payroll. An inducement worthy of a police probe?
It turns out that the Election Act prohibits only inducements to persuade or dissuade people from running. It doesn’t ban bribes for anyone to give up their seat. Not exactly a logical loophole.
In truth, the Election Act was intended to stop powerful people or corporations from getting their way by bribing politicians to get out of the way. Not to prevent political parties from recruiting the best people to win elections, while persuading likely losers to leave quietly (as happened in Sudbury).
Of course, there is another way to clear the air. The premier could call a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Impropriety, summoning the leaders and MPPs from all three parties — under oath — to testify about the conversations, inducements, resignations, paycheques, and other tricks of the trade practised on all sides.
Or the opposition could spare us from such a waste of time and money, after having plunged us into a wild OPP goose chase: They could offer a public apology for the hypocrisy of relying on the police to do their dirty work, when everyone — especially voters — knows that all sides are guilty of similar sins.
Politicians who live in glass legislative chambers shouldn’t throw stones, lest voters say: A pox on all your parties.
And who will run for public office then? Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn