Prolonged battle bad for Conservatives

At some point, party will have to decide whether public inquiry will clear air on ‘ robocalls’

Just as in the NHL, the House of Commons has its enforcers. Invariably they are young, but not too young; bright, combative, ambitious and sure- footed. These are people trusted by the prime minister to say the right thing, at the right time, without notes, and not put their foot in it too often.

At the height of the sponsorship scandal, Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison played that role for the Liberals. These days, Peterborough MP Dean Del Mastro and Nepean- Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre are skating elbows up for the Conservatives, as they fend off opposition accusations of electoral fraud daily in question period.

Critics say the enforcers’ efforts have been ineffective — or, to use Liberal interim leader Bob Rae’s expression, “wacko.” Not true. In fact, Del Mastro and Poilievre’s efforts are having exactly their intended effect, from a tactical point of view, in the short term. Longer term? Perhaps not.

Clearly the Tory strategy is to fill the air with chaff — to envelop the debate in so many claims and counterclaims that Canadians, literally, change the channel. The newscast moves to talk of robocalls and the clicker is immediately in hand, flipping to something less tedious. Conservatives are banking on the idea that voters are skeptical of everything they hear in the House, from any party. If the debate can be drowned in white noise, therefore, it may be made to pass over Canadian living rooms like a storm cloud. Once passed, forgotten.

But there’s another side to this kind of pitched combat: It oxygenates and prolongs the fight. Had they stuck to simple denials and exhortations that anyone with knowledge of wrongdoing should report it to Elections Canada, the Commons debate might have settled into an uneasy pattern by now. Instead, there’s a fresh battle every day.

With Del Mastro accusing the Liberals of causing the entire affair with their own robocalls and demanding the release of Liberal phone records, ( while unaccountably refusing to release the Conservatives’ own) the skirmishes are bound to continue for days.

This is, to a point, deliberate. But it also means that, while the channel may change in living rooms across the country, it doesn’t on the Hill.

On Thursday, leading conservative thinkers from across Canada congregate in Ottawa for the Manning Centre’s 2012 Manning Networking Conference. The speaker’s list includes a who’s who of federal cabinet ministers — including Peter Mackay, Tony Clement, Jason Kenney and Rona Ambrose — as well as current and former senior staffers and strategists, including Guy Giorno and Dimitri Soudas.

This was to have been, would have been, a triumph for the conservative movement, which has come full circle from ‘ the West wants in’ to national power. The intent, Preston Manning says, is to provide a forum for a free and frank intellectual exchange among conservatives. It’s a laudable idea. Especially now, with the Conservative party in a majority, frank policy debate is good. The alternative, as Liberals have learned, is ossification and complacency.

But here’s the thing: Will anyone be particularly interested, this week, in the policy chat? The broader discussion of this conference and the chatter in the hallways is certain to be framed by robocalls and talk of electoral fraud — because of the political war fever in Ottawa, which the Conservatives have helped perpetuate.

The larger question: What effect are the government’s tactics on robocalls — attack, attack, attack — having on its core message and agenda? And doesn’t the daily spewing of chaff tend to increase, rather than decrease, the need for an impartial inquiry?

Conservative academic Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, gives no credence to the notion that there was any central knowledge or control, by the Conservative party or its national campaign, in the robocalls affair. But he does concede that the technology has changed how elections are fought and won and that this may be worthy of independent study. “Something short of a judicial inquiry, but a report on the use of telephone technology in elections, might be helpful,” he says.

Manning, for his part, says that all the major parties should do a better job of understanding and policing the use of new technology. “You’ve got them in all parties, people who will skate too close to the edge on this stuff,” he says.

Far from dismissing the scandal out of hand, he calls it “a messy thing, a bad thing.” And he sees a possible silver lining: “If it causes the parties to come to grips with the ethics of new technologies ... it could be a blessing in disguise.”

So the ultimate question for Harper and his hard- working enforcers: At what point do you stop scrapping and get back to scoring goals? If the Conservatives truly believe the other parties commissioned calls that went wrong, they should convene a public inquiry into the use of this technology, by a non- partisan body, and let it do its work.