Why can’t politicians do the decent thing?

By far the most enthusiastic Conservative crowd of Campaign 2019’s final week greeted leader Andrew Scheer on Wednesday afternoon as his campaign landed in the famous political battleground that is Windsor, Ont. The NDP currently holds all three ridings in the booming manufacturing city just across the river from Detroit, but both the Tories and Liberals claim confidence they can win them back. The raucous partisans at the Essex Centre Sports Complex arena certainly seemed to think so: Tireless chants of “Andrew” turned to jeers at Justin Trudeau and his evil alleged tax-hiking coalition-in-the-making, which turned to roars at Scheer’s promise to obliterate the carbon tax, which turned back to jeers when reporters asked questions the crowd didn’t like.

An inquiry about Scheer’s passport situation elicited not just jeers, but a shouted allegation that “Trudeau is half-Cuban.” Fella needs to get some perspective, if you ask me: Just because Fidel Castro is secretly Trudeau’s father doesn’t mean Scheer hasn’t on occasion crossed the Canada/U.S. border using the wrong passport.

I kid. But the scene did raise some interesting questions about Canadians’ priorities. Scheer was in Windsor to announce — against a somewhat counterintuitive backdrop of kids barrelling around on a hockey rink — that his government would beef up the Conflict of Interest Act to the tune of $20,000 fines.

In context, the crowd ate it up. The mention of a judicial inquiry into the SNCLavalin debacle, which was previously announced in the party platform among other ethics-and-accountability measures, got a huge cheer.

But that context is very specific to the current moment. This moment is roughly 90 per cent about Lavalin and the Trudeau family’s vacation to the Aga Khan’s private island. And it’s roughly 10 per cent about Bill Morneau, a more minor villain but nonetheless a useful one for any salt-of-the-earthbranded party. In 2017, it was revealed the finance minister failed to disclose to the federal ethics watchdog one of his private corporations that owned a villa in France. Who the hell forgets to declare ownership of a French château?

It’s impossible to argue Morneau and Trudeau shouldn’t have faced stiffer fines. But it’s also true that $20,000 is very nearly nothing relative to those men’s means. It would be more relative to Prime Minister Andrew Scheer’s, but by then he would be making nearly $360,000 a year. Politics can tear some pretty impressive reputations to shreds without their owners even seeming to notice until it’s too late. To the extent ethics and accountability matter in this campaign, the key isn’t stiffer penalties. The key is how believable Canadians find the candidates’ pledges to behave cleanly.

On that front, It’s pretty ugly. An Ipsos poll published Wednesday found Scheer just barely beating Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as “someone you can trust,” and just barely losing to Singh and Trudeau as “someone who will provide open, responsible and ethical government.” On “someone you can trust,” Scheer “won” at 19 per cent. But when 30 per cent answer “none of the above,” no one wins.

“(Trudeau’s) ongoing scandals and coverups have caused Canadians to lose faith in the integrity of their government and their democracy,” Scheer told Windsorites. “Canadians expect accountability when their leaders break the law. … They expect strong democratic institutions that have the power to investigate corrupt politicians to the fullest extent and they expect appropriate punishments who get caught.”

Canadians certainly have a right to demand all those things. But do they still expect them? And what’s real “accountability,” anyway? Surely it can’t be cutting a cheque for $20,000, saying sorry and carrying on. Surely in politics, accountability is when you get caught, you resign. No British PM would even attempt to survive a scandal like Lavalin. But Canadian media treated calls for Trudeau’s resignation as essentially ridiculous.

Considering how spectacularly and how recently Trudeau authored one of the more notable scandals in Canadian political history, it might seem odd that it hasn’t played a more prominent role in the election campaign. But it’s not odd if people just assume his competitors are all bent to one extent or another, or will bend once they’re elected. An Ipsos poll published last month found just 12 per cent of respondents placed “corruption and ethics in government” among their top-three issues. Top of the table was health care, at 35 per cent. If they’re all bums, you might as well vote for the bum you think will help you out.

The simple fact is the only way to get more ethical and less corrupt governments is for the people who run them to want to be more ethical and less corrupt — and to have the gumption to resist temptation when they’re inevitably backed into a corner. There is no way for that to happen except for heads of government to conspicuously set such examples and hold their underlings to them, such that the penalties for malfeasance become truly existential. We can live in hope, but in the meantime we have to make our choices in the real world. Andrew Scheer says he would cut your taxes, and it’s reasonable to assume he would, and a significant number of Windsorites are willing to mark an X and reap the benefits.