Harper’s silence, Jim Flaherty’s tears and punishment
Last Thursday, after Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair said that he had watched a video of Rob Ford smoking crack, reporters asked Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino and his parliamentary secretary, Parm Gill, to comment. “I’m not going to get into it,” said Fantino, who used to have Blair’s job.
Gill, though, had something to say.
“Rob Ford is a great mayor,” he said. “I support him. I think he’s doing a wonderful job.”
It was odd. Party spin doctors send out talking points to MPs every day advising them on what they should say about the news. Were the Tories asleep?
I later found out they had sent out lines asking MPs not to comment, so Fantino was on script while Gill was off.
I thought the instructions were cowardly, since our leaders needed to confront the drug-induced breakdown at Toronto City Hall, but the Tories seem to want to stay on the right side of Ford Nation.
Ford’s 2010 election as mayor set the stage for the Conservatives’ breakthrough in the Toronto suburbs in 2011. A few months after the election, Harper attended a jolly barbecue at Ford’s Etobicoke home to celebrate the teamwork that gave him his majority. Ford and Harper joked around about a bass-fishing trip he took with Ford — an outing I find hard to imagine — and a jovial Harper praised Ford for cleaning up a “left-wing mess” at city hall.
Because of that relationship, a comment from Harper would have been helpful.
It’s one thing for Olivia Chow, who wants Ford’s job, to call for the mayor to get help, another for the prime minister to say so.
On Tuesday, just after Ford admitted to smoking crack, Justice Minister Peter MacKay was in the foyer of the House to make an announcement.
I asked him to react to Ford, since he had earlier criticized Justin Trudeau for admitting to a backyard toke.
MacKay said that he had just heard about Ford’s confession. He weighed his words carefully.
“I’m the Justice Minister,” he said. “You know where I stand on the use of illegal drugs. As a human being, I think that the mayor of Toronto needs to get help.”
On Thursday, after the Star published a video of an extremely intoxicated Ford, a reporter asked Finance Minister Jim Flaherty whether Ford should get help.
“I am close with the family,” he said, in his normal tone of voice, and then he stopped. “I am,” he said again, and paused, grimacing and closing his eyes, plainly struggling to keep from crying.
“You’ll have to … The mayor, at the end of the day, he has to make his own decision about what he ought to do. That’s all I can say.”
Flaherty’s tears seem to have been the most eloquent comment that this government could bring itself to make. I think the prime minister ought to have spoken about this, since he is supposed to be leading the country and we needed leadership this week.
We know that the frosty Harper can talk about difficult personal issues, because in 2009, after Conservative MP Dave Batters took his life, Harper eulogized him, speaking movingly about depression. But the prime minister hasn’t said a word about Ford.
The PMO’s spinners must have noticed that Ford’s troubles took the spotlight off the prime minister during the Senate scandal, and it may have seemed wiser to stay out of a quickly changing, nightmarish story about a political ally, but I think Harper’s silence also points to a limit in his message about crime.
The Conservatives’ tough-on-crime message, delivered at every opportunity, is a message about the criminal as other, like the late Anthony Smith and the other guys in hoodies in that photo of Ford outside a crack house. They are evildoers who need to be punished.
The Tories, like Ford himself, oppose supervised injection sites for drug users, which save lives and reduce crime. They give voters what they want: the emotional satisfaction of punishing wrongdoers.
This government has imposed mandatory minimum sentences across the board, not just on violent criminals but also on pot growers.
It sounds tough, but taking away discretion from judges costs us more, does nothing to make us safer and leads to injustices.
Consider the case of Leroy Smickle, a gainfully employed 27-year-old with no criminal record who in 2009 had the bad luck to be caught posing with a loaded handgun for a Facebook profile pic, and found himself looking at three years in prison. Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy ruled that the sentence would be “fundamentally unfair,” and declared the minimum unconstitutional. The Crown appealed, demanding that he serve his three years.
Flaherty shed tears for the Fords because he knows them and knows they’re suffering, because whatever the tawdry facts of the case, he feels for them.
We should show as much compassion for Leroy Smickle and his family.