Posts from our progressive community

Many politically active people in BC are grieving right now and there is much angst and blame being laid.  I personally have experienced this process and will be for some time to come, well, probably for the rest of my life.

 

I’m not sure which stage I’m in today yet, but I have . . . → Read More: Grief, Blame and Anger

If you've spent any time in grizzly territory, chances are you have wondered at some point what it might be like if you found yourself face to face with the big brown bear.  Wonder no more.

Crews filming The Great Bear StakeOut had a Go-Pro camera attached to a rock, hoping to catch some grizzly video.   The bear, and her cub, thought it looked tasty.   So here, for your weekend amusement, is what you never, ever want to see in person.



Now it's been a real bitch of a week and so I think I'll take my leave.  Have a great holiday weekend everyone.  Next week is bound to be better.

It's official.  The United States of America is a permanent warfare state.   Perhaps now the country should adopt the flag Mark Twain designed for this very occasion. 

At a Senate hearing this week, Michael Sheehan, assistant secretary of defense for special operations, testified that the American war on al Qaeda will go on for at least another 10 to 20-years, minimum.  That pretty much is what you call the "foreseeable future" and that then marks the explicit recognition of America as the world's one and only permanent warfare state.

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted "disposition matrix", a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be "disposed of": indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

This happily serves America's healthiest industry, its military/industrial/commercial warfighting complex.   This has to be music to their ears with the knowledge that al Qaeda-type groups will form a lovely bridge while they're waiting for a more direct and lucrative confrontation engagement with China.

...military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". (Read more on Bacevich's warning on this blog here, and here, and here.) Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

Greenwald sums it up perfectly.  Heed his warning and those of Bacevich linked above because Canada is going to get sucked into this, especially on China.


It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

...the "war on terror" cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of "terrorism"), and (2) the nation's most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. 

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin.


Then there are the threats to Americans' security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as "A Nation at War" and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans 


And then there's the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture. 

Greenwald, Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, Chomsky and many others have microscopically dissected this madness and revealed it to be a self-fulfilling prophesy not of conflict and triumph but of self-inflicted defeat, democratic collapse and economic ruin (except for the few running this fiendish plan).  This is also where fascism is birthed and nurtured and muscled.   We have to stop believing this couldn't happen to us.  It already is.

In today's Guardian, another look at the lengths the Harper regime goes to crush dissent, especially informed dissent, in Canada.  Another shameful black mark on Canada's international reputation, courtesy of our prime ministerial bully and his thuggish minions.

This story is about enviro-artist Franke James and how she was targeted by the Harper machine - even as far away as Croatia - because of her views on climate change and outspoken opposition to the Tar Sands.


I won't go through the disgusting details.   Follow the link if you want to read it for yourself.

There just seems to be no bottom to this cesspool. Now the Puffster is said to have tried to subvert the CRTC hearing so that the money-losing Sun News gets its wish to be carried on basic cable.

You can watch the video here.

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It's not just the government that owes a duty to the public, the opposition also owes a solemn duty to the public.  That's the lesson that's inescapable for the past couple of federal elections and this week's devastating electoral debacle here in British Columbia.

When you run in an election, you're obviously in it to win.   But, if you don't make it, you're seeking to serve as the opposition.  It's not some consolation prize, your reward for losing, it's that other job you were seeking, just in case. You're promising to serve the public as a foil to government, to work on policy and organization and to rally in time for the next election to give the incumbents the greatest challenge possible.   You have to be a legitimate contender.  It's your job to make yourself a better choice for the electorate and you've got to be willing to fight because politics is a blood sport and your opponent knows it.

Looking back on the opposition under Stephane Dion or Michael Ignatieff, the stomach doesn't churn but merely curdles.   Both of them were hapless but, of the two, Dion at least worked the job.

That Ignatieff was a mere poseur was evident when, at the onset of the great global collapse of 2008 and Harper, in desperation, shut down Parliament, Iggy took it as an extended holiday and went home to finish a book about his mother's family, the Grants.   Canada faced a moment of crisis, the minority government was on the ropes, and Ignatieff took a nap.


The last two provincial NDP leaders in British Columbia, Carole James and Adrian Dix, were also simply wrong for the job.  James was arrogant and high-handed and generally disliked by the public.  Dix was innofensive but, more than anything else, ineffective bordering on hapless.   For British Columbians looking to get rid of a horribly corrupt, scandal-riddled and dishonest government,  James and Dix were, like Dion and Ignatieff, stomach curdlers.

When you look at your best hope, your opposition leader, and your heart sinks and you ask, "that's it?" you've got a problem.

You don't have to like them to know the type you need, the operators.   People like Chretien, Layton even Preston Manning, political scrappers every one.   Some times it's good to look for people who show up in Ottawa with a little bit of blood already under their fingernails.   That would be a reasonably apt description of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien or any of their bunch.


We can write volumes of our experience in how to do opposition wrong and the price paid for it.   Maybe it's time we realized how to do the job right because things aren't going to change for the better until we do.

So we're going to let the RCMP get to the bottom of this senate expense scandal that now extends straight to the top of the Prime Minister's Office.

I wish that gave me hope.  It doesn't.

Ever since former and subsequently disgraced Commissioner Zaccardelli conjured up notions in mid-election of a phantom investigation that helped Steve Harper sweep the Martin government out of power, the RCMP appeared decidedly bent.

That worsened when Harper appointed the first civilian Commissioner of the force, a veteran Tory operative, Bill Elliott, who made a complete hash of the job until he too had to go.

From Zac to Elliott, we come to today's Commish, Bob Paulson who was supposedly put in charge to clean up the force - just like his predecessors.   It will be Paulson's RCMP that gets to the bottom of the current scandal.  At this point it's time for a collective, "oh dear."

Paulson, you see, served notice that the RCMP was and remains the Royal Conservative Mounted Police.   He did this by circulating a directive to his top officers putting them on notice that just like the Harper armed forces and the Harper public service, the Harper national police agency is to consider itself sequestered.

In an email dated March 22 from Paulson to more than 50 chief superintendents, assistant commissioners and deputy commissioners, the commissioner said that meetings or lunches with parliamentarians "can have unintended and/or negative consequences for the organization and the government. Therefore, should you or your staff receive such requests, I am directing that you advise my office and the chief strategic policy and planning officer."

And we're supposed to trust this outfit - that won't let even its senior officers communicate freely with our elected representatives lest that have "negative consequences" for the Harper government - to get to the bottom of this scandal?   With a predisposition like this, I don't think so.

Did anyone else feel that? (1) Trashy, Ottawa, Ontario

Assorted content to end your week.

- Paul Krugman draws a much-needed connection between austerity politics and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine:
What Smith didn’t note, somewhat surprisingly, is that his argument is very close to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, with its argument that elites systematically exploit disasters to push through neoliberal policies even if these policies are essentially irrelevant to the sources of disaster. I have to admit that I was predisposed to dislike Klein’s book when it came out, probably out of professional turf-defending and whatever — but her thesis really helps explain a lot about what’s going on in Europe in particular.

And the lineage goes back even further. Two and a half years ago Mike Konczal reminded us of a classic 1943 (!) essay by Michal Kalecki, who suggested that business interests hate Keynesian economics because they fear that it might work — and in so doing mean that politicians would no longer have to abase themselves before businessmen in the name of preserving confidence. This is pretty close to the argument that we must have austerity, because stimulus might remove the incentive for structural reform that, you guessed it, gives businesses the confidence they need before deigning to produce recovery.

And sure enough, in my inbox this morning I see a piece more or less deploring the early signs of success for Abenomics: Abenomics is working — but it had better not work too well. Because if it works, how will we get structural reform?

So one way to see the drive for austerity is as an application of a sort of reverse Hippocratic oath: “First, do nothing to mitigate harm”. For the people must suffer if neoliberal reforms are to prosper.- Meanwhile, Esther Hsieh writes that Norway's rejection of laissez-faire economics has resulted in the most productive economy on the planet - with social support for skilled workers (such as universal child care) and income equality serving as key drivers of that economic success. And the Canadian Institute for Health Information observes that universal public health care serves as an important form of income equalization in Canada.

- Michael Byers and Purple Library Guy each offer an assessment of the lessons to be drawn from British Columbia's election results. And Alison reminds us what Christy Clark has sounded like when she hasn't been trying to neutralize her party's penchant for environmental destruction.

- Finally, Thomas Walkom recognizes that the problems with Canada's Senate go far beyond Mike Duffy. And Michael Harris notes that the scandal surrounding Duffy includes Stephen Harper and his inner circle (no matter how much they scramble to escape accountability now):
But we do not live in a better world, we live in this one. Stephen Harper’s inclination is to make up the rules as he goes along. I for one do not see this as loyalty to his minions, but rather as a show of power. When, for example, the ethics commissioner has caught a cabinet minister or two in a breach of the rules, the PM has been known to simply dismiss the finding. The cases of Christian Paradis and Jim Flaherty come to mind.
So Harper’s initial instinct was to save Duffy. He began that process by taking the public on a mind-numbing sojourn into the rules and regulations of the Senate. He used the escape clause of the Deloitte audit, that by Senate definition, knowing where you live is a brain-twister. And he has never had a problem dismissing the ethical part of any problem if it collided with his agenda. Look what he did to Kevin Page for the high crime of outing the PM’s lie over the cost of the F-35s.
But dry-cleaning Duffy quickly turned into a sticky proposition. For one thing, this one has gone right up the nose of the public and people are gagging. And then there are those two mutually exclusive stories about how the senator’s debts were paid off....One enduring question is this: Why did Nigel Wright bail out Mike Duffy before the sharp pencil boys from Deloitte had even finished their damning audit?
But there is an even bigger issue. If Stephen Harper doesn’t see anything wrong with his chief of staff making a $90,000 gift to a sitting Conservative senator engulfed in scandal, is there anything he wouldn’t endorse for partisan gain?

In his column this morning, Thomas Walkom suggests that Mike Duffy's current scandal-plagued problems are representative of much deeper ones in the Senate, namely that our much-cossetted members of that 'chamber of sober second thought' are appointed, not because of their expertise (many of them have none), not because of intimate knowledge of a particular province (Duffy has none, having lived in Ottawa for over 30 years and not even legally qualified to represent P.E.I.), but because the Senate has become, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, a repository of party strategists and bagmen where they can continue their partisan wizardry.

No doubt Walkom is correct as far as he goes. But the above, it seems to me, are simply symptomatic of two much deeper problems in public life, the widespread disengagement of our citizens, about which I have written before, and the shocking dearth of integrity in those who achieve high office.

For example, all of the events surrounding the Duffy porkbarreling have, quite rightly, provoked widespread outrage. However, when the abuses and betrayals of the public trust are not so obvious or so sensational, far too many citizens just shrug their shoulders and say that politics doesn't interest them. This marked indifference is precisely what has permitted, even encouraged, the depradatory environmental, science, economic and social policies the Harper regime has so avidly embraced and promoted. It is this indifference that enabled Harper to prorogue Parliament twice. It is this indifference that enabled, without even a hint of contrition, the excesses of Treasury Board President Tony 'gazeebo' Clement. I could go on and on.

A sleeping public enables, even encourages the unethical, the unprincipled, those for whom integrity is an alien concept, to prey upon and erode the public good.

I have always tried to live my life with principle and integrity, as do so many others throughout the world. Because we inhabit a world requiring adaptation and compromise, integrity and principle are ideals toward which we strive, providing, as they do, a moral compass and the recognition that the solely material and secular things of this world often come with a price too high to pay.

I will close this post with a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a man who learned that hard truth far too late, recognizing, as the end of his life approaches, that he has sacrificed everything of enduring value in his lust for power and pomp:


My way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

-- Act v, Sc. 3




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Two of Stephen Harper's senate appointments have been shoved out of the Conservative caucus. The Senate was their reward for doing the Prime Minister's dirty work. But one of life's axioms is that what goes around comes around.

Patrick Brazeau helped Stephen Harper kill the Kelowna Accord. It was Brazeau, the deputy national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, who supported Harper during the 2006 election. The Assembly of First Nations backed Paul Martin and the Accord. Michael Harris writes:

It was the age-old battle over reserve and non-reserve aboriginals and the differing treatment they receive from the federal government. Harper got his first minority government in 2006 in part because Brazeau, then CAP’s deputy-national chief, helped kill the Kelowna Accord. Two years later, he was in the Senate.
Mike Duffy also performed an essential service for Harper during the 2008 election. Lawrence Martin reminds his readers that:

Duffy has been a favourite of the PM’s. He was viewed as having done the Conservatives a great favour in the 2008 election. At the end of the campaign, when momentum could have tilted either way, Liberal leader Stephane Dion stumbled in responding to a CTV question he couldn’t understand. The CTV reporter promised Dion he wouldn’t run the clip — but Duffy turned around and made a major story of it. The Conservatives later acknowledged it really swung votes their way in the final days. It wasn’t much later that Duffy was named a senator.
Stephen Harper would not be where he is today without the assistance of Brazeau and Duffy. But henchmen come with their own baggage. Mr. Harper operates on the assumption that he exercises complete control over his minions. The problem is that minions eventually screw up. And men like Brazeau and Duffy screw up big time.

Henchmen are their own curse.

He has been drunk as a skunk in public.

He has given women and children the finger.

He is a crass, vulgar bigot, and the worst Mayor Toronto has ever known.

Now let Rob Ford explain this one. 

A cellphone video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine is being shopped around Toronto by a group of Somali men involved in the drug trade.
Read more »

Well he's finally been kicked out of Con caucus.

Senator Mike Duffy has resigned from the Conservative caucus and will sit as an Independent amid controversy over his living and travel expense claims.

Even as the scandals keep on coming.

Sen. Mike Duffy attempted to influence the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s upcoming decision involving the right-leaning Sun News Network, a source has told CTV News.

But now at last we can understand why the boys in the PMO were so desperate to try to make the problem go away.
Read more »

Mike Duffy has departed the Conservative caucus.

"...the Prime Minister’s Office appears to have been blindsided by Duffy’s claims that he had arranged his own loan with Royal Bank of Canada to cover the repayment.

“There are a growing number of questions about Mr. Duffy’s conduct that don’t have answers. Mr. Duffy will have to answer as an independent senator,” a government official said Thursday night.
Duffy’s claim that he had secured a bank loan was a complete surprise to senior government officials and appears to have sparked his departure from the Conservative caucus.
Senator Marjory LeBreton, the government house leader in the Senate, confirmed he was out of caucus.

“Senator Duffy has informed me that he has resigned from caucus to sit as an independent senator,” LeBreton said in a statement.

Duffy said in a statement the controversy around his repayment had become a “significant distraction to my caucus colleagues, and to the government.”

And then this curious statement from senator Mike who refused to cooperate with auditors, refused to hand over bank statements and other records, and claims to have been ordered by the Prime Minister's Office to dummy up:

“Throughout this entire situation I have sought only to do the right thing. I look forward to all relevant facts being made clear in due course, at which point I am hopeful I will be able to rejoin the Conservative caucus,” he said. 

Mike, the auditors were asking you to make the "relevant facts" clear and you wanted no part of it.   You gave them the slip.   Sorry, Duff, but you've been marooned.

After reading Dawg's excellent piece about the man who was appointed by the Harper Cons as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, all I can say is, "Heck of a job, Danny!"

In March 2012, Christy Clark gave the opening remarks to the Ottawa Manning Centre Networking Conference, the yearly "conservative family reunion".

She was introduced by her then chief of staff, former senior Harper advisor, Enbridge lobbyist, and Alberta 'firewall manifesto' signatory Ken Boessenkool, who was her very first campaign manager back in 2010. 
"We have a duty to Canada" to easy the flow of products to Asia, she told her audience at the Manning Centre [a year ago]. "We support pipelines in British Columbia." BC Conservative leader John Cummins was not invited.
Manning has in the past said he doesn’t support the political ambitions of Cummins, who was elected as a Reformer with Manning in the 1993 election, because vote-splitting on the centre-right always makes it easier for the NDP to assume power.One-time Harper government cabinet minister, Jay Hill, also said Friday he’s backing Clark’s leadership. “I’ll do whatever I can to support her and support the B.C. Liberals."
Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and President of the Manning Centre, is also a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.Jay Hill was in charge of the Cons 200 page dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt and stonewall parliamentary committees back in 2007.
Also helping Christy's campaign was Chuck Strahl, former BC Reform and Con MP, now chair of the Manning Centre and chair of CSIS watchdog the Security Intelligence Review Committee since last June, at which time he had to give up working for Christy.

The only pollster to accurately predict Tuesday's election result was Christy's principal secretary and ADM in charge of "Intergovernmental Relations" till a year ago and now on contract to Christy, former Reform and Republican policy advisor Dimitri Pantazopoulos.

Premier’s Office targeted crucial election ridings for the B.C. Liberals — all on government time and your dime
"Premier Christy Clark’s former principal secretary, Dimitri Pantazopolous, and former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad were among those involved in a comprehensive strategy that used government staff and resources to try to win swing ridings for the BC Liberals ...  serious misconduct by government employees and misuse of government funds.  “Dimitri was the driving force behind the swing teams, from its inception through to the operational phase."Pantazoploulos also runs the Manning Centre Municipal Governance Project and is mentioned by Calgary developer Cal Wenzel in the now infamous cel vid about buying the campaigns of developer-friendly municipal candidates in order to defeat Calgary Mayor Nenshi.


On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - former Christy chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign. 














and a quick tweet from Rob Ford's chief of staff Mark Towhey:











You do remember Nick Kouvalis from Campaign Research,  don't you ? 

In addition to being Rob Ford's election architect, Kouvalis is a regular speaker at ... wait for it ... the Manning Centre yearly bunfest.

Fun fact :  Founding directors of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy :

• Nigel Wright, Harper's chief of staff, currently in the news for cutting Con senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal cheque to cover money the Duffster owed to the Senate for inappropriately claimed living expenses for the past four years while Duffy was being investigated for it,  and 
• Gwyn Morgan, Chairman of the Board of SNC Lavalin til May 2 this year, the company being investigated for fraud in four countries on three continents, was Steve's choice for heading up his brand new Accountability commission in 2006.

.

…are readying the frying pan, I suspect. Michael Den Tandt has never been one of my favourite scribes, but his column on the whole mess is frankly masterful. Go read it.... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Forty-Nine to One is not Fifty-Fifty.   Climate change denialists like to spread it on thick and claim there's some fierce debate over the reality of anthropogenic global warming and there are a good many disinformed, misinformed and simply delusional types who think there is no consensus and it's a toss up.

That's simply garbage served up by people who manufacture garbage for people willing to consume garbage.

Yet another peer-reviewed study into the great body of climate change research studies finds 97.1% endorse the consensus view while a miserably underwhelming 1.9% reject the consensus.

That is the finding of a University of Queensland-led study that surveyed the abstracts of almost 12,000 scientific papers from 1991-2011 and claims to be the largest peer-reviewed study of its kind.
 The report's lead author, John Cook, a fellow at the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute and founder of the website skepticalscience.com, said the scientific consensus was overwhelming, growing and had been around since the early 1990s.
  He said that while the number of papers rejecting the consensus was "vanishingly small", his research suggested the public was under the impression the debate was split 50-50.

"When people think scientists agree, they are more likely to support a carbon tax or general climate action," he said.

"But if they think scientists are still arguing about it, they don't want to do anything about it." Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are about 400 parts per million and rising – the highest in more than 3 million years.

Mr Cook said scientists now found less need to state their position on climate change in abstracts summarising their papers, "just as geographers find no reason to remind readers that the earth is round".

Science is a discipline that is not quick to embrace consensus which is one reason even phenomenon such as gravity are still treated as theories.  Therefore, when you hit 97% agreement, you truly are ringing all the bells.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, the National Post’s Matt Gurney has a useful summary of Mike Duffy’s corrupt antics in the Senate, up to and including the decision by the Prime Minister’s Office to bail out Duffy with $90,000 in cash from Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, which Duffy then used to pay back his $90,000 in ill-gotten gains bilked from the taxpayer via fraudulent expense claims. At the time, the PMO praised Duffy for “voluntarily” paying back the money. It now turns out there was nothing less than a conspiracy to rescue Duffy from having to make good on the expense accounts, and then to cover up the truth.

It’s illegal for Duffy to accept these sorts of payments in connection with his job as a Senator, so Gurney’s colleague, Andrew Coyne, is probably a little off base when he suggests that the matter wouldn’t have been nearly so awful if Duffy had disclosed the payment when it was made. In any event, I do thoroughly endorse the calls from both Coyne and Gurney (and many, many others) for Duffy to resign.

But there’s a broader observation to be made here, and I’m going to draw on another recent and scandalous episode in order to make it: where the hell has Stephen Harper’s admittedly self-interested sense of ethics gone?

Some of you will be scoffing that he never had one. This isn’t entirely true. Back when Harper was Leader of the Opposition, he believed sincerely in accountable and transparent government — or, more to the point, he believed that talking points about Liberal corruption, of which there was plenty to go around, played well with voters. And after getting elected, too, he passed some serious reforms to the ethics, lobbying, electoral finance, and other laws, even if those reforms have since been criticized for being full of loopholes so big you could drive a truck through them. And ministers could get dismissed for gross indiscretion from time to time, although those times have gotten noticeably fewer and some of the offenders (I’m looking at you, Max Bernier) have been pardoned and welcomed back into the fold.

Contrast that Harper with the Harper of this year. The Harper of this year isn’t exactly open about the corruption of his government, but he makes only slight attempts to hide it, and when caught out, he’s thoroughly unapologetic. When Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue was caught with his hand in a rather large cookie jar, the PMO defended him. When it turned out that they couldn’t simply brazen away massive violations of the electoral finance laws, Penashue stepped down, but only to run in the resulting by-election with a public promise from other Cabinet ministers that he would be reinstated into Cabinet following his re-election, plus some rather appalling guff of his own about he had deliberately (ab)used his Cabinet position by sabotaging government projects elsewhere in the country in order to gather pork for his own riding.

And now Mike Duffy. Duffy, as has been known for some months now, collected $90,000 in expenses for living in his house in Ottawa — a house he already owned and lived in when he was made a Senator, and hasn’t left since — on the dubious pretext that his vacation cabin on PEI was actually his “primary residence.” This declaration was made despite the fact that Duffy pays income taxes to Ontario, has an Ontario health care, and is registered to vote in Ontario; he subsequently claimed that he had made an error when filling out the form. A couple of months ago, while an audit of Duffy’s books was underway, he suddenly announced that he was going to repay the $90,000 in a spirit of generosity. At the time, we put it up to the Conservatives trying to put away the story before it got out of control.

Which was right, in a sense, but also wrong, in a sense. We now know, courtesy of some convenient press leaks, that Duffy worked out a deal with the Prime Minister’s Office. Under the terms of this deal, he “stayed silent” during the investigation — silent about what, we still don’t know — and, in exchange, he received a $90,000 “gift” from Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright, which he used to repay his fraudulent expense claims. So Duffy didn’t actually lose a cent by way of punishment. The Conservatives are adamant that Wright used his own money, not taxpayers’ or the party’s, for this incredibly seedy transaction.

Now, first of all, this seems like a useful time to point out that it’s simply untrue to say that “all politicians are the same.” Chretien’s Liberals, corrupt as they certainly were, were never charged with national electoral money laundering. When ministers were implicated in bilking the public, they were shipped off to Europe as ambassadors — which is bad enough, in its own way, but not nearly as bad as endorsing them as by-election candidates (a la Penashue) or promoting them to the Treasury Board (a la Tony Clement, whose proven exploits already dwarf the Sponsorship Scandal in its size). It’s hard to imagine Chretien not only declining to oust from his party a Senator found guilty of defrauding the taxpayer, but bailing him out of trouble with $90,000. Mulroney might have done it, but only if the cash had been stuffed into a brown envelope and exchanged in a New York hotel room.

As I wrote already, some readers will no doubt be already scrolling down to the comment section to interject that Harper was corrupt all along. I don’t contest this. There was, for instance, Harper’s attempt to bribe terminally-ill independent MP Chuck Cadman with a $1 million life insurance policy in exchange for a vote against the Liberal budget. The difference is, Harper used to angrily deny such allegations, and engage in ludicrously heavyhanded censorship tactics to suppress them — in the Cadman case, he sued the Liberals for libel and demanded $3.5 million in compensation, although the suit was later quietly dropped, presumably because the allegations were true.

The detectable (but gradual) difference is that after making some cursory efforts at denial, the Harper Conservatives no longer make serious attempts to defend their claims to integrity or accountability. During the Penashue by-election, it was openly claimed — unsuccessfully — by the Conservative Party that it would reward Labrador for supporting Penashue by putting him back in Cabinet and directing a steady stream of government investments into the riding. It was also indicated that if they declined to support Penashue, they would be punished: federal funding for the riding would dry up overnight. Given that Penashue had openly admitted to massive violations of the electoral laws in 2011, it’s amazing that he would have been allowed to run under the Conservative banner again in the first place.

The Duffy scandal didn’t have to be a scandal. The Liberals turfed their own cheating Senator, Mac Harb, long ago, even though he was guilty of much less than Duffy. Yet to date, Harper and the Prime Minister’s Office have not repudiated Duffy. Instead, they bought him out, and now, they have the temerity to claim — in obvious disregard of the ethics code — that the huge payment made to Duffy, much more than most of us make in a year, is actually a sign of how generous and friendly the Harper government is. It’s stunning, callous, and pathetic.

But it’s calculated. We have to assume it’s calculated. Despite their frequent missteps, the Harper government lives by tactics, not grand strategic vision. That is why they micromanage. That is why it’s hard to imagine Harper wouldn’t know about the payment to Duffy and even have approved it (without any semblance of a paper trail, of course). And that is why it’s worth asking what was going through their heads at the time that they judged the political risks of secretly funneling money to a corrupt senator were less than the political risks of simply firing Duffy at the outset and washing their hands of the whole thing, the way they did when another Harper appointee to the Senate, Patrick Brazeau, was recently charged with sexual assault.

On its face, this sort of calculation seems absurd. Harper himself would have had a field day with the issue if the Liberals had done anything remotely like it during their dying days. The conclusion must surely be that they believe the political fallout from being thoroughly implicated in corruption is actually negligible.

Once again, that may seem absurd on its face, but I’m not so sure. 40% of Canadians won’t vote anyways, so it doesn’t really matter what they think, although probably it’s something on the order of “don’t know, don’t care.” Of those who do vote, it’s now quite apparent, after six years of Harper rule, that at least 60% will never vote for the Conservatives anyways. The PMO can afford to write off these voters, because experience has amply demonstrated that you can win a majority government without them. Lots of these people are no doubt very angry about the Duffy scandal, but they weren’t going to vote for the Conservatives anyways, and Harper knows this.

Of the remaining group, the majority — let’s say at least 30% — will vote for the Conservatives anyways, because they consider themselves right-wing to the core, even though there’s no indication that the Harper Conservatives have more than a passive interest in any plausibly “conservative” political agenda. This is actually a surprisingly small percentage of our population that consider themselves too staunchly conservative to vote for any party that doesn’t label itself as conservative — adjusting for the mass of non-voters, less than one in five is a staunch conservative loyalist.

Despite current polling levels, I am quite confident that this represents basically a lower bound and I will stand by my judgement. Even in 1993, when the Progressive Conservatives imploded in spectacular fashion, they still captured 16% of the popular vote, and the Reform Party took another 19%. Plus, voter turnout was higher. Adjusting for that, about 25% of Canadians voted for an openly right-wing party in 1993, which is actually higher than the percentage that voted for the Conservatives in 2011. Of course thinking readers will want to also adjust for the fact that the PCs were not as right-wing in 1993 as they are now, and that by 1993 the Liberals were already a right-wing party in their basic policy outlook if not in their rhetoric.

So that leaves a total of about one in twenty Canadians who will vote for somebody and might vote Conservative but could plausibly be talked out of it. Of this already very small group, only a minority will (a) watch the news regularly, (b) read subtly enough to realize that this sort of graft would probably not be committed by other political parties, (c) put a high enough priority on government accountability that a scandal like Mike Duffy’s, or Tony Clement’s, or Peter Penashue’s, would cause them to change their vote, and (d) will receive such a strong impression from scandals like these that it will still influence their voting intentions two years down the road.

Now, it could be that the cumulative weight of successive scandals will end up costing the Conservatives dearly, the way it did for the Liberals, and the way it did for the PCs. I am not convinced of this, however. Mulroney’s extravagances were so extreme that it sparked the rise of a new right-wing party, whereas today, the vast majority of Conservatives show no interest in leaving Harper, at least on the mere grounds of routine lawbreaking, fiscal incompetence, or heavy-handed secrecy and censorship. The Liberals were buried by a full-court press by the conservative media, whereas today the media can generally be counted on to act as cheerleaders for right-of-centre parties, regardless of their indiscretions. The Globe & Mail is may be already working on the first drafts of their 2015 endorsement of Stephen Harper. At the time, people of all political parties and at all newspapers agreed that the government was subject to the rule of law. Sadly, that no longer appears to be the case.

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