Northern Reflections

Stephen Harper says he knew nothing about Nigel's Wright's cheque to Mike Duffy. That's probably true. But Harper's plea of ignorance does not preclude his giving Wright instructions to make Duffy an offer he couldn't refuse.

Harper learned long ago that, like any good don, he had to insulate himself from his operatives. It's all part of what Leo Strauss called "the noble lie." Don Lenihan writes that the concept is diametrically opposed to the populism which was the bedrock of the old Reform Party:

While the new party appropriated the language of accountability from the old Reform Party, it did not embrace the values and culture on which it was based. The reasons take us back to Stephen Harper’s break with Reform in 1997. The rupture was caused by tensions between Preston Manning’s populism and Harper’s commitment to conservative principles.
Harper has always been a Straussian:

In Strauss’ view, successful democracies are led by an elite group which can make the right decisions for the public, even though these will often conflict with what the public would expect or accept. Enlightened leaders bridge this gap by telling the public a story it can accept — what Strauss called a “noble lie.”

The unavoidable conclusion from the last few weeks is that the culture in the PMO is decidedly Straussian rather than Reformist, elitist rather than populist. Indeed, the Conservatives appear to have their own well-crafted version of the noble lie. It rests on the claim they remain true to their Reform roots, especially the commitments to transparency and accountability.

In reality, the communications machine crafts the government’s messages, and then foot soldiers like [Michelle] Rempel are called on to deliver it. Under Harper, this has become an elaborate system of governance. The party uses sophisticated data systems and research to tailor its messages to the public’s mood. Voters are told what the government wants them to hear and the gap between what is said inside and outside the PMO is protected by a wall of secrecy.
And now word has gone out that omerta will be strictly enforced. We can only hope that there are members of the Conservative Party willing to stand up to The Don.

Yesterday Stephen Harper held a pep rally and beat it out of town. He gave no answers. He thinks it will go away. But, as Lawrence Martin wrote yesterday in the Globe and Mail, the integrity issue is reaching a critical mass. It's not about Mike Duffy or Nigel Wright anymore. It's about Stephen Harper himself, for the government and the man are one:

Mr. Harper and his band might be able to make people forget about the Senate scandal, and other affronts to the integrity of the system. But there’s simply too much out there for this government to escape the reckoning – a dire one.
Yet the Harperites still think they can avoid that reckoning:

It’s remarkable what this government thinks it can get away with. The Canadian Press is reporting that Team Harper is buying ads on the taxpayer dime to promote a job grant program that doesn’t yet exist. The ads began running in prime-time slots this week. Peter Van Loan, the government House Leader, described the Canada Jobs Grant program as a “proposal that needs to be fleshed out and developed fully.” Thus far, it hasn’t even got the approval of the provinces. Yet, our money is being used to advertise it.

Last week, The Globe and Mail revealed the Conservatives withheld tens of thousands of documents it was obligated to disclose as part of a human-rights case in which it’s accused of discriminating against indigenous children. Now, according to The Globe, the government is using its failure to hand over the files to try to get the proceedings put on hold.

We’ve learned the Tories can’t account for $3-billion from the security and anti-terrorism budget. Before this, before their attacks ads, we saw the Speaker of the Commons, himself a Tory, issuing a ruling that, in effect, repudiated Mr. Harper’s gagging of his own MPs. One wonders where Nigel Wright was on some of these abuses. Maybe he tried to do something but was rebuffed.
Three times before, when Harper's arrogance threatened to torpedo his government, he created a diversion. In 2008, when he ended public funding for political parties, he prorogued Parliament and came back with a stimulus program which he is still advertising today. In 2009, when he refused to hand over documents concerning the detention of Afghan prisoners, he again prorogued Parliament. In 2011, when Parliament found his government in contempt, he raised the bogeyman of a "separatist coalition" and scared enough Canadians to win a majority.

This time the bogeyman is in his office. And it is real. Harper will probably try to shut things down again. But Canadians have reached their Howard Beale moment.

Beginning with his caucus meeting today, Stephen Harper will try to wash his hands of The Duffy Matter. But, Andrew Coyne writes in The National Post, this stain will not wash away. To begin with, Nigel Wright's claim that his personal cheque was charity to a friend in need simply does not wash:

It is impossible to believe that Nigel Wright, a man with two law degrees and substantial experience of both politics and business, could have been unaware of the dangers — political and legal, to his party and to himself — involved in such a transaction. Whether in fact it broke any laws, it crosses all sorts of ethical red lines that, as a matter of prudence if nothing else, anyone with any sense would wish to avoid.

Yet, if we are to believe the (latest) story we are being told, in “a moment of weakness,” Wright gave in to Duffy’s pleas — either out of pity for his impoverished state or a desire to spare the taxpayer or both — and wrote him a personal cheque for $90,000. The story, on its own, is preposterous. There is no evidence Duffy was hard up for money, and if he were, there were a dozen other, better, simpler remedies than having Wright pay him out of his own funds.
But, even more than that, there is the Harper government's own record -- beginning with reports that the late Chuck Cadman was offered a one million dollar insurance policy in exchange for his vote to bring down the Martin government. The pattern was set long ago:

People who have made the kinds of compromises, moral and otherwise, that this government has made over the years; who have learned to justify to themselves the kinds of behaviour that are this government’s signature; whose first instinct in this, as in previous episodes, is not to clap their hands to their faces crying “my God, what have we become?” but to think of every possible way to spin and dissemble their way out of it; who have grown so spectacularly deluded as to publicly suggest, in the words of Calgary Centre MP Joan Crockatt, that the current wave of resignations shows how high their ethical standards are — such people are not capable of altering course in the way suggested. That is not who they are.
Who they are has been obvious from the very beginning. From the Cadman Affair, to David Emerson crossing the floor, to the Duffy Matter -- there is nothing new here. What is surprising is that they have gotten away with it for so long.

In an attempt to put Nigel Wright's resignation in perspective, Paul Wells returns to a passage he and John Geddes wrote two years ago:

Someone who was there paraphrased Harper’s message to his ministers at his first cabinet meeting in 2006: “I am the kingpin. So whatever you do around me, you have to know that I am sacrosanct.” Harper was telling his ministers that they were expendable but that he wasn’t. If they had to go so that his credibility and his ability to get things done were protected, so be it.It wasn’t personal,” this source said. “It was his office.”
If you work for Stephen Harper you're expected to take the blame. That's what Nigel Wright did yesterday. The talking points will be: "This was Nigel's mistake. He paid the price. Case closed."

But this is Stephen Harper. We know the man well enough by now to understand that the $90.000 cheque was not just Wright's idea. His statement yesterday hints that there was more going on behind the scenes:

“I did not advise the Prime Minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy’s expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact.”
Harper didn't know the means. He didn't want to know. But who hatched the plan? And why? Surely the answer must have something to do with information Harper wants to bury. That's not surprising. Stephen Harper works hard to make sure information he does not approve goes down the memory hole. Wells writes:

It’s really sweet that Stephen Harper believes he cannot win a fair fight of full information in the light of day, but as an operating principle it is getting tired. The desire to bring every debate to a screaming halt rather than engage the debate is one of this prime minister’s two or three most obvious defining characteristics. It’s obvious even where scandal is not involved. As one example among many, the Supreme Court reference on Senate reform this autumn will hear three days of public arguments the Harper government did everything to avoid, first by stalling for years on the very notion of a reference, and then by asking the Court, pathetically, to bypass public argument and go straight to delivering an opinion.

We will see more of that in the days ahead. It is easy to predict, based on long observation of this prime minister, that any question about what this government did, what this prime minister’s Senate appointees did, how Harper’s office handled it, and what will be done to fix these attitudes in the future will be answered with, “Nigel Wright gave up his job. Isn’t that enough? It’s time to move on.”
Wright's resignation is supposed to put an end to the matter. It's all very Nixonian. But, as that president discovered, the cover up is worse than the crime.

Last week, Toronto Star columnist Rick Salutin compared Joe Oliver to Willy Loman, the woefully misguided drummer in Arthur Miller's play, Death of A Salesman. In Canada's ongoing pipeline saga, Salutin wrote:

Resources Minister Joe Oliver is the Willy Loman of this drama, without Willy’s panache. His attacks on climate scientist James Hansen or Al Gore are ludicrous; those two lack any personal, financial interest for undermining Canadian oil; their sole motive, wrong-headed or not, is saving the planet. Weak sales strategy, minister.
Willy was not much of a salesman. But he was a legend in his own mind. And his inability to see who he was -- and the harm he caused -- was at the heart of Miller's tragedy. The Harper government's insistence -- from the beginning, and again last week at the Council on Foreign Relations -- that the Keystone Pipeline is a "no brainer"  has generated a continent wide backlash. On Friday, Rick Smith -- the Executive Director of the Broadbent Institute -- wrote, also in the Star:

Simply put, Big Oil is reaping what it sowed. In a country where due process is respected, where people want to have their say, the heavy-handedness and arrogance of oil companies and the Harper government turned a previously obscure environmental issue (I mean, who really paid any attention to pipelines up until the last year and a half?) into a much more potent concern regarding the erosion of democracy and fairness.
Like Willy, the Harperites believe they can sell anybody anything. But the truth is that they -- like Willy --  are pathetic salesmen. Stephen Harper continues to insist, like Willy's long suffering wife Linda, that "attention must finally be paid." The trouble is, it's the wrong kind of attention.

Following the news that Pamela Wallin has resigned from the Conservative caucus, Andrew Coyne takes a hard look at the Mike Duffy fiasco:

So Duffy’s behaviour is not the issue. The issue is the culture that enabled it. The Tories may find it expedient to disown him now, but it wasn’t five minutes ago they were cheering him to the rafters, inviting him to campaign in their ridings and defending him in public, long after his misconduct was known. Expelling him from caucus at this late date changes nothing. The time to discipline him was when when he was first caught out, not after every alternative had been exhausted. Indeed, he should never have been appointed, if for no other reason than that he was legally ineligible: to be the senator from PEI, you have to be from PEI.
The Harperites went to great lengths to protect Duffy. They offered Patrick Brazeau no such protection. The question -- the elephant in the room -- is Why?

The revelations of recent days suggest one reason: because of the sorts of things the auditors were likely to uncover, had they been allowed to do their work. And, perhaps, because of the many other rocks that might be overturned as a result: for example, Duffy’s alleged lobbying on behalf of Sun News. (Who was the “Conservative insider with connections to the CRTC” Duffy is reported to have approached? What could possibly have led him to believe his efforts to influence a quasi-judicial tribunal would be fruitful? Did he do this entirely on his own? Unprompted? Unpaid?)
Duffy was a Conservative Party operative on the public payroll. He wasn't the first. And the problem certainly extends to senators  from other parties. But this party -- this government  -- came to office railing against the corruption in the House of Sober Second Thought and in government in general. Rather than insisting on accountability, the Harperites have hopped on the bandwagon. Michael Harris  reminded us of the numbers last week: "By October 2015, 62 per cent of the 105-member Senate will have been appointed by Stephen Harper."

And Harris simply stated the obvious this week. Mike Duffy may be gone. But Stephen Harper is the one who should be roasted. It is he who drives the current culture of entitlement.

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.

Tom Walkom's analysis of the BC election is interesting.  In the end, he writes, British Columbians were asked to choose between two negatives:

On Tuesday, B.C. voters were left with two negative questions: Did they hate the Liberals enough to get rid of them? Or did they fear the New Democrats enough to avoid them?
In the end, they chose fear over hate.
Fear seems to be the operative word these days. It was fear that was at the heart of Adrian Dix's campaign. Like Stephen Harper, Dix didn't offer a vision. He simply portrayed himself as an incrementalist:

Throughout the campaign, Dix did his best to reassure voters that the new New Democrats had been thoroughly defanged. Unlike the NDP governments of Dave Barrett in the 1970s and Glen Clark in the ’90s, he insisted it had no plans to do anything remarkable.

This time, however, the NDP was determined to portray itself as bland. Dix may have been Glen Clark’s chief of staff during the tumultuous ’90s. But his campaign motto this time was minimalist: “one practical step at a time.”
His promises — such as one to ensure that nursing home residents receive two rather than just one bath a week — were underwhelming.
That strategy gave Stephen Harper a majority government. Now Canadian corporations are sitting on $500 billion of dead money.Tom Mulcair and Andrea Horvath should be taking notes. Canadians are looking for what the first President Bush called "that vision thing."

 

Tom Walkom writes that when it comes to residency, Senate rules are unambiguous:

The constitution act is crystal clear on this. It says a senator must be at least 30 years old, own $4,000 worth of real estate in the province he represents and be “resident in the province for which he is appointed.”
And, try as he might, the Artful Dodger can't dodge certain facts:

As the Senate’s own internal economy committee found, Duffy does not hold a P.E.I. health card. He does not pay income tax to P.E.I. He spends only 30 per cent of his time in the province. How then can he be resident in P.E.I.?
And if he’s not resident in P.E.I., he cannot be a senator from that province. Indeed, the constitution act specifies that if a senator is found not to live in the province he was appointed to represent, his seat is deemed vacant.
The Senate has always been a home for political partisans. But, under Stephen Harper, the Senate has become the last defense against the will of the House of Commons. Micheal Harris reminds his readers that it was the Senate which enforced Harper's denial of climate change. It was the senate which killed

by stealth Bill C-311 after the House of Commons had passed the climate change bill. And this under a prime minister who once promised that he would never allow an unelected Senate to go against the will of the majority of Members of Parliament.
Walkom puts the case succinctly:

Mike Duffy came from P.E.I. It is a heritage of which he is justly proud. He vacations on the island. But he doesn’t really live there any more. And because of that, he cannot — by law — represent P.E.I. in the Senate.

 

Natalie Brender writes in The Toronto Star that, if disasters such as the factory collapse in Bangladesh are to be avoided in the future, we are going to have to stop acting as consumers and start acting as citizens. Private initiatives by non governmental agencies aren't enough:

As usual, the reason for this state of affairs is that things are complicated. The locations, actors, incentives and pressures involved in today’s global supply chains are so diverse and complex that uncoordinated action from any number of angles isn’t enough to make a major difference.

If private voluntary initiatives aren’t enough to produce consistent results, another solution is to weave them more closely together with governmental regulation. Getting government involved with buyers and suppliers across a given commercial field has the potential to ensure that all firms abide by common rules. Accordingly, new kinds of public-private partnerships are emerging. In some, national or regional governments work with the private sector to develop goals and metrics for compliance with environmental and labour standards. In other cases, a government might encourage corporate compliance with regulations by offering lighter penalties for violations in return for corporations’ transparency and disclosure.  
The assumption, of course, is that governments act not only in their own workers interests, but in the interests of workers across the world. And the present Government of Canada is going to do no such thing. It has firmly planted its flag in the employers camp. Trade deals are written to protect international investors; and -- as far as the Harperites are concerned -- citizens are consumers.

Brender's colleague at the Star, Susan Delacourt, has done a lot of work lately documenting the Conservative take on citizenship. In the Harperian universe, everything -- including the self respect of the Conservative caucus -- is for sale. The workers of Bangladesh and other Third World nations will continue to suffer as long as the present Government of Canada remains in power.

Joseph Stiglitz writes in this morning's New York Times that, just as America is beginning to recover from the crisis which rocked the world financial system, another storm is about to hit:

The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down — some to a point even lower than where they began.
Just as home owners found themselves with mortgages they couldn't repay, American students now find themselves with debt they can't repay:

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000. These debts are beyond students’ ability to repay, (especially in our nearly jobless recovery); this is demonstrated by the fact that delinquency and default rates are soaring. Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind. For federal loans taken out in the 2009 fiscal year, three-year default rates exceeded 13 percent.
And the aftermath of the Great Recession has made things worse:

Like much else, the problem of student debt worsened during the Great Recession: tuition costs at public universities increased by 27 percent in the past five years — partly because of cutbacks — while median income shrank. In California, inflation-adjusted tuition more than doubled in public two-year community colleges (which for poorer Americans are often the key to upward mobility), and by more than 70 percent in four-year public schools, from 2007-8 to 2012-13.

With costs soaring, incomes stagnating and little help from government, it was not surprising that total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year. 
It's a depressingly familiar story. Caught in the jaws of a financial system which piles up profit for the few, the economy stagnates -- because, faced with a mountain of debt, students neither form families nor buy homes:

Those with huge debts are likely to be cautious before undertaking the additional burdens of a family. But even when they do, they will find it more difficult to get a mortgage. And if they do, it will be smaller, and the real estate recovery will consequently be weaker. (One study of recent Rutgers University graduates showed that 40 percent had delayed making a major home purchase, and for a quarter, the high level of debt had an effect on household formation or getting further education. Another recent study showed that homeownership among 30-year-olds with a history of student debt fell by more than 10 percentage points during the Great Recession and in its aftermath.)

It’s a vicious cycle: lack of demand for housing contributes to a lack of jobs, which contributes to weak household formation, which contributes to a lack of demand for housing.
The Masters of the Financial Universe have given birth to a vicious, not a virtuous, cycle. They really aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

Andrew Coyne's opinions tend to fall on the right side of the political spectrum. That fact, however, does not make him a fan of the Harper government. In this morning's National Post he writes:

We’ve had some thuggish or dishonest governments in the past, even some corrupt ones, but never one quite so determined to arouse the public’s hostility, to so little apparent purpose. Their policy legacy may prove short-lived, but it will be hard to erase the stamp of the Nasty Party.
The Harperites have deliberately chosen to present themselves as the Nasty Party. Coyne, in fact, agrees with some of Harper's initiatives -- like raising the age of eligibility for Old Age Security. The problem with the government is its style: "as overbearing as it is under-handed and that on a good day:"


When they are not refusing to disclose what they are doing, they are giving out false information; when they allow dissenting opinions to be voiced, they smear them as unpatriotic or worse; when they open their own mouths to speak, it is to read the same moronic talking points over and over, however these may conflict with the facts, common courtesy, or their own most solemn promises.
There are certain laws -- like the law of gravity -- which govern existence on this planet. This government's essential flaw is that it ignores the principle of what goes around comes around. It has nothing but contempt for its opponents, the press and -- most surprisingly -- the public. The result, Coyne concludes, is that:

"The odium in which they are now held is well-earned, and entirely self-inflicted."

One wonders if the Harper caucus has any backbone at all. We know that Big Steve has spent taxpayer money keeping an eye on his own MPs:

Opposition parties accused Stephen Harper’s government of spying on its own MPs and being poor money managers Thursday after The Huffington Post Canada revealed Conservatives had spent $23 million on media monitoring in two years — including millions to track their own backbench MPs.
It sounds like life in the House of Harper doesn't breed much trust. Father knows best:

NDP MP Charlie Angus told reporters the Tories are probably keeping tabs on their backbench because these are the MPs causing the prime minister “a great deal of trouble.”

“They’re certainly not following the party line. They’re running off on tangents all the time. So obviously the Prime Minister’s Office is trying to keep tabs on their behaviour,” he said.

But if Harper wants to do that, Angus suggested, the Conservative party should foot the bill, not taxpayers.
If Stephen wants to keep an eye on his MP's he certainly can do that -- and bear the consequences. But his penchant for using public funds for that project -- and for those pamphlets which attack Justin Trudeau -- goes over the line.

But Big Steve makes the rules. His lust for control betrays his deep seated insecurity. And he believes that, if he wants to keep his eye on you, you should pay for his privilege.