Dear Editor
With the latest proven illegal moves to fraudulently limit voter participation in Guelph, Ont. during the last federal election there (one Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, convicted and facing a maximum five-year sentence), it seems rather clear to me there is something more to this latest revelation than just this one unethical and illegal action by one unethical individual. As a matter of fact, if one follows the long history of the Harper government, this kind of disregard for ethics and/or legality in the pursuit of individual or party benefit by staffers and elected officials has been a continuing story.
The list is too long to detail in one letter, but I'm sure anyone who occasionally reads a newspaper or tunes in to a news report on TV or some social media source, can recall at least a few chapters of this ongoing story. A few that come to mind for me are the "in and out" scandal in the 2006 election (to which the Conservatives eventually pleaded guilty), the various times Parliament was suspended by the minority prime minister to prevent a possible unfavourable (to the government) outcome, the Del Mastro (former Parliamentary secretary to the prime mininster) scandal, the numerous on-going Senate scandals featuring Harper appointees and the long list of those appointees after Conservatives had run on a pledge to not do that. But yes, there have been many other chapters of that sad and rather mean story.
Whenever one of these lapses of decency or ethics comes to light, the official response has always been to throw the particular perpetrator under the bus (unless it happens to be the prime minister), as just a kind of bad apple. But how many of those bad apples can a party have before they appear to be part of what that party really is?
Russell Lahti
Battleford
