To the Editor:
In each of Stephen Harper's year-end media interviews, he repeated a pair of well-rehearsed lines that he used frequently in the House of Commons last fall. His purpose was to avoid answering questions about his ethics scandal.
First, he says it's "obvious" that he didn't know a thing about the outrageous $90,000 payment made by his Chief-of-Staff (Nigel Wright) to affect the behaviour of a sitting legislator (Mike Duffy). And second, he claims it's also "obvious" that if he had known, he would have stopped it.
Is the mere assertion of "obviousness" enough?
Why has the Prime Minister's story fluctuated so much? First, he insisted Mr. Wright acted entirely alone, but later he abandoned that claim when the police flatly contradicted him.
According to the RCMP, more than a dozen people in the Prime Minister's inner-circle were linked to the Wright-Duffy affair as it steadily worsened over a period of at least six months, including senior PMO staff, top Conservative Party officials and several Senators. So how is it that Mr. Harper noticed nothing whatsoever, when all this evolved right under his nose for all that time?
The Prime Minister is in touch with these people every day. They were dealing with the most serious political trouble his regime has ever faced. And yet none of them - not his Chief-of-Staff, not his lawyer, not his Issues Manager, not his fundraiser, none of them - mentioned a single word about what was going on, and even worse, he never asked?
When the Prime Minister told Mr. Wright that a plan to deal with Duffy was "good to go", what specifically was he approving?
What control did the PMO exercise over the Conservative Senators who edited a report on Duffy to whitewash its findings?
Mr. Harper asserted there was no paper-trail anywhere in government relevant to this ethics scandal, but again the police contradicted him. They found hundreds of pages of evidence, and are looking for more - including the email records of PMO lawyer Benjamin Perrin, which somehow got lost for six months while the Mounties kept asking for them at least three time. How did that happen?
Why has Mr. Harper blocked Parliament from hearing testimony about alleged back-channel attempts by Conservative Senator Gerstein to intervene in the Duffy audit? And how did the PMO come to know the results of that audit in advance?
All the unanswered questions raise serious doubts. And so does this government's track-record on other ethical matters.
Long before Duffy and Wright, there were those troubling deals with Allan Riddell and Chuck Cadman? There were strange appointments handed out to people like Bruce Carson (now facing influence peddling charges) and Arthur Porter (now in jail in Panama).
And there was that "In-and-Out" election financing scam which triggered a police raid on Conservative Party headquarters, charges of law-breaking, a guilty plea and conviction, and the heaviest fine the law allows.
There was also Peter Penashue, Mr. Harper's MP for Labrador, forced to resign in disgrace, and Dean Del Mastro, Harper's former Parliamentary Secretary, going to trial on four counts of violating the Elections Act.
Don't forget thousands of illegal phone calls in Guelph, and perhaps as many as 200 other ridings, for which at least one Conservative operative is currently being prosecuted. And there was that damning Federal Court judgement which explicitly found that electoral fraud took place in several constituencies in the 2011 election, with the most likely source of the data used to commit that fraud being the Conservative Party's super-secret computer system.
All this on Mr. Harper's watch. Given this history, all the unanswered questions and the incessant stonewalling, it's not unreasonable for Canadians to be skeptical about things that are said to be "obvious".
Ralph Goodale, MP, Wascana, SK.
