Canadian Cincinnatus

Any Canadian gun owner who sat out the last election has only himself to blame if his guns are confiscated

I was scheduled to go to a pistol match on the Saturday before the last Federal Election, but I cancelled out. Instead, I cleared my schedule and spent the entire weekend dedicated to my candidate’s GOTV efforts. The recent polls had me worried. When I told the match organizer what I was doing, as well as my friends at the match, they shrugged. Election? I’d rather go out shooting.

It seems that the recent political successes that Canadian gun owners have enjoyed has also lulled us into complacency. The bad old days of Alan Rock and Kim Campbell are gone for good. Or so many think.

I got the same apathetic reaction from a fellow shooter while discussing politics over a beer. He told me that Harper has to go. He’s too annoying. I told him that Stephen Harper has been the best friend Canadian gun owners have ever had. He got rid of the long-gun registry - the lack of which is a significant obstacle to any future gun-grab scheme - and he cut useless red tape meant only to harass shooters. My friend said he will vote Conservative - like he always does - but he thinks the Conservatives need a new leader.

I responded that loyalty is an important virtue in politics – both for politicians and the voters. Nothing can be achieved without it. Whatever Harper’s faults (and I agree they became increasingly manifest in his last few years in office), he has been steadfastly loyal to shooters. In response, we needed to come through for him. Because if we don’t - and by come through, I mean donating and volunteering, as well as just voting – why would anybody else champion our cause in the future?

Well, what I feared might happen is beginning. The Federal Election was held on Oct 19. From a press release from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA), dated merely five days later:

“THE RCMP TEST THE WATERS ON THE FIRST NEW ROUND OF FIREARM PROHIBITIONS.  

October 24, 2015 – As reported by CSSA in the last several months, the RCMP has been eager to impose new prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles at the earliest opportunity.

Little known to most firearm owners, an unsuccessful attempt was made by the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Program to prohibit the common-as-dirt SKS rifle, a non-restricted firearm imported into Canada by the hundreds of thousands over the last 40 years. Its solid reliability, inexpensive ammo and very reasonable price have made it a stalwart in a large portion of Canadian gun safes. Every year, thousands of game animals are humanely harvested and millions of rounds of ammunition are sent downrange by this humble firearm.

Yet, one broken gun sold by a large retail store sparked an all-out pogrom against the ubiquitous rifle by the RCMP. Some adroit stick handling prevented this from achieving fruition and while the tale is not well known by consumers, it is common knowledge in the firearm industry. As is often the case, lobbying is a prophylactic exercise where success is measured by what doesn't happen.

The story below – reported by the CBC – is the opening salvo in an attempt by the RCMP’s Firearms Program to ban the following firearms: the SKS, the Ruger Mini-14/Mini-30, the Tavor TAR 21, the CZ-858 and the Norinco M-305 rifles.

Do not ignore this message and do not be fooled by political rhetoric. THIS IS REAL, and the storm is only beginning.”

That old phrase, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is nowhere more true than in politics.

All I can say is that my conscience is clear, but I wonder how other Canadian gun owners can sleep well at night.

 

Memo to Canadian Conservatives: don’t refight the last war

In the National Post, Kevin Gaudet, discussed the qualities that the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada should possess. To him, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is as important as intellectual intelligence (IQ). He is of course right that EQ is an indispensable asset in politics. But I get the sense that what Gaudet has in mind for next party leader is an anti-Harper.

Gaudet was responding to a Maclean's article written by Conservative strategist, Ken Boessenkool, who, according to Gaudet, pined an even more for an anti-Harper. Again according to Gaudet, Boessenkool wants the next leader to be “young, female, and not from the West.” Gaudet was right to criticize this as a laundry list that would eliminate many qualified candidates essentially for affirmative action reasons.

To me, in looking for the anti-Harper, both Gaudet and Boessenkool are trying to refight the last war. They saw Justin Trudeau exploit Harper’s personality flaws – that Harper is an unempathic, unfeeling, control freak – and they don’t want that to happen again. Justin Trudeau won by being warm and fuzzy and young and sunny. They want some of that same mojo.

But here’s the thing they both miss: Stephen Harper is gone. The problem they are trying to solve has already been solved - by Harper’s resignation as party leader. The challenge now isn’t finding Mr. Goodbar, but positioning yourself to beat Trudeau four years from now.

How do we do that? Remember the Theory of Presidential Opposites that I propounded in my last column. Justin Trudeau won by being the anti-Harper. In order to beat Harper, we need to find the anti-Trudeau, not an anti-Harper to counter their anti-Harper.

But say, didn’t the last election prove that Canadians respond positively to Justin Trudeau? Yes they did. This shows that the Canadian electorate right now wants politicians like Justin. But the next election isn’t right now. It’s four years from now.

By that point, Justin’s good qualities will have become shopworn and taken for granted - just like Harper’s did after nine years. (If you recall, Harper is sober, hard-working, unpretentious, smart, competent, and thrifty.) What we really need to be looking for is somebody that can exploit those weaknesses of Justin Trudeau that will have become obvious to everybody four years from now. What are they?

Well we already have a good idea. Trudeau is shallow, facile, unread, unserious, and all surface – just like he was portrayed in the Conservative propaganda ad quoting Trudeau as saying, “and the budget will balance itself.” Four years from now, the budget won’t have balanced itself. To exploit that fact, the Conservatives need a leader with opposite qualities, so that the contrast with Trudeau will be maximized, and entirely to our benefit.

But what if four years from now, Trudeau will have proven that he has inner reserves of intellect and seriousness that we have not yet recognized? If that’s the case, he will win reelection - especially with the mainstream media covering his back. But even if this proves to be the case, our position will still be maximized with an anti-Trudeau at the helm, because all politicians, even good ones, begin to grate after a while. Exhibit A is Stephen Harper himself. And of course, if Trudeau is what he seems to be, he will be ripe for defeat – but only if we position ourselves correctly today.

But still, even granting all that, wouldn’t it be better if the next leader lacked Harper’s personality flaws? Of course it would. It would be even better if the next leader lacked all personality flaws entirely. The thing is, real human beings don’t come that way. Everybody has weaknesses as well as strengths. I believe history will conclude that Stephen Harper’s strengths greatly outnumbered his weaknesses. And just as in the leadership process that selected Harper, Conservatives will be choosing from the imperfect bunch of candidates who put themselves forward.

One of the keys to success in strategy is the ability to look past the emotions of the day and look dispassionately into the future to assess the likely situation (and emotions) that will be the case then. Therefore, in evaluating today’s leadership candidates, we should think about how they will do four years from now, and not today.

 

Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and warm and fuzzy personalities

Famed American blogger, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit), has often propounded the Theory of Presidential Opposites, a theory that he credits to his daughter (the Insta-daughter). It holds that:

“Each President is chosen to be the opposite of his predecessor.”

The Insta-daughter proposed the theory to explain Barack Obama’s rise. Obama is the cool, eloquent, ivory tower intellectual who succeeded the tongue-tied, ‘smoke ‘em out’ gunslinger with the Texas twang, George W Bush.

The main idea is that people get fed up with their leader’s personality type. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies start to grate on everybody’s nerves after a while. Because of this, the voters become susceptible to the charms of somebody possessing an opposite personality-type.

For instance, sunny, optimistic Ronald Reagan replaced “there’s a malaise in America” Jimmy Carter, who wore a sweater in the White House because he kept the thermostat low to fight the ‘energy crisis’; the hip baby boomer with a sax, Bill Clinton, replaced the grumpy Greatest Generation father-figure George H W Bush; etc.

I think there is something to this theory, and I think it partially explains Canada’s choice in the recent Federal Election. After being in power for nine years, every Canadian knew Stephen Harper’s personality flaws. He is a control freak, and he is ice cold – as Mark Steyn pointed out in a column entitled Cold Fish in an Indian Summer (where he quoted yours’ truly extensively). Mr. Personality he ain’t. Whatever Justin Trudeau is, nobody can accuse him of being an unfeeling technocrat. He is warm and fuzzy all over – and with great hair.

If this theory is true, then it would be a mistake for the Conservatives to select a conservative version of Justin Trudeau to lead them – somebody who would give Conservatism a great big happy face, while also injecting some sex appeal. Instead, they should pick his polar opposite, somebody who could highlight Trudeau’s faults, which are already manifest: he is a shallow, glib dilettante, who doesn’t think through his actions and who doesn’t have an executive bone in his body.

The next Conservative leader ideally should be serious alpha leader - but also be the people-person that Harper clearly isn’t. 

Thank God Stephen Harper balanced the budget before he lost the election

Historically, something that has enabled activist left-wing governments is preceding conservative governments that have lost their way. These governments enact all sorts of left-wing agenda items in a futile attempt to be ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ or whatever. In doing so, they only provide bipartisan cover to their successors, so that whenever their successor implements something controversial, all they have to say is that their predecessor did the same thing. It’s an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

In the province of Ontario, the hapless Progressive Conservative Premier Ernie Eves spent like a drunken Liberal in a vain attempt to cling to power. After the Dalton McGuinty Liberals swept into office in 2003, they blamed all their deficits on the Conservatives they succeeded. It didn’t matter that Ernie Eves was in power barely a year; nor that the man he succeeded, Mike Harris, was probably the toughest fiscal hawk in Canada’s history; nor that McGuinty (and his successor Kathleen Wynne) made the Ontario the world’s greatest sub-sovereign debt holder, beating out California with only one-third of the population; all that was swept under the carpet with one line: we inherited the debt from the Conservatives.

In the US, the best example in recent is President George W. Bush’s last year in office. Yearly deficits, the TARP bailout, several stimulus bills to ‘jump-start’ the ailing economy, pork-barrel spending unrestrained by Presidential veto, all of it provided cover to Barack Obama for his more purposeful agenda of “fundamental transformation”.

Historically, there was Herbert Hoover, whose economic activism provided perfect cover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, allowing Roosevelt to campaign against Hoover from the right, and then enact a much more expansive interventionist agenda when in power.

Fortunately, Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, hasn’t been given this luxury by Stephen Harper. This is because Harper made sure that the books were balanced by the time this election was called. This is because ever since Harper’s majority win in 2011 freed him up to cut spending, he worked assiduously towards this goal.

Now somebody at this point will object. So what? Trudeau will just blow up the budget again. Yes, he will. But that’s the point. Justin Trudeau will do it, and Justin Trudeau will own it. All of it. Thank’s to Harper’s diligence, Trudeau can’t shift the blame to him or anyone else.

Even more, by cutting the GST by 2%, Harper has permanently lowered the ceiling on how much the government can be grown. As I explained in my last article before the election:

“Stephen Harper cut the GST from 7% to 5%. Many economist disapproved because a value added tax is a much more efficient way to raise revenue than an income tax. This is true, but the economists failed to understand Harper’s motives. Because he cut an extremely unpopular but extremely efficient tax, he permanently cut the size of the federal government. With a 7% GST, Finance Minister Paul Martin could simultaneously run a balanced budget with huge government spending. This is no longer possible – unless the GST is first raised.”

Because of the GST cut, Harper had a harder time balancing the budget than Paul Martin did; but as a result, Trudeau will have a harder time spending money – unless he raises the GST. And if he does that, he will provide the Conservatives a golden gift for the next election.

So, in the Conservative defeat, raise a toast to Stephen Harper. Unlike other conservative politicians who lose an election, he didn’t set his left-wing successor up for success with his dirigiste agenda.

Why Stephen Harper deserves re-election

Unlike some of the Republican candidates in the US Presidential election, who chose to live life large, Stephen Harper has chosen to live life incrementally – taking a lot of small steps, but all in the right direction.

The reason why he has done so was explained to me by top Conservative strategists at a party event held a few weeks after Stephen Harper’s first win in 2006 against Liberal Paul Martin. After losing to Paul Martin in 2004, Harper realized that the most important obstacle to overcome was the Liberal meme - repeated ceaselessly since 1993 - that Conservatives (and their Reform predecessors) are too extreme for Canada. Harper’s solution was to move forward incrementally without making any moves that could trigger the Liberals to say, Ahah! See I told you. Until now, this strategy has been successful.

Unfortunately, it has a defect. It leaves some conservatives frustrated because they fail to see the steady progress Stephen Harper has made to date. They think Harper isn’t doing anything, or they have been caught up in nothing scandals like the Mike Duffy circus. If this is you, don’t be fooled. Harper has accomplished a great deal.

For starters, Stephen Harper has been the best friend Canadian gun owners ever had. He not only abolished the long-gun registry but also recently, he significantly cut the red tape that gun owners face. This is important because, until Harper came on the scene, there is no doubt that the end goal of Canada’s gun control laws was to disarm Canadians – completely. By eliminating the long-gun registry, the Conservatives have set that agenda back decades, for if anybody were to try to ban handguns now, all he would do would be to drive all the long guns underground. Nobody would register them after seeing all the pistols confiscated. They would first have to bring back the long-gun registry first, before proposing a ban. It would be a decade-long project.

Second, the Harper government has greatly strengthened our criminal laws. Sentences have been lengthened and consecutive sentences are now possible. He even took tentative steps towards the legitimization of self-defence.

Third, Harper increased the Canadian retirement age from 65 to 67, and the retirement age of civil servants by an extra five years. These moves have a huge impact on the Federal Government’s unfunded liabilities - a sum much greater than the federal debt. He did it quietly by phasing in the limits over time. For this reason, these changes have had little impact on current federal spending, but they will pay big dividends in the future.

Fourth, he modified Canada’s immigration law while simultaneously making inroads in Canada’s ethnic communities. Thanks to these changes, we no longer have a Liberal voter importation program, but rather a system for selecting immigrants based on their economic usefulness. Of all his below-the-radar initiatives, this will probably have the most significant effect on Canada.

Fifth, Stephen Harper cut the GST from 7% to 5%. Many economist disapproved because a value added tax is a much more efficient way to raise revenue than an income tax. This is true, but the economists failed to understand Harper’s motives. Because he cut an extremely unpopular but extremely efficient tax, he permanently cut the size of the federal government. With a 7% GST, Finance Minister Paul Martin could simultaneously run a balanced budget with huge government spending. This is no longer possible – unless the GST is first raised.

Sixth, Harper has completely changes the emphasis of Canada’s foreign policy. While the Liberals canoodled up to third-world dictators like Fidel Castro, as well as the third-world dominated UN, Stephen Harper’s government has resolutely stood up to thuggish foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, while standing beside threatened Western countries like Israel and Ukraine.

Finally, there is one achievement that conservatives sometimes criticize Harper for, his handling of the 2008 recession.  They point out that the federal deficit ballooned after the crisis hit. This is true. What Harper’s critics forget is that until 2011, Stephen Harper was in charge of a minority government, with no natural allies in Parliament. When the Great Recession broke, every other party clamored for stimulus spending. If Harper had balked, he would have been out of office and our deficit would have grown much larger than it did, and worse, it would have become structural. Instead, the stimulus spending Harper authorized (mostly tax rebates for home improvements) could be rolled up easily after the crisis passed. This is why I give him high marks. If the Liberals or NDP had been in charge, they would have added entitlement spending, and good luck trimming that later on.

The one area where I fault him is in his Supreme Court appointments. This is because the Court is as left-wing as ever in spite of the fact that most of the Justices are his appointees. Considering that there is no confirmation process required for Supreme Court Justices as there is in the US, he has had a lot of lattitude picking candidates. So where is our Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia?

But in balance, I can only conclude that Stephen Harper has been the best Prime Minister in my lifetime. We can do much worse than him, and we probably will – especially if Justin Trudeau wins the next federal election.

So, factor that in when you go to your polling station on Monday.

Attention all Canadian gun owners

Today, I am doing something I rarely if ever do on this site, I am making a pitch for a political party, in this case the Conservative Party of Canada in the upcoming Federal Election. This is because Stephen Harper’s government has been without question the best friend that Canadian gun owners have ever had.

First, his government abolished the long gun registry in 2009. Then, recently, they enacted the Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, which cuts down substantially on the red tape that gun owners face every day - all of which carry stiff criminal penalties. Mostly these changes concern ATT’s, but there also many other benefits. For the details see here.

The significance of these measures for the Canadian shooting sports cannot be overstated. For the past forty years, encroaching gun laws have relentlessly cut down our freedoms while deliberately creating roadblocks for the enjoyment of our activities - with the clear end goal of completely eliminating the private ownership of firearms in Canada. Stephen Harper’s government has rolled back this agenda for decades.

In contrast, the Liberals and to a lesser extent the NDP have declared war on us.

We must remember that the only reason that Canadians are allowed to own guns today is because in the 1990’s Canadian gun owners threw away their apathy and chose to fight back – by participating in politics. Until then, the prevailing wisdom was that all Canadians hated guns and that gun control was a guaranteed winning issue. Well, the political scalps of Kim Campbell and Alan Rock changed all that perception.

In large part, thanks to our participation in the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, and now the Conservative Party of Canada, Harper’s Conservatives have delivered. It is now up to us to repay their loyalty to us. If we don’t come through for them in this election - after all, they have done for us to date – then we will have only ourselves to blame if we find out that we have no friends left in Ottawa tomorrow.

Whether we will continue to be allowed to own guns tomorrow is up to us today.

 

How the Conservatives got stuck with Gerry Bance

By now everybody knows the Gerry Bance story, a now-former Conservative candidate in Scarborough - Rouge Park who was caught on film urinating in a coffee cup a couple of years ago when he worked as an appliance repairman. The obvious question is how could such a man end up as a candidate for higher office. As a resident of the Scarborough – Rouge Park riding, let me shed some light on the matter.

I attended the Conservative nomination meeting, which was held this spring, in order to support my favoured candidate, Paul Egli, a retired and distinguished businessman. In the contested nomination flight, Egli sold about three hundred memberships and felt pretty good about himself. In contrast, Bance sold over a thousand memberships and most of them showed up that night to vote for him. Egli was buried. The attendance at nomination meeting was bigger than at any nomination meeting I have ever attended – by an order of magnitude.

Gerry Bance, you see, is that character that should be familiar to anybody who has ever been involved in riding-level politics: the ethnic fixer, somebody who wields mysterious power over the people in his own ethnic community. In a democracy where the guiding principle is one man, one vote, somebody who can mobilize a thousand voters out to a nomination meeting is a powerful man indeed. Gerry Bance is (or was) such a man in the Tamil community.

At this point one can ask what’s wrong with that. In the strict legalistic sense, nothing. Bance followed the rules. His only sin was playing the game better than his opponent. As well, it is often argued that a contested nomination battle - with both sides selling memberships - is good for the health of a riding association. It is also often argued that ethnic outreach is also a good thing. These two assertions are correct, but we should not let this blind us to some questionable tactics that these two goals enable. For instance, how good is it for the health of the riding association to allow one-time members to determine the nomination? By allowing such a practice, the riding association concedes one of its most important decision – the nomination of its candidate - to unknowns whose allegiance to conservative principles is, to say the least, tangential. Disenfranchising your core support hardly boosts morale – or results in judicious decision-making.

For all the Liberals out there who might be reading this, I want to caution you against too much smugness. This sort of politics is relatively new to the Conservative Party. It blossomed with the ethnic outreach Harper has done in the past ten years. In contrast, such tactics have been going on in the Liberal party since time immemorial. A great example was the March 6, 2004 nomination vote in Hamilton East – Stoney Creek. Newly elected Liberal Party leader, Paul Martin was trying to oust Sheila Copps from the party. Both sides resorted to ethnic mobilization tactics. The resulting voter turnout was so huge (2,804 to 2,491) that even our dimwitted political reporters noticed. An alternate headline for this post could have been ‘Liberal tactics come to the Conservatives’.

So, if such tactics are more entrenched in the Liberal party, why does it seem to hurt the Conservatives the most? That is an excellent question. As a partial answer, it is interesting to note that the CBC made this video in 2012. The CBC website noted that the CBC only became aware of the identity of Gerry Bance from a tip sent to them just this Sunday night. Really? Bance was a failed Conservative candidate in 2006 and 2008. He was nominated again in May of this year. So, they only found out about it in the middle of a Federal Election? A cynic might wonder if they knew about it all along and were sitting on it until the most politically opportune moment to influence the vote. If the opposition parties had done this, that’s fair game. That’s how politics is played. But the CBC is a publicly funded broadcaster that has a legally mandated duty to be objective and impartial. They are not a private broadcaster who can slant their news anyway they want.

So, what should the Party do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? My solution is to raise the Party’s membership fee to $50. At $10, it is entirely too cheap. At $50, you still enable candidates in contested nomination fights to recruit new members and it is still possible for the grass-roots to wrestle boards when the sclerotic old guard needs to go. But by raising the membership fee so that it is no longer insignificant, you also inhibit backroom mechanics from making a complete mockery of the democratic process. 

Who is paying Mike Duffy’s lawyer?

Last week, columnist Christie Blatchford, who is covering the Mike Duffy trial for the National Post, asked this question. I thought: what an excellent question. Here is a guy, who is on trial for padding his expenses to the tune of $90K and who could not pay it back himself when asked to. How can he afford to hire Donald Bayne? Bayne is reportedly one of the top criminal lawyers in Canada. Can you imagine what his hourly rate is? Considering the length of the trial, and the amount of time Bayne has evidently invested in analyzing every e-mail, his bill must be exorbitant by now. Blatchford reports that Duffy has taken a $500K mortgage out on his house, but Bayne’s legal fees must be way higher than this by now.

Bayne could, of course, be defending Senator Duffy pro bono, but Duffy doesn’t strike me as the kind of defendant that would tug at the heartstrings of a criminal defense lawyer. He is not an underprivileged minority ‘youth’ who can’t afford to mount a defence, somebody whose public defence would go a long way in raising the moral stature of his legal defender in the salons of Yorkville. The case against Duffy also does not involve any higher legal or moral principle. It’s just about a grubby politician accused of stuffing his own pockets – and a conservative one at that!

So if it is unlikely that Duffy can afford to pay Bayne himself, and if it is unlikely that Duffy could inspire Bayne to defend him for free, and if it is also unlikely that Duffy could fool an old fox like Bayne into thinking he can pay Bayne’s bills when he really can’t, the only remaining likely option is that somebody else is paying them. Who could that be?

One clue comes from the vigorous multi-day cross-examination of Nigel Wright. Donald Bayne showed great interest in determining whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper knew about the $90K cheque that Wright wrote to Duffy to cover his disputed expenses. At one point in the cross-examination, the prosecutor objected that this line of questioning has nothing to do with the matter at hand. The judge dismissed this objection but I think the prosecutor was right. What has Nigel Wright’s cheque got to do with the ostensible purpose for the trial, to determine whether Mike Duffy committed fraud over his expenses? (As an aside, I think Duffy will be found innocent. His expense claims were approved, and the Senate rules about primary residence were, at the time, vague.)

One would think that if Duffy were as short of cash as he says he is, and if Bayne’s billable hours are as high as they likely are, Duffy would have instructed Bayne to keep his costs to a minimum by running a no-frills defence. But Bayne acts as if it had money to burn, as if he were part of the O J Simpson Defence Establishment.

The obvious guess is that the Liberal Party is paying them. Reinforcing this suspicion is the fact that Bayne seemed to deliberately slow-walk the trial this spring, in order to force it into recess. Christie Blatchford reported that the trial of former Liberal Senator Mar Harb was originally set for Aug 10. Because Harb and Duffy are accused of fundamentally the same thing, and because they share the same prosecutor, this would have meant that if everything went according to schedule, Harb’s trial would be happening right now instead of Duffy’s. Instead, Harb got his trial date postponed, so that – conveniently enough - the politically interesting parts of Duffy’s trial happened during the Federal Election.

Personally, I doubt the Liberal Party is paying Duffy’s defence directly. This would be too reckless and risky a move for even an airhead like Justin Trudeau. Personally, I suspect Bayne is being paid by some Liberal donor who would have liked to donate much more to the Liberal Cause than campaign finance laws permit. Paying Bayne’s salary allows him to contribute to the cause in a way that Elections Canada cannot scrutinize.

If the mainstream media really were a neutral reporter of the news, they would be asking who is paying Bayne as vigorously as they are now asking Stephen Harper whether he knew about Wright’s $90K cheque.

 

The National Post’s Colby Cosh can’t spot the scandal in the Nigel Wright affair, and neither can I

 

In yesterday’s column in the National Post, Colby Cosh offered some much-needed perspective on Nigel Wright’s role in the Mike Duffy Senate expense scandal.

Personally, I was never understood what Stephen Harper’s now-former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, did wrong in writing a $90,000 cheque to Mike Duffy so that he could pay back his disputed expense claims. Nigel Wright’s accusers claim that they are motivated by concern for the public purse, not partisan score-settling in the middle of a federal election. If this is so, then why aren’t they praising Nigel Wright conduct? Isn’t the public treasury better off after Nigel Wright’s money was deposited in the government bank account? And if this is so, why aren’t they indignant that Harper forced Wright to leave?

Ah, you don’t understand, the $90,000 (which ended up at the Receiver General of Canada) is a bribe. OK, what is the quid pro quo, may I ask? If you think Nigel Wright paid a bribe, what did he want Duffy to do for it? Please be specific. All I can see is that Wright expected Mike Duffy to make his scandal go away by paying back his disputed expenses. That’s some bribe. Duffy was bribed to obey the law (what Duffy had already claimed he wanted to do but couldn’t because he didn’t have the money).

The other contention is that the $90,000 payment was to avoid a Senate audit. I can’t rebut this better than Colby Cosh:

“When media scalp-hunters say the Conservatives were trying to “avoid” or “tamper with” the Deloitte audit of Duffy, for instance, I find myself saying, “Well … yes: they wanted to make the audit unnecessary, to hold Duffy to the strictest view of his financial obligations.” Is that an illegitimate reaction to an audit? If the CRA threatens to audit my tax return, and I respond by filing a new one and adopting adverse interpretations of my allowable deductions, am I doing something bad? Is that a “cover-up” in the ordinary sense?”

A third contention is that Nigel Wright placed himself in a conflict-of-interest with his $90,000 payment. If you think so, please tell me what two (or more) interests were placed in conflict by his actions. Again, be specific. Sweeping denunciations won’t cut it when a man’s honour and legal guilt are at stake.

If it wasn’t a bribe and it wasn’t a conflict, then perhaps it was an illegal campaign contribution. If you believe this, then tell me: what office was Duffy running for? In Canada, a Senator has a lifetime appointment. Mike Duffy wasn’t running for office, isn’t running for office, and will likely never do so in the future.

Just to provide some perspective, look at how the media reported on the Pat Martin/Racknine controversy. What is that, you ask? In 2011, NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) accused the robocall company, Racknine, which is associated with the Conservative Party, of making illegal calls to misdirected voters to the wrong polling station. Racknine sued Martin for defamation, asking for $5 million in damages. There was an undisclosed settlement that Pat Martin couldn’t afford because he, a former union boss, isn’t rich. To help pay his settlement and his legal bills, he accepted donations from various unions. There was a kerfuffle about whether these donations were campaign contributions (and therefore exceeded donation limits) or constituted a conflict-of-interest, but it was relatively muted and short-lived. Nothing like the category 5 hurricane that has swirled around Mike Duffy every day for the past several years.

You know what? As far as I understand the facts, I am on Martin’s side. If something isn’t a bribe, doesn’t create a conflict, and wasn’t given to defray a campaign expense, accepting it should be legal. While it is clear Pat Martin has foot-in-mouth disease, I don’t think he did anything wrong by accepting donations to help pay his legal costs. Just as I don’t see anything wrong with Nigel Wright taking care of Mike Duffy’s expenses when the latter couldn’t pay them back. Is there a legal requirement for Martin and Duffy to go bankrupt?

What I do insist on, however, is that the media use the same standards to report on Nigel Wright - and Mike Duffy - that they used on Pat Martin.

Speaking of media bias, why is it that we hear about Mike Duffy 24/7 but never hear about the other Senators in similar trouble, like Mac Harb? Who is Mac Harb you ask? He is a former Liberal Senator, also charged by the RCMP with Fraud and Breach of Trust for dubious living expenses. Except that in Harb’s case, the numbers involved are $230K not $90K. Conveniently enough, Harb’s trial was postponed to the New Year. How many of you have heard about any of this? I bet most Canadians think that the only Senators under suspicion are Conservatives. And I don’t think that is a coincidence.

How much will Canada’s Federal Election cost?

Finding myself on the road on Sunday, the day that Stephen Harper dropped the writ, this was the question that Toronto’s 24-hour all-news radio station (680 News) asked over and over again, on the hour, every time they told us about the federal election that had just been called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The was on the unnecessary cost due to Harper’s insistence that it be an unprecedented 11 weeks long. Because 680 is just a headline news station that has no talk-show hosts on it, I have observed it to be a reliable disseminator of whatever the Canadian news media’s current talking points are.

My first retort is costly to whom? By increasing the length of the campaign to 11 weeks, its cost went up by $125 million. This looks like a lot of money until you notice that the 2015 Canadian federal budget is $290 billion. This is what is really at stake, because the winner of this contest will determine whether Canada will continue with balanced budgets or go into deficit territory. If today’s fiscal discipline were removed by Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau, the deficit could easily balloon to $20 billion per year – if not more. These are the real fiscal stakes at play.

Also consider the reverse situation. What if Harper had shortened the writ period from the normal six weeks to four weeks in order to, say, save money? Then the opposition parties would no doubt accuse him of stifling democracy by limiting their campaigning time.

Obviously, the real reason for their complaint is that the Conservatives are better able to go the distance than the opposition parties are because they are richer so they, in effect, gave themselves an advantage. My response: OK, so what? In every previous Canadian election, the governing party dropped the hammer whenever they thought it was the most convenient time for them to do so according to the latest public opinion polls, and nobody thought twice about this selfish, partisan practice. In contrast, this is the first federal election when the governing party set the day of the election so far in advance that it had no idea whether it would be a good time to hold it or not. And Stephen Harper stuck to that date, voluntarily tying his hands in a way that no previous Prime Minister has ever done before.

The only way he could satisfy the opposition parties would be if he chose the most convenient writ period length from their perspective. And even then, they would likely still complain publically in order to score cheap points.

It is sad state of affairs that such a piece of blatant partisan propaganda could be passed off as a straightforward news headline. If 680 News were truly an objective headline news station, it would have instead matter-of-factly announced the election call, and then - in a separate news item - reported on the opposition parties’ complaint about its’ length.

The really surprising thing is that in spite of such blatant examples of journalistic abuse as this, there are plenty of people who still contend –with a straight face – that there is no left-wing bias in our media!