NOR DICITY
Al Pope, February 13, 2009
Where have all the scandals gone?
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly withdrew his lawsuit against the Liberals in the so-called Cadman affair. To recap that sad sordid little tale, Chuck Cadman was the independent conservative MP who rose from his deathbed to cast the deciding vote that kept the Paul Martin Liberals in power in 2005.
The opposition Conservatives, sniffing their first chance at power, had been strong-arming the ailing Cadman prior to the budget vote that could have brought down the government. Journalist Tom Zytaruk, who was working on a book about Cadman’s life, heard from members of the MP’s family that prominent Conservatives had gone so far as to attempt bribery. Zytaruk even produced an audio tape on which Harper himself appears to confirm that financial offers were made.
The 2008 release of Zytaruk’s book, with its allegations of Conservative corruption, set the Liberals howling for blood. If found to be true, the bribery story ought to result in serious criminal prosecutions, carrying the threat of long jail terms for anyone involved. The Conservatives hotly denied any wrongdoing, and insisted the tape was doctored.
Amid much fanfare the Conservatives produced expert witnesses to support their doctored-tape story. Taking a page from his old mentor Brian Mulroney, Harper filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against the Liberals for continuing to use the bribery allegations on their web page. Sticking closely to the Mulroney script, Harper trumpeted his outrage at the harm done to his family, though it’s unclear how the bribery allegations touched the PM’s wife and young children.
If the lawsuit was intended, as most observers agree, to cool down the story, it worked. The Cadman affair became one of many scandals to lose its momentum in a maze of litigation. Questions in the House of Commons bounced off that most impregnable of walls, the matter-before-the-courts defense.
Now that suit has been dropped by mutual agreement, some questions arise for the average voter. What became of Harper’s outrage? Does he no longer care about the harm done to his family’s reputation? Or does he buy the notion that by changing their leader the Liberals have become a new entity, not responsible for the actions of the past?
Or could it be that the doctored-tape story just wouldn’t hold water? We, the public, aren’t meant to find out the answers to these questions. In an out-of-court settlement in which no money changed hands, the Liberals agreed to hold up the rug so the Conservatives could sweep the Cadman story under it.
The trouble is that so much has been swept under the Parliamentary rug since Harper came to power, the lumps are starting to show. Former cabinet minister Maxine Bernier’s affair with biker glam queen Julie Couillard, with its national security implications, was quietly swept away under cover of the Conservative’s phony outrage over the Cadman tapes.
The Schreiber-Mulroney affair is lost in a narrow, circumscribed “investigation”, clearly designed by Harper to find out as little as possible about the big question: where did all the Schmiergelder go? If Harper has his way, we may never know if Schreiber really did sprinkle $20 million in bribes around Tory circles, as he claims, and if so, who got in on the bonanza.
The in-out election financing scam is under the carpet too, at least temporarily, while Elections Canada struggles to conduct an investigation and the government resists with all its power. In his latest move, Harper appointed key witness and former Conservative bagman Irving Gerstein to the senate, placing him out of reach of the Commons ethics committee.
Any one of these affairs, if they bear fruit, ought to be enough to end Harper’s career. At least two could result in criminal charges. As the Liberal sponsorship business proved, there is no statute of limitations on political scandals, and no knowing which one will come back to bite, or when.
One possibility is that Tom Zytaruk may now decide to sue Harper for defamation. The PM’s claim that the writer doctored an interview tape was surely at least as damaging as the Liberal’s assertion that he hadn’t. Now that Harper has apparently backed away from that accusation, we are confronted with the implication that the Prime Minister used the full power of his office, as well as the power of the courts, to smear the reputation of an innocent Canadian.
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