A lot of people actually think that’s a pretty good idea. That it handicaps the Conservatives’ opponents disproportionately because they have not developed a comparable ability to appeal to private donors is no skin off many voters’ noses. Harper’s plan would have attracted some support to the Conservatives, at no cost, if he had simply campaigned on it when he was supposed to be telling people his plans for government.
But this Prime Minister cannot help himself. If he knows something you don’t, he values that thing out of all proportion to its true worth. So he sprung his party-financing scheme on his opponents and an unsuspecting country and provoked the entire lurid coalition-prorogation psychodrama of late 2008. And he took the dime-store novellas peddled by Snowdy on Gillani’s say-so at face value, simply because he was privy.
In some ways that instinct is a product of the Conservatives’ minority status in a Parliament where every opposition party, a consistent majority of the electorate and the bulk of the press gallery sits well to the government’s political left. That’s inclement weather for a government that would like to survive for a while, and Harper has survived it by playing a particularly ruthless brand of game theory.
The easiest game to win is a game of asymmetrical information, where one player knows more about his opponents than they know about him. Harper spends a lot of time setting up that steep gradient between what he knows and what everyone else does. During the 2006 election, one Conservative staffer was assigned to stake out the coffee shop where Liberal staffers would pause from long days in their party’s campaign war room. History doesn’t record that the overheard chit-chat did the Conservatives any good, but it made the leader feel better. Today, reporters seeking comment on any story are quizzed at length about their intentions. They may or may not get a call back with any information. But the information they surrender is collated and analyzed for trends on the issues that interest the media.
Formal requests for documents are ritually stonewalled. Last week the interim information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, said the right of citizens to information about how they are governed is “at risk of being totally obliterated” by delays. Legault has been interim information commissioner for 10 months while she waits to hear whether the same government she criticizes will accept her application for the full-time job. That arrangement would seem custom-designed to keep Legault in line indefinitely, but she has decided she will keep doing her job with brio for however long she might continue to hold it. Harper’s instinct—hoard information, dole it out in as miserly a way as possible, act on insider information rather than on what’s obvious to all the world—persists.
What is left over, after all of this, is the lives of a husband and wife who used to be of great value to Harper’s party. Rahim Jaffer was a key early guarantor of the Reform party’s claim to diversity, urban appeal, and—because he speaks French—a measure of interest in the French language and the peculiar currents of Quebec politics. He was the Canadian Alliance’s deputy House leader when that shattered party was trying to recover from Stockwell Day’s disastrous leadership. There’s just nobody in Ottawa who dislikes the guy, or there wasn’t six months ago. His wife was carefully stationed in the camera shot right behind Harper for years, the better to improve perceptions of the party among women voters. She was famous in Conservative circles for being a hard boss to work for, but her own boss, Stephen Harper, would not hear a word sent against her.
Now they have been cast aside. The evidence against them started out solid enough. He really did blow over the limit at that cop stop outside Toronto. She really did hurl footwear while P.E.I. airport workers were simply trying to do the job Canada’s federal cabinet obliges them to do. The excuses on offer have been flimsy. Guergis had two miscarriages, but to suggest that should be her defence insults any number of women who held on to their dignity in the face of comparable challenges.
Perhaps all that can be said about the couple’s decline, up to a point, is that the life they signed up for can be rough on anyone’s dignity. In his autobiography, Think Big, the former Reform party leader Preston Manning devotes considerable space to “the sad but oft-proven truth that if you are suffering from a financial problem, a marital problem, or a substance abuse problem, it will only get worse, not better, if you become a member of Parliament.” Very few are the denizens of the capital who would long survive serious scrutiny of their behaviour off duty. That’s not an excuse. Perhaps it is context.
But we cannot judge Jaffer and Guergis because we literally have no idea what the former minister and her husband stand accused of doing. The Prime Minister’s love of secrecy did not stop him from hinting darkly that there were nasty allegations against them. Then he clammed up, as if all that is now happening to them were none of his problem. This started out as a story about the things Rahim Jaffer and Helena Guergis should be ashamed of. It’s starting to look like they’re not the only ones.
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