Prime Minister Harper – True to Form (#23)

Prime Minister is truly the consummate politician, and deserving of his reputation as such. When faced with blatant and damaging wrong-doings within his inner circle, that is causing outrage amongst Canadians, including members of his own Conservative party, he stays true to form, simply ignores the issue, stonewalls, misquotes his own previous speech, deflects all questions, and leaves the country.

Given the opportunity to come clean at this morning’s open caucus meeting, called by him, the Prime Minister goes the other way. He chose instead to completely ignore the reason for the open caucus meeting, not directly address the actions of his Senators (who had to quit his Caucus), or of his Chief of Staff who also had to resign because of his highly questionable action. In fact, the Prime Minister deigned not to even mention their names, even though they were central to the scandal. 

It is the true and tried method of politicians to stonewall till the public begins to tire, moves on, and forgets. 

But, that does not make this government any different from any other, in spite of their oft proclaimed reminders to the public that they reintroduced accountability into Canadian politics. The Prime Minister repeated that refrain again this morning at the caucus meeting, while stonewalling and refusing to account for the actions of those closest to him in his Party, and in office. 

The actions of the Senators are obviously wrong (grossly misrepresenting expense claims) and they should have been clearly addressed as such by the Prime Minister. He refused to do that. The fact that the Prime Minister was defending Senator Mike Duffy till about a week ago, calling his actions till then, ‘noble’, is simply incomprehensible. Then, when he was forced to accept the resignation of his trusted Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright, it was tacit acknowledgement of Mr. Wright’s wrong doing. Yet this morning he completely ignored mentioning, or even acknowledging the fact, that in his inner most circle his highest ranking and most trusted official had committed an offense worthy of resignation. Instead of explaining the details of such conduct emanating from the PMO’s office, he professed (and I paraphrase) he is ‘Not Happy’ with the whole affair, and that if anyone was to use public office ‘…for personal gain, they should leave the room.’. Harper then left the room.

Today again the Prime Minister chose to be a true politician rather than what he had promised the Canadian public at election, an open accountable government.