The Bev Oda Resignation Watch

Criticism continues to rain down on Bev Oda from the op-ed pages, with every columnist and his dog calling for her to step down or be fired.

The Halifax Chronicle Herald, the Record, the Ottawa Sun, the Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe, and Sun Media's David Akin all serve up variations of the same theme, the gist of which is “get rid of Bev Oda, posthaste.”

Harper has skirted the Oda affair by feeding Canadians the line that as minister it was her right and responsibility to determine who got aid funding but, as the Toronto Star’s James Travers points out, the prime minister ignores the key corollary to that argument, namely that “with responsibility comes accountability.” Oda clearly had the right to deny Kairos funding, but “[w]here she utterly and fatally failed was in shirking accountability for her decision.” Travers says that what’s so remarkable about Oda’s conduct is that given Conservative ministers’ record of hiding behind bureaucrats, her actions aren’t even surprising.

The Saskatoon StarPhoenix editorial board says the Oda affair is evidence of the Conservatives’ “systemic use of deceit, obfuscation, document redaction, stalling tactics and personal attacks on civil servants and political opponents,” and notes that secrecy in government has gotten so bad that the parliamentary budget officer recently warned that MPs are increasingly unable to do their jobs because they’re denied vital information.

Andrew Coyne at Maclean’s agrees with Michael Ignatieff that the Oda scandal is nothing less than a test of our democracy. Ministers occasionally slip up or even lie, he writes, but “when they are caught, when the jig is up, when there are no longer any lies to be told, it is to be expected — it has always been expected — that consequences should follow. At the least, one could expect the government to acknowledge that what she did was wrong — or at the very least, to acknowledge that she did it.” So far Harper has made no such admission, and Coyne says that it is now not only Oda and Harper’s credibility that is at stake, but Parliament’s. If it allows this outrage to stand, it will have failed in its task of holding elected officials to account and be reduced to a “moral farce.” Strong stuff from Coyne, and right on the money.