Bev Oda: Ottawa's Mini-Mubarak

The op-ed pages continue to resound with calls for Bev Oda to resign.

In the Toronto Star Chantal Hébert declares that the Oda affair should by all rights spell the end of the Conservative government. She has no doubts that “[i]f Harper was the leader of the official opposition, he would already be taking steps to withdraw the confidence of the House from the government,” just as he did when the sponsorship scandal was about to hit the Liberal government in 2005. The Liberals have already made grumblings about bringing the government down over corporate tax cuts, but Hébert says surely Harper’s apparent lack of concern about one of his own ministers lying to Parliament is an even better reason to force an election.

“Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff appears to have discovered his backbone,” writes the Ottawa Citizen’s Susan Riley, “either that, or taken some mad vow to go down fighting.” Not only has Iggy seized on the Oda scandal, calling it the Conservative’s “amateur hour,” but he’s finally come out swinging against the Tories’ “tough on crime” agenda, which he now refers to as “dumb on crime.” No doubt the Conservative campaign strategists are already writing TV ads portraying the Liberals as soft on crime, but there’s a lot of evidence to back their position and Riley surmises, “Maybe they've finally discovered they are going to be misrepresented … no matter what they do. So may as well do the right thing.” Ah, that’s politics for you: doing the right thing when it matters least.

The Globe and Mail’s editors, as is their obnoxious wont, attempt to look at the big picture and speculate about what effect the Oda affair is having on the aspirations of oppressed people everywhere yearning to be free. “Ms. Oda’s politically challenged position [at the head of the Canadian International Development Agency] makes it even more difficult to promote democracy overseas,” they write, “an historic Canadian strength, and an imperative, given the events reshaping the Arab world.” Obviously Oda’s contempt for Parliament is ironic considering the role of her agency is to promote good governance, but exactly why the Globe thinks Ottawa could otherwise singlehandedly shape the outcome of the Egyptian revolution is less clear.