The Tories' Gomery Moment?

Charges brought against the Conservatives for the in-and-out funding scheme are trouble for the self-described party of law and order.

The CBC’s Don Newman speculates that charges laid against four Conservatives last week by Elections Canada could force Stephen Harper to forego plans to make party funding reform a major campaign issue, and could even make him determined to avoid a spring election. “For the Harper government, these charges could be a bit like the Gomery inquiry was for the Liberals in 2005,” says Newman. “Every court appearance will bring a recap of the allegations and the inevitable contrast with the Conservative's law and order, and good public management themes.” In this climate the prime minister might not want to go to the polls nor to bring up his own ideas of party financing reform on a regular basis, but the Newsroom would stop short of comparing the charges to the Gomery inquiry. The charges are regulatory, not criminal, and not nearly a big enough deal for most Canadians to send the Tories into a tailspin.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Andrew Cohen delivers a scathing portrait of one of the accused, Tory Senator Irving Gerstein, whom he describes as “an uber-partisan – fierce, proud, unapologetic, and unreconstructed.” As the Conservatives’ fundraising guru, Cohen says Gerstein’s disconnect with reality has reached levels rivaling that of Saddam Hussein’s information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, sending out donation appeals warning of terrifying socialist-separatist coalitions that threaten to rend the country in twain despite no such thing actually existing. “You have to occupy another dimension to see the world as darkly as Gerstein does,” writes Cohen. “When raising money, he … simply wants to clarify the choice: it's us or the Apocalypse!” The frustrating thing is that it works really well, Cohen says, and as a reward Gerstein was appointed to the Senate “where he continues to mount the ramparts and decry the Goths, Huns, Bolsheviks and other useful barbarians forever at the gate of Conservative Canada.” While we can certainly agree that the Conservatives’ fundraising missives are often the stuff of fantasy, for a guy complaining about overuse of hyperbole, Cohen’s no stranger to it himself.