Finally, A Sex and Money Scandal

Lying to Parliament? No biggie. Dating a hooker? That shall not stand!

“When I wrote earlier this week that the stickiest political scandals involve sex and money, I wasn’t suggesting that the Harper government actually get embroiled in one,” says Tasha Kheiriddin on her National Post blog. “But apparently someone was listening.” Bruce Carson, a former Conservative aide with close ties to Stephen Harper, is suspected of illegally lobbying the government to accept a contract to sell water filtration systems to First Nations reserves. His 22-year-old girlfriend was an agent for the filtration company and would have made big money on the contract. And she’s a former sex worker, to boot. “Until the Carson tale came to light, the Tories’ trail of scandalettes hadn’t tripped them up; the polls still show the party with a healthy lead. But this story has the power to stick in the public’s imagination, because it’s easy to explain and, well, icky.”

Sun Media’s Brian Lilley arrives late to the party and declares that the Carson story means that there will be a spring election after all.

This blurb in the Ottawa Citizen reviewing Carson’s checkered past makes one wonder how he was allowed within a mile of the Prime Minister’s Office. In 1980, Carson was fired from a law firm for allegedly forging a client’s signature on a cheque, disbarred for misappropriating $24,000, eventually pleaded guilty to theft and forgery, and sentenced to 18 months in jail. This guy had trouble written all over him.

On his Maclean’s blog, Paul Wells rightly points out that the real scandal here is that five years after it announced “immediate action” on cleaning up First Nations water supplies, the Harper government has done virtually nothing and people in isolated communities are still drinking dirty water.

The irony here is that out of all the controversies to hit the Conservatives, this one arguably shouldn't be fatal. The villain in the piece was no longer in government, unlike the two Tory senators recently charged with violating election laws in the campaign that brought the government to power. But this controversy has all the right keywords: hooker, money, Harper. Not much else matters, apparently.