A Strong, Scandalous Majority Government

In which the Conservatives start to look more and more like their predecessors every day.

The Conservative government's scandalometer has been rising steadily ever since they won a majority, with revelations about Defence Minister Peter MacKay's private use of a military search-and-rescue helicopter being just the latest to lead to tongue-clucking and forehead-slapping throughout Ottawa. The St. John's Telegram's editorialists proclaim that MacKay's lie excuse for why he used the helicopter – that he was merely following up on a longstanding request from the military to go on a search-and-rescue mission – as "insult added to injury." As in so many other scandals, it's rarely the original sin that ticks off voters (and especially columnists) – it's the attempted cover-up that has MacKay in hot water. The Telegram says much the same about another scandal, in which the Tories were found out to have spread rumours around Liberal MP Irwin Cotler's Montreal riding, calling constituents and telling them that the venerable former justice minister was about to retire. House Speaker Peter Van Loan defended the practice as falling under "freedom of speech" – hardly the first time that freedom's been used to cover up borderline illegal practices.

So, what must the Tories be thinking to utter such falsehoods on the floor of Parliament? Well, it’s a long time until the next election, and you can be guaranteed that they are depending on the usual short memories of the electorate. "Six months down the road, they’re probably thinking, the lies will seem as much like ancient history as cuneiform writing does," sigh the editorialists. Recent history suggests that sentiment will probably be the only truth coming out of this debacle.

Alec Bruce of the Moncton Times & Transcript pens a hilarious piece of satire, singing MacKay's praises for "risking life and limb to demonstrate that not all of our aging whirlybirds drop from the sky like luggage in a samsonite commercial." Bruce then urges "Infrastructure Minister Denis Lebel [to] spend some quality time traversing Montreal's honeycomb of aging bridges, overpasses and tunnels to personally ascertain the number of vehicles required to dislodge a 15-tonne block of concrete from its mooring" and for Environment Minister Peter Kent to drink the water and eat the fish found in the Athabaska River near the Alberta oil sands. The coup de grace is a "rumour" that MacKay might join the army in time for the next war so that he can "test the quality of government services provided to returning veterans, among the ranks of which he will count himself." Whoever said satire is dead in this country?

Over at the National Post, Chris Selley warns the party in power that the steady accumulation of all these scandals, from Bev Oda's "'not' of disputed parentage" to Tony Clement's questionable spending of $50 million in his riding, are starting to resonate with the public at large. "Dead-obvious pork and sadsack denials of pork tend to rise above partisanship and upset everyone," writes Selley. "This isn't arcane trivia. It's the sort of thing that has always gotten Canadians' blood boiling, and always will.... [W]ith the sense of entitlement apparent in these big-name Tories, mere months into their majority, is there any reason to believe the G8 spending fiasco will represent rock bottom?" We're not in the prognostication business, but the G8 issue ought to have been enough to sink a government – and failing that, at least a cabinet minister or two. (Surely there are a healthy number of Liberals, both current and former, who must be hitting themselves for forcing an election so early in the year.) The Tories have three-and-a-half more years before the next election. That's plenty of time for them to correct their more arrogant tendencies, but if the past five years are any indication, the only correcting they will be doing will be inserting more words of disputed parentage into government memos.