In an abbreviated fall sitting, the House of Commons sat for just 34 days. Every one of them was a bad day for the Conservative government, except for the throne speech opening the new session, when there was no question period.
It’s not that the government didn’t set an agenda in the throne speech, one driven by consumer issues such as the cost of wireless phones. It even announced a significant achievement on the second day of the sitting — the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, which is a very big deal.
But on the same day, the Conservatives stepped on their own message by turning the Senate into a star chamber rather than one of sober second thought.
At issue were the ineligible travel and housing expenses of three senators appointed by Stephen Harper: Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau.
Rather than waiting for internal and outside audits, the Prime Minister’s Office suspended the presumption of innocence by having the Senate majority vote to suspend the three senators without pay. But not before giving them a microphone, as if longtime broadcasters Duffy and Wallin didn’t know how to use one.
Had the PMO left well enough alone, the first two weeks of the sitting, in the second half of October, would have been a walk-up to the party’s convention in Calgary. Instead, the Senate expense scandal dominated the news cycle.
The RCMP, investigating the Wright-Duffy affair, would have been heard from soon enough, and they certainly were, with an affidavit that blew up the storyline that Wright signed a personal cheque to Duffy for $90,000 without anyone else knowing about it.
It turned out that several other PMO and Conservative party insiders did know, so then the question became what the PM knew and when. For his part, Harper maintained that he had been kept in the dark all along. As for Wright, his former chief of staff, whose resignation he had accepted with regret in the spring, Harper said in the fall that Wright had been terminated, and that only his actions and Duffy’s were being investigated by the RCMP.
In question period, no one was buying it. In the role of grand inquisitor he was born to play, Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair totally dominated question period every day of the sitting. In his own behavioural terms, he has done a very good job of holding his famous temper in check, and he even revealed a wicked sense of humour. But it’s interesting that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, rather than Mulcair and the NDP, seem to have got a bounce in the polls. That may be because Mulcair is playing a hit man, and Canadians may not be inclined to vote for the guy with the gun.
Inside the Conservative party, there’s something else going on. For the first time, MPs and the rank and file are beginning to look past Harper. Not that he’s in a hurry to go anywhere. He’s announced his intention to run again in 2015, and in case anyone didn’t get that, he made the point two weeks ago by bringing back his former communications director, Dimitri Soudas, to be executive director of the Conservative party. He’s now surrounded by ultra-loyalists in both the PMO and the party.
But the PMO has badly mismanaged the Senate expense file, and Tory MPs are tired of being taken for granted by the kids in the hall at the Langevin Block. There is significant support on the Tory backbench for Michael Chong’s private member’s bill, the Reform Act, which would give significant powers to party caucuses.
In all, the fall sitting was utterly wretched for the Conservatives and the PM. In fairness, he did sound a lovely and appropriate grace note last week, on the death of Nelson Mandela. He invited former prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell, as well as Mulcair, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler and First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo, to join him on the long flight to South Africa. By all accounts, everyone got along famously.
There was a shared sense of occasion, for which Harper deserves full credit.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
