Whether or not you believe senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau deserve to lose their jobs for abusing the public trust, the farce that passed for a hearing in the upper chamber last week is a disgrace to the values we hold dear, and Canadians should not stand for it.
What the Conservative majority sought to do in the Senate was neither a search for the truth nor an attempt to hold the three senators accountable for egregious misbehaviour. It was, and remains, a politically driven show trial, a kangaroo court reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, where the powers that be decide who is guilty or innocent, and then sit back and watch as their minions rubber-stamp those decisions.
Now we are learning that Senate Conservatives are looking for ways to go easy on Duffy and his colleagues, and you wonder what happened to the sound and fury about “gross negligence.”
Canadians were told in no uncertain terms that the trio has done something so egregious, we should just hang ’em high, due process be damned.
So what changed? Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau are no more or less guilty today than they were a week ago, but what has the Conservatives beating a retreat is that Canadians refused to go along with their high-handed approach to justice and fairness.
In their haste to get rid of a scandal that was damaging the party, Conservatives sought to use their majority to strong-arm the Senate into doing their bidding. They were hoping that horrified and angry as they are with the three senators, Canadians would swallow the bait. They were wrong.
Canadians still want to hold Duffy and his colleagues accountable, and if a poll were done today, I dare say a majority would want them out of the Senate. But they don’t want a kangaroo court dishing out the punishment.
The good thing is, Canadians recoiled. They don’t want a prime minister being so powerful as to dictate who stays in Parliament and who doesn’t. They also believe that everyone deserves their day in court.
There was no need for haste. The only reason for the rush to judgment was to save the party from ongoing embarrassment, and in their zeal to do what is right for the party, they forgot that quintessential Canadian value: fairness.
A party convention is due this weekend, and the prime minister doesn’t want Duffy looming large in his rear-view mirror. If there ever were any doubt that the whole Senate spectacle was about politics and not high principle, the Conservative climbdown should dispel it. But the word is that they’ll go easy on Brazeau and Wallin, but not Duffy, and it is easy to see why. The former broadcaster challenged Stephen Harper, and he is not getting any favours, which the party is clearly telegraphing to Canadians that it has the power to bestow.
The Senate rules on living expenses may be murky and arcane, but the ethical imperative is unmistakable: You don’t claim living expenses for a place you don’t live in, and if you do, you are fleecing taxpayers, and you have to face the music. However, the irony of this sorry spectacle — and an infuriating one at that — is how the brain trust in the Senate and the Prime Minister’s Office contrived to turn Wallin, Brazeau and, of all people, Duffy, into sympathetic figures.
These three should be on their knees doing mea culpas from one end of the country to the other, but astonishingly, thanks to the brilliant strategy of the PMO and its Senate allies, it is the Conservatives who are taking blame and suing for a deal. They are the ones backing down, looking for ways to end what has turned out to be a public-relations disaster.
How the prime minister and his advisers decided it was good politics to publicly humiliate the three senators, and punish them in this heavy-handed way, is hard to fathom.
However it ends, whenever it ends, no one comes out of this scandal with their reputations unsoiled. No one involved in this affair is totally believable. Their stories have changed over time. There’s a lot we still don’t know, and might never know.
The only good thing to come out of this scandal, if there is any good thing, is that some Conservative senators drew a line and spoke for what is right. Who knows, they might suffer for it. But it is when good people stay silent that things go wrong. Too few spoke out, but is heartening that Hugh Segal and Don Plett did.
Mohammed Adam is an Ottawa Citizen columnist.
