Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

 

Canadians normally go to the theater, cinema or arts center to watch a drama. These days they turn on the TV, read the papers, listen to the radio and, voilà, they end up watching a weird soap opera involving municipal and federal politicians.



Politics is, of course, a dirty business, even in democratic countries. But Canadians associate dirty politics with neighboring US. They see their own country as generally well governed. Still, some politicians misbehave and, at election time, voters toss them out. Then the pattern gets repeated.



On a municipal level, Toronto’s Mayor Robert Ford was described by Macleans’s magazine as “the greatest political train wreck of our time.” A columnist described him as “one of the most dangerous men in Canada.”



In recent months several city mayors in Quebec province have been tossed out and/or jailed because of corruption and misuse of office. But Ford remains the mayor of Ontario and Canada’s biggest city, Toronto. He was elected mayor in 2010 and vows to run again in 2014.



Ford has a long record of getting into trouble. In 1999 he was charged in Florida with drunk driving, paid a fine and had to do community service. In 2012 Judge Charles Hackland ruled that Ford had violated the municipal conflict of interest rules and barred him from office. Ford appealed and was reinstated. The matter is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.



In March 2013, former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson alleged that Ford had been impaired, had sexually groped her and propositioned her to visit him in Florida without his wife. Ford denied the allegations. He has also been accused of fraternizing with gangsters, some of whom have been arrested.



In August 2013, videos of the mayor being drunk in public appeared on YouTube. In October 2013, Toronto police chief Bill Blair announced the police had a video of the mayor smoking what looked like crack cocaine.



Earlier, Ford had denied such a video existed. Later, he admitted he had smoked marijuana and had been intoxicated in public. He promised to reform himself but says he won’t quit office. So the accusations and the drama continue.



At the federal level, things are not as shocking but they are quite bad. They involve Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau. They have been suspended because they filed tens of thousands of dollars in improper expense claims. The questions are whether the Prime Minister’s Office tried to cover up the scandal and how much did the prime minister know but did not disclose to the Parliament. Opposition parties are asserting that the prime minister is evading their questions and should testify under oath.



The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is alleging that the PM’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright breached the criminal code when he gave $90,000 to Duffy to repay the government and avoid a spending scandal. The prime minister is saying the payment was improper and that he fired Wright when he found out. But he had stated earlier that Wright had resigned and that he had accepted the resignation with reluctance.



The court records imply that Mr. Harper was informed that the Conservative party would repay Duffy’s expenses. In e-mails that have been released Wright says he would “speak to the PM before everything is considered final.” Later he wrote: “We are good to go from the PM.” Court records suggest that the PMO was involved though they do not say that the PM knew the details. The Conservative party had agreed to repay $32,000 but when it learned that the amount was $90,000, it balked. Wright said that he paid from his own funds to reimburse the taxpayers. He wrote that he acted “within the scope of my duties and remain confident that my actions were lawful.”



In addition, the RCMP states that the PMO influenced senators to change a Senate subcommittee report overseeing an audit into Duffy’s expenses “to reflect wording that the PMO wanted.”



The RCMP probe is continuing. The Opposition parties, understandably, are trying to discredit the government. The Conservative party caucus members seem united in supporting the prime minister but some dissidents are speaking out.



Davis Sachs, a prominent Conservative, has written:

 

“Some of the prime minister’s key people have conspired to undermine Senate investigations, to influence a third-party financial audit and ultimately to pay off a senator, all, in tragic irony, to maintain an illusion of party ethics. The prime minister has, in the kindest interpretation, hidden the full truth.”



Andrew Coyne, an astute national columnist, wrote: “It’s the general impression that we are being governed by a gang of thugs - secretive, high-handed, unprincipled gusting to unethical, and openly contemptuous of such quaint notions as democratic accountability - an impression that grows more baked-in each time the prime minister dodges a question in Parliament.” These are strong words, maybe somewhat unfair. Canadians can hardly wait to get the full truth.

 

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.