Forget 'hidden agendas' – the robocalls are consistent with how the Conservatives have governed.The fact that the Conservative party engaged in an organized and systematic voter-suppression campaign last spring should not come as a shocking revelation. This is the way politics now works in Canada. It is ugly and sordid, and what we heard last week only scratches the surface.
The Conservatives didn’t invent dirty tricks. And the Liberals are far from pure as the driven snow. Just this week, interim Liberal leader Bob Rae was forced to admit that a Liberal party staffer was behind Vikileaks, the Twitter account that posted private details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ life. Rae’s apology was swift and graceful. What a Liberal staffer did was repugnant and there can be no excuse for it. One has to wonder whether this junior staffer was freelancing, whether he told anyone about what he was doing, and whether any members of caucus were aware of it. Bob Rae should get to the bottom of those questions immediately.
If the Liberal Party of Canada is to have any credibility taking on the issue of cleaning up Ottawa, it ought to come clean and acknowledge the role it has played in debasing our political culture over the years. Only then can the page be turned.
Technological advances (in the form of social-media platforms, marketing methods, and other dirty tricks like robocalls) have only magnified what most people already assume about politics – that it is intrinsically sleazy and dirty. In a real way, our collective sense that this “is just the way politicians are” and that “they’re all the same” has anaesthetized us to what’s going on.
Even at their most conniving, however, the Liberals can never hold a candle to the Harper Conservatives in the dirty-tricks business. The Conservatives are on the cutting-edge: They have taken the black arts of the political trade to an entirely new level of technological sophistication, organizational rigour, and discipline.
As the most recent revelation in the robocalls scandal shows, Conservative campaign operatives make widespread use of cheap and easy-to-use cellular technology for phones and internet connections. The fraudulent robocall that misdirected voters in Guelph seems to have come from a disposable "burner" cellphone registered to one Pierre Poutine, on Separatist Street, in Joliette, Que. But the Tories have also allegedly used cellular scrambling technology to block out signals, and virtually shut down the campaign operations, of their opponents. The Bloc Québécois likely don’t know what hit them, but they lost a very close race to the Conservatives in the Rivière-du-Loup bi-election of 2009. Reporters should ask them if they ever had any problems with unexplained interruptions of their cellular phone service, especially on voting day.
To understand Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s party and how it operates, watch Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. This compelling documentary chronicles the career of Lee Atwater, the most infamous Republican operative. Atwater, mentor to Republican strategist Karl Rove, was the crown prince of dirty tricks, pioneering lies, and hatchet jobs disguised as political advertising to win elections. His bag of tricks included voter suppression and “push-pull” polling, which the Harper Conservatives have also favoured, and deployed to good effect in my riding.
Today’s Conservative party has been run on this playbook. Distraction, subterfuge, fabrication, obfuscation, surprise, overwhelming force, and the mandate to divide and conquer all figure prominently in Harper’s tool kit. We’ve seen these tactics in countless campaigns, and for six years in the House of Commons. The purpose is to shore up their flanks while destabilizing, weakening, and demoralizing the opposition. If the Conservatives didn’t write the book, they have certainly become masters and feared practitioners. Lee Atwater would be very proud.
We know that negative advertising and campaigning – which takes many forms and uses a variety of techniques – suppresses voter turnout. For instance, the Harper Conservatives took dead aim at then Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff through thousands of paid advertisements that framed them negatively in the minds of Canadians. They began their campaigns to annihilate Dion and Ignatieff before they even had a chance to warm the seats in their new office. These attack ads, of course, were made possible by taxpayer-subsidized funding.
Were the Conservatives’ actions in this case fair, honest, ethical, and in the interest of serious democratic debate? Of course not. This was unprecedented in, and an outright perversion of, Canadian democracy. While the attack ads did not violate any laws, no fair-minded person would call this anything other than what it was: a systematic character assassination of two good men, and a clear instance of organized voter suppression.
Deliberate falsehoods are part of the Conservative arsenal. Political scientist Tom Flanagan acknowledged that back in 2009 when he told an interviewer: “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible.” Think about those words for a minute. It is a remarkable admission from one of Harper’s closest friends, his mentor, his comrade in arms, and his former chief of staff. This is how Harper and his Conservatives actually think. Why, then, should we be shocked to learn that the Harper Conservatives have once again engaged in organized voter suppression?
Last week, in the latest instalment of “I knew nothing about this,” Canada’s prime minister threw a poor 23-year-old under the bus. We can be sure that a junior staffer did not take it upon himself to organize and pay for a concerted robocall campaign in multiple ridings across Canada. There’s a war room inside a war room at Conservative party central in Ottawa that does all of that, and a whole lot more. No more than five people – those at the very top of the pyramid – know the real secrets of the Conservative party and how it runs elections. And it’s no great mystery who they are.
The Conservatives’ dirty tricks are not limited to election politics. Intimidation is a fact of life in the constellation of Harper’s Ottawa and our national governance. They have destroyed public-service careers that we’ll never hear about. It is a testament to the professionalism of our public servants that we have not seen more brown envelopes from bureaucrats. But they are seething, for very good reason, at the conduct of “The Harper Government.”
They have fired and cast aspersions on many Crown Corporation heads, including me, and my board. They have successfully discredited people who were doing nothing more than their jobs on behalf of taxpayers. They have tarnished the reputations of cabinet appointments. They have besmirched Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer. And, in case you thought they couldn’t get any lower, they even dragged the former head of Statistics Canada and the veterans ombudsman through the mud.
I filed two complaints with Elections Canada myself last May over Conservative dirty tricks. I also launched a lawsuit against Conservative MP John Weston in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. There is little I can say about that suit at this time. However, this is the same John Weston who published a December 2007 “advertorial” calling for the resignation of his opponent, then Liberal MP Blair Wilson, because of “an Elections Canada investigation of serious allegations” against Wilson. Those “allegations” were based on an anonymous letter published online by a Conservative blogger, and republished in Vancouver’s The Province. Elections Canada later made it clear that there was no such investigation.
When Wilson later obtained an Elections Canada audit to clear the air, there were some minor irregularities but nothing of a serious nature. The identity of the source of the lie has been making its way through the court system – slowly. A Supreme Court judge made the decision requiring the disclosure of the “anonymous source” in December 2010, and the Court of Appeal has reserved judgment on this appeal since last March.
Delay, confuse, delay. This is something the Conservatives do well. They have the money, so they can afford to do it. Most people do not have the same kind of money, and want to get on with their lives. The Conservatives count on that, too. When they come up against someone like Blair Wilson, they can only fight the inevitable with expensive appeals, hoping by the time the truth comes out no one will care.
Harper has governed with exactly the same formula that he uses to run elections. Make no mistake: He will never leave fingerprints on dirty tricks. But his unmistakable signature is everywhere. The culture he has worked tirelessly to mould in government is dominated by reinforcing mindsets anchored in a sense of grievance, suspicion, insecurity, fear, and vengeance.
Liberals have never really understood Harper, and go around wailing about his “secret neo-conservative agenda.” Yet, when you take an objective look at the record, what becomes clear is that Harper doesn’t have an agenda – secret or otherwise – and never did. The only agenda that ever mattered to Harper is acquiring power and keeping it. In other words, Harper is fundamentally an opportunist, not an ideologue. The objective record is conclusive: He is no better than a schoolyard thug.
What is most nauseating about the Harper Conservatives is their sanctimonious hypocrisy. They cloak themselves in the rhetoric of “integrity” and their religious “faith.” It is all baloney. Their pompous, self-righteous, and contrived “virtue” is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. They went to Ottawa on their high horses of “honesty, accountability, and openness,” but, once there, they gave Parliament and the people of Canada the Bronx salute.
Unfortunately, the best thing Conservatives have had going for them is an unfocused, shrill, and flailing opposition, which includes my own party, the Liberals. For six years, we have utterly failed to hold the government accountable on the core issues that truly matter to Canadians – the economic ones. That has been a godsend to the Harper Conservatives, and they know it. But their luck won’t last much longer.
Liberals should take the sensible and responsible path and allow Elections Canada and the RCMP to conduct their investigations. They should be conducted without the overhang of partisan posturing – at least from us. I would prefer that Liberals not contribute to making the House of Commons more of a circus than it already is. There will be plenty of time to hold the government accountable when the facts are in.
In the meantime, there’s a cancer growing at the heart of the Canadian political system. It is corrosive. It is debilitating. It is doing harm to the country. And it must stop. Absent a new wave of decency and conscience in the nation’s capital, the only way to do that is to be ready to offer a fresh and serious alternative.
Original Article
Source: the mark
Author: Daniel D. Veniez
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