On Friday, MP Dean Del Mastro — late of the Conservative caucus, lately an independent — was found guilty on all counts by Justice Lisa Cameron in his election expenses trial. It turns out he did “overspend” (read “cheat”) in the 2008 federal election.
How did he do it? By making a personal contribution of $21,000 to his own campaign … and, uh, failing to report it. By knowingly submitting a falsified document to Elections Canada. And in my books, he kept up the charade that he had done nothing wrong by lying his brains out for years.
Remember the lengths to which the now convicted election fraudster went to deny any wrongdoing on his behalf? He accused Elections Canada of investigating him without his knowledge. Lifting a page from the O.J. Simpson book of Hail Mary legal theatrics, he accused his accusers.
“I think there are a lot of very serious questions for Elections Canada to answer on this, with respect to the fact that apparently — not that they will confirm it — they are looking into something like this, when the first call upon receiving the complaint should have been to me, and allowing me to go through things with them and to go through records, and see if there are any questions that remain,” he told Postmedia’s Stephen Maher and Glenn McGregor.
At one point, Del Mastro complained that his privileges as a Member of Parliament had been breached by the mere fact that EC was investigating his election expenses. This, despite the fact that EC already possessed time-stamped logs recording $21,000 in voter identification calls not declared in Del Mastro’s election expenses.
In fact, one of the things noted by Judge Cameron in rendering her verdict was Del Mastro’s lack of credibility. She noted how he obfuscated the evidence and avoided telling the truth on the stand. In some cases, he left questions asked on cross-examination ignored and unanswered. While such tactics are grounds for promotion in the Harper government, they are not traits that generally end well when you are under oath in court.
What makes this even more farcical is how the prime minister has — again — demonstrated his appalling judgement on major appointments. He made Dean Del Mastro his parliamentary secretary. And despite demands from the opposition that Del Mastro step down while he was being investigated, Harper kept him on until he was formally charged by Elections Canada.
That’s right. The same acute eye for talent that put Arthur Porter (now languishing in a Panamanian jail) in charge of oversight for CSIS — that tapped Bruce Carson a senior policy advisor and appointed two senators now facing criminal charges — has struck again. Del Mastro is further proof the PM should start outsourcing his staffing requirements — maybe to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
But wait, there’s more. Harper also named Slick Deano as the government’s pitbull to defend the government from charges of voter fraud in the yet-to-be resolved Robocalls scandal. In other words, the MP specifically chosen to fend off allegations of voter fraud against the CPC was himself under investigation by Elections Canada.
Was the PM trying to tell us something?
Del Mastro was also the guy chosen by the PM to explain to the media why former cabinet minister Helena Guergis had been flicked from the party. This explanation was delivered — paradoxically — after Guergis and her husband Rahim Jaffer had been completely exonerated of any wrongdoing after a barrage of allegations was sent to the RCMP by the prime minister himself. Seven Mounties investigated the couple for three months. The RCMP report should have been her ticket back into caucus. Instead, she got the word that she was getting the boot from, of all people, Del Mastro.
“Dean Del Mastro came out of caucus and gave an interview where he said that there was a standard in the Conservative caucus that I didn’t meet,” Guergis told me. “He knew what was coming down the pike for him — they knew even before the 2011 election — and he said that! I let him have it.”
Now, of course, Dean Del Mastro himself doesn’t meet the “standard” set for membership in the Conservative caucus. But it is oh so much more important than that. With Del Mastro’s conviction, members of Stephen Harper’s party have been convicted of cheating in each of the three elections it has won.
In 2006, the CPC used an accounting scam — moving money in and out of local and national accounts — that allowed the party to spend a million dollars more than the spending limits allowed. This became known as the In-and-Out scandal, which resulted in charges five years later. Here’s how one of the reporters who broke the story, Glenn McGregor, described it:
“We had a confession of wrongdoing by the Conservative Party in a deliberate attempt to stealthily violate the election rules to their advantage. This scheme involved some of the highest officials in the Party. I believe it changed the course of the election.”
In 2011, Harper cabinet minister Peter Penashue was forced to resign and run in a by-election after an Elections Canada investigation found that he had accepted illegal contributions in 2011 and overspent his campaign limits. The woman who beat him in the by-election, Liberal Yvonne Jones, described the outcome this way: “People are tired of the fearmongering. They were tired of the attack ads. They were tired of the lies.”
With Del Mastro’s four-count conviction this week arising out of the 2008 election, you have to wonder what the Conservatives have in mind for 2015.
Whatever it is, the Fair Elections Act — which weakened, rather than fortified, Elections Canada — should make it a little easier to pull off.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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