Even Saint Stephen trips on ethical carpet
Sunday, April 1, 2007
about closing the barn door way too late.
Earlier this week — on Boxing Day, for those of you who were, like the majority, either shopping, cleaning up or relaxing — the federal government announced its own big oops very, very quietly.
Seems the paragons of political virtue, the ones who rode to a minority victory on the coattails of some really questionable Liberal ethics, got caught in their own ethical mess.
If only the darn opposition parties hadn’t scuttled the Tory-planned amendments to the political-contributions part of the Canada Election Act. All Stephen Harper and his buddies wanted to do was change it so that delegate fees to political conventions aren’t considered donations.
Give money to a political party to be able to attend its partisan gatherings — that sure sounds like donating money to the cause, doesn’t it? It turns out the Conservatives forgot to report almost $3 million in its 2005 filing with Elections Canada. That amount includes $539,915 in unreported donations, $913,710 in “other revenue” — whatever that might be — and $1.45 million in “other expenses.”
And about 3,000 Conservative party supporters will have to refile their 2005 income taxes to claim a tax credit for these overlooked donations.
The prime minister himself broke the law limiting the amount of annual political contributions a person can make and, after the books were redone, ended up with a rebate of $456 from his party, as did two other convention delegates who gave too much to the cause.
The official word, which backs up the attempt to change the act, was that the Conservatives don’t think the average taxpaying Canadian should have to subsidize the costs of political conventions. The Conservatives went on to imply that they didn’t ignore the rules — it’s just that this little requirement to count convention costs as donations was fairly new.
Not so, says Election Canada. It’s been that way for decades.
The truly galling aspect of this fiasco is the Conservatives knew last summer they hadn’t complied with the law, when one of their own — Treasury Board president John Baird — told a Senate committee that the costs weren’t being included as donations. (This is the same John Baird who has been after the civil servant who was told, during the crisis in Lebanon in the summer, to get the 15,000 Canadians stranded there out as soon as possible and at whatever the cost might be. The largest Canadian evacuation from a country in history ended up costing many millions of dollars, and Baird seems to have a problem with this. And it’s the same John Baird who criticized the Senate for taking its time to review the much-heralded Conservative showpiece, the Accountability Act, accusing the upper body of interfering with the will of Parliament — read here: Conservative government.)
But I digress.
It seems to happen a lot when I consider some of the strange actions of the governing federal party. One oops leads to another one, which leads to . . . you get the idea.
This tiny tempest may not seem to matter much to those of us who don’t belong to political parties, and who don’t shell out the big bucks to attend their conventions and have a say in how these parties will be run. But it should. It’s indicative of either willful ignorance or outright defiance of the laws of the land — something the Conservative government has been rightly accusing the Liberal party of doing as well.
And it’s proof that Stephen Harper and his group of cheerleaders are just as capable as any other politician of tripping on the ethical carpet — and then trying to sweep the mess under it.
Well said.