Northman's Fury

CathiefromCanada has a nice round-up of stories on the Mulroney affair and how Harper has been flopping like a fish out of water while trying to resist putting the matter to an inquiry.

Incredible in some ways. The Conservatives just dropped the proverbial pre-election bribery budget, have launched their fifth series of attack ads against Stephane Dion, which has resulted in their leader looking far better in comparison, and despite all of that, they've actually dropped into a tie with the Liberals nationally.

“Two weeks ago, when they had their mini-budget, with billions and billions of tax cuts, they couldn't have imagined that the Canadian public would thank them by seeing their numbers drop,” he said.

Apparently, bribery attempts just don't get the reaction they used to. I'm impressed.

Of course, it doesn't help that they're dealing with the fact that Harper and the Great Satan of Canadian politics Mulroney were close friends; that they have issues with riding associations choosing their own candidates; that they've taken a "we don't mind other countries killing Canadians" approach to death penalty cases; and keep showing a far better grasp of rhetoric and little in the way of action for most of their other promises. That kind of stuff is bound to catch up to you eventually, regardless how much you hound the opposition leader.

The federal Conservative party has quietly settled a lawsuit with a disgruntled former candidate but now faces the possibility of two fresh legal challenges.

Lawyer Alan Riddell, who was stripped of his Tory candidacy in 2005, settled his libel suit against Prime Minister Stephen Harper and party president Don Plett out of court, the party said in a terse, one-line statement on the weekend.

. . .

The Riddell case dates to the fall of 2005 when the Conservative party decided it wanted to replace its candidate in Ottawa South with Allan Cutler, a former bureaucrat who blew the whistle on the sponsorship scandal.

After repeatedly attempting to disqualify Riddell, who'd run for the Tories in the 2004 election, the party agreed to reimburse him $50,000 in expenses if he would step down voluntarily.

They subsequently refused to pay when the arrangement became public knowledge, and Harper flatly denied in public that any such deal between the party and Riddell had been made.

Riddell sued for libel, essentially arguing the prime minister had accused him of being a liar.

The party released a single-line statement on the weekend, dated Friday, saying they had "mutually settled all legal proceedings."

One down, and two more on the way for their dismissal of two other riding candidates, which I’ve already covered to some extent.

If the two former candidates do file suit, it would mark another legal chapter for Conservative party lawyers who have seldom lacked for work in the last two years.

It's an unlikely twist for a party whose 2006 election platform promised to "ensure that party nomination and leadership races are conducted in a fair, transparent and democratic manner" and "prevent party leaders from appointing candidates without the democratic consent of local electoral district associations."

A bitter court battle over the nomination process in Calgary West, the riding of Conservative MP Rob Anders, ground on for months and eventually compelled Anders to repeat the nomination process last spring.

Just last month, the party replaced the riding executive in a Nova Scotia riding after the existing members pledged their continuing support for Independent MP Bill Casey, who was expelled from the Conservative caucus for voting against a budget measure.

And they don’t even mention the work those Conservative lawyers must be doing to defend the party from their campaign spending scandal.

As far as it being an unlikely twist, if only.  It has long been apparent that the Conservative party is to serve the interests of its leadership, not its constituents.  From the very beginning Harper has worked to crush any dissenting opinions and restrict members’ ability to communicate any opinions outside of what he personally approves.

Slapping down local riding committees so he can put his own people in the running isn’t out of character.

Regimental Sergeant Major Robert Girouard
Corporal Albert Storm
Corporal Kevin Megeney
Corporal Brent Poland
Corporal Paul Stannix
Corporal Aaron Williams
Sergeant Donald Lucas
Private Kevin Kennedy
Private David Greenslade
Master Corporal Allan Stewart
Trooper Patrick Pentland
Master Corporal Anthony Klumpenhower
Corporal Matthew McCully
Master Corporal Darrell Priede
Trooper Darryl Caswell
Sergeant Christos Karigiannis
Corporal Stephen Bouzane
Private Joel Wiebe
Captain Jefferson Francis
Captain Matthew Dawe
Master Corporal Colin Bason
Corporal Jordan Anderson
Corporal Cole Bartsch
Private Lane Watkins
Private Simon Longtin
Master Warrant Officer Mario Mercier
Master Corporal Christian Duchesne
Major Raymond Ruckpaul
Corporal Nathan Hornburg

I've already mused about why the RCMP shut down any investigation of Brain Mulroney when, after he had sworn under oath that he had no dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber and received a hefty payment from Canadian taxpayers for libel, ultimately admitted to receiving $300,000.00 in cash from Schreiber for "business dealings" of some sort a couple years later.

Now we have our current Conservative PM Harper warning that it would be "dangerous" to call for an inquiry into this matter.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has dismissed calls by opposition parties for a public inquiry into reports about cash payments made to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, saying allowing the government to launch probes against former political adversaries was "extremely dangerous."

"Do they really want to say that I, as prime minister, should have a free hand to launch inquiries against my predecessors?" Harper asked reporters Friday in Halifax following a speech to the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

. . .

Harper also issued a thinly-veiled warning to the Liberals, saying he could use the opportunity to investigate former prime minister Jean Chrétien's involvement in the controversial sale of a golf course in his Quebec riding — even though the justice system has already dealt with the matter.

In 2000, former ethics counsellor Howard Wilson ruled Chrétien did not violate existing conflict-of-interest rules.

Or, Harper said, he could also launch an inquiry to look into Paul Martin's involvement with Canada Steamship Lines, a company Martin held in trust and later handed to his sons while he was prime minister.

Of course, it isn't like the Conservatives haven't used these issues to attack the Liberals already. I'm sure if there was any way to milk more out of those dealings, Harper would have already done so. And I'm hard-pressed to see the similarity between those business dealings and someone receiving massive amounts of cash in hotel rooms and then lying under oath about it.

And that's not the unusual thing about this; Harper issuing threats and bully-boy tactics are par for the course at this point. What's unusual is Harper pretending that the opposition is asking for some unusual expansion of government powers by asking for the inquiry. Because I remember this little thing former PM Paul Martin started called the Gomery inquiry, the findings of which the Conservatives made great use of. Harper already has the power to look into his predecessors' activities.

So just what is Harper afraid an inquiry into Mulroney's activities is going to find?

The federal Conservatives have ousted their candidate for Toronto Centre, 43-year-old international-trade lawyer Mark Warner, and he says it's because he wanted to play up urban and social issues that are at odds with the master Conservative campaign strategy.

"We've had, for a number of months, a series of differences between our campaign and the national campaign, over the degree to which I could run a campaign that would focus on the kind of issues that matter in a downtown urban riding," Warner told the Star.

Conservative officials have been actively resisting Warner's emphasis on housing, health care and cities issues, he said, even blocking him from participating in a Star forum on poverty earlier this year and pointedly removing from his campaign literature a reference to the 2006 international conference on AIDS in Toronto – which Warner attended but Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not.

. . .

"Well let me just simply say this; that in a national campaign, that is exactly what it is – a national campaign. There are certain things that we expect all of our candidates to do in a national campaign," Plett told the Star yesterday.

These guys are less than subtle in ensuring that candidates toe the party line, having turfed Garth Turner, (who admittedly is a bit of loudmouth), then Bill Casey, who tried to look after his constituents needs, and going so far as to suspend the riding association when they sided with him.

Now they’ve kicked out one candidate for, again, focusing his campaign on issues his constituents actually care about, and another for somewhat reasons even less defensible:

Another candidate, Brent Barr, in Guelph, has also been disallowed from running, Plett said.

Barr, like Warner, is shocked and angry – furious at being told he wasn't campaigning enough and, more importantly, that he was failing to enter information from his canvassing into the central party information registry.

I’ve already made my feelings about that registry quite clear, so I won’t bother reiterating, but it still burns me considerably that they’re willing to turf somebody from the party for failing to go along with it.

"The Conservative party that I'm from doesn't remove a duly nominated candidate. It's supposed to be based on grassroots principles," Barr said.

Unfortunately for Mr. Barr, and for the rest of us, the Conservative party has abandoned all of the conservative principles that once drew me to conservatism.  Instead of principles, it has decided to pander to the base and pursue power, and screw whomever gets in their way.