One of these days, Canada will be headed by a really fiscally conservative government. And the first thing that that government will do when they come into office is to have a public inquiry into why we have so many public inquiries.
It seems to be a national sport in Ottawa; nothing is too small for the opposition parties to jump up and demand a public inquiry.
It is hard to justify most inquires; even the Air India inquiry, which at least appears to have merit. That multi-million examination into what happened is likely to come up with conclusions that we are already aware of. There was a total screw up by the RCMP (surprise, surprise) and the newly created CSIS. And the terrorist act would have been taken seriously if most of the passengers had been white and therefore looked to be “Canadian”.
Now with the Christmas holiday slowdown in Ottawa, the opposition parties are screaming for a public inquiry into former PM Brian Mulroney’s dealings with German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. Jack Layton wants one to stop the influence of money in politics as if that is ever likely to happen. And Stéphane Dion thinks we should spend the big bucks to look into the integrity of the office of the prime minister. Only the lackluster Liberal leader could come up with a weaker argument for dinging the taxpayers for an inquiry than Jack could. We elect people to represent us and they either have integrity or they don’t. There is nothing that can be done to ensure that an elected official, either an MP or a party leader has integrity. You put an “x” beside a name and you takes your chances. That’s democracy.
There is nothing new that we could possibly learn from holding an expensive inquiry into the former prime minister’s dealings with Schreiber. Brian has his story down pat and no amount of probing will tell us conclusively whether his version of the events is the truth or another manifestation of lyin’ Brian. And Karlheinz Schreiber has already made so many conflicting statements that anything he could say is totally unreliable. As far as getting any smoking gun revelations from him as he’s already said; he may be ugly but he’s not stupid. Any inquiry that is held may provide a few juicy tidbits for the opposition to use but there will hardly be any benefit to Canadians.
Stephen Harper has the most to gain if an inquiry is held. It could turn out to be the worst scandal of the Harper years in government, in which case the Conservatives will come out looking pretty good. There is nothing to link the present government with Schreiber except the businessman’s statement that he sent a letter to Harper that Harper said he never got. A letter getting lost in the bowels of the bureaucracy; what are the odds?
Schreiber only brought Harper into the mix to give the government an incentive to keep him in Canada rather than extradite him to Germany to face fraud charges. The opposition; those on the left who live by the rule that the end justifies the means will attempt to link Harper and the present government with guilt by association. Harper is close to Mulroney. And the father of the current Minister of Defense supposedly drafted the letter that Schreiber wanted sent to Harper. Canadians are too fair to draw any adverse inference against the Tories based on these connections. Then again, it’s nice to Steffi talk about something other than global warming and the environment. And some of us thought that he was just a one trick pony.
This is hardly Adscam and any attempt to make it look so simply because envelopes of cash were exchanged will fail.
When calling for this public inquiry, at least Stéphane Dion let us know what he thinks of us, the voters. Dion threatened to bring down the government and ended up having his party abstain in a confidence vote because we the people didn’t want an election. The people rule! Current polls suggest that Canadians have little or no interest in this matter yet what Canadians want is not a consideration in calling for yet another public inquiry. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Other than keeping Brian Mulroney in the spotlight and enabling him to sell more books and entertaining the media with the Brian and Karlheinz Show, nothing can be gained by holding a public inquiry.
