Desperately seeking scandal

The Federal Liberals are rooting around like pigs searching the forest floor for truffles, as they attempt to find some scandal, no matter how trite or trivial they can hang on Stephen Harper's Conservatives. The hapless and inept Stephane Dion, in an effort to save his flagging leadership, has pressed Stephen Harper to call a public inquiry on the Mulroney/Schreiber Airbus affair. Some of you may not remember what that was all about, as the events transpired in 1988, which is nearly twenty years ago.

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Suffice it to say that all of this smacks of desperation, as several other initiatives to hang dirt on the Conservatives are also under way. Chief among these is a legal confrontation between Elections Canada and a group of Conservative MPs. Elections Canada is disallowing the 60% election expense rebates that these MPs are claiming because Elections Canada alleges that the ads for which the rebates are being requested bolstered the Conservative Party of Canada, rather than the individual candidates. Dion believes that he's died and gone to heaven, as all of a sudden he has cause to accuse the Conservatives of breaking the law by spending $1.2 million more than they were entitled to spend under the Elections Canada rules. Only problem is that as far as scandals goes, this one is about as lame as they come. First of all, the Conservative MPs filed court papers this week that show the other parties are guilty of the same thing. The papers contain examples of 100 other campaigns, ranging from the Bloc to the Liberals, where the candidates essentially did the same thing that the Conservatives are accused of doing. Among other things, the court papers state that all the Liberal candidates ran ads in New Brunswick during the last election that were totally national in nature, except that they carried the names of the individual candidates, which the Conservative ads did as well. In point of fact, the Liberal Party of Canada transferred some $1.7 million to local Liberal candidates during the last election and billed local candidates just $1.3 million for items provided to them. This is particularly ironic in that the Doberman pinscher leading the current attack against the Conservatives in Parliament is none other than, you guessed it, a Liberal MP from New Brunswick named Dominic LeBlanc. It's one of those cases of where the pot is calling the kettle black. Why Elections Canada is quibbling with the Conservative MPs over the rebates, while paying the other parties' candidates without serious scrutiny is a mystery. One can only assume that the people running Elections Canada have a vested interest in making the Conservatives look bad. Is it possible that the previous Liberal government appointed the Elections Canada bosses and this is a way to show gratitude for their jobs? Just asking. Not wishing to be too partisan, my advice to Stephane Dion would be to avoid the "S" word at all costs, as the Liberals have a definite edge on any other party in Canada when it comes to skullduggery. The Chretien years, during which the current Liberal leader was a cabinet minister, has had a lot to answer for ranging from pepper-spraying legal protesters, to HRDC giving away one billion dollars without properly documenting how that was used, to outright stealing over $200 million of taxpayers' money. None of these scandals ended up with anyone in power actually being held accountable. In fact, I'm still waiting for the cops to charge the Liberal politicians that stole the $200 million, although I won't hold my breath. If a political party is so bereft of fresh new ideas that their only hope of regaining power lies in making their opponents look bad, then there's a definite problem. Rather than dumpster diving into other parties' dirt, the Liberals would be much better off coming up with and election platform that isn't based on the idea that "the others guys are worse than we are".