Upon George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004 as U.S. president, he proclaimed he had a lot of political capital and he intended to spend it. And spend he did — so much so that there was very little public esteem left a year before his final term ended.
Now that the autumn sitting of Canada’s Parliament is beyond the halfway point, Prime Minister Stephen Harper either thinks he has so much political capital that he can afford to squander it or that it doesn’t matter what he does with it because of the lack of an effective Opposition.
On the accomplishment side, the Harper government will have pushed through its massive crime bill. The revived copyright bill also is likely to be well on its way to becoming law, and the Tories will have started the clock on per-vote subsidies.
Although all of these measures are controversial, the government at least can truthfully say it has implemented what it said it would do in last spring’s election. And judging from the government’s strong polling numbers, its core voters approve of the actions it has taken so far.
But on the optics side, this autumn has been a terrible season for the Tories. The Tony Clement affair has been growing more rancid every week that the House of Commons is in session. Even the Conservative-supporting commentators with Sun Media are calling for Treasury Board president Clement’s resignation.
The Tories may have thought they were successful while campaigning this past spring, when it came to throwing a wet blanket over Clement’s spending in his rural riding during the G8/G20 summit, held mostly in Toronto in 2010. (The Liberals had made the same mistake when they initially thought that they had cooled out the Quebec sponsorship scandal.)
When the Conservatives were the Opposition, they needed a year to make the sponsorship scandal stick in voters’ minds. The New Democratic Party, the new Official Opposition, appears to be well on the way to accomplishing the same thing with the Clement affair.
Harper has a problem with Clement: although Clement may be a spent force politically, any prime minister would be loath to demand Clement’s resignation. Such a high-profile resignation would set off speculation about who will be next to leave the cabinet.
On the other hand, Clement is the man in charge of the coming spending cuts. The president of the Treasury Board has to have moral authority to deliver tough fiscal medicine.
Look for a cabinet shuffle and a new Treasury Board president just as soon as the Prime Minister’s Office can think of a strategic place to put Clement.
In the meantime, Clement is in political purgatory, and spending cuts can’t really begin in earnest.
The embarrassments continue. The government not only lost a court case over the Insite safe-injection site in Vancouver, the Supreme Court of Canada gave the Tories a full dressing-down. Adding insult to injury, this high-profile court case was initiated by — guess who? — Clement, when he was health minister.
In another scandal, the Harper government blatantly intervened in the recent provincial elections of Ontario, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island, almost to the point of taking over the campaigns of their provincial cousins. Conservative Senator Mike Duffy even got caught driving three provincial whistleblowers to a news conference in P.E.I. Voters in Ontario and P.E.I. returned Liberal governments; Manitoba returned the NDP.
As a result, aside from looking foolish, the Harper government will have a new set of problems in the future. For a federal majority government, the provincial premiers are often the real Opposition. Harper will be going into 2012 with three very angry premiers on his hands.
Then, there is the mélange of stupidity that started with cabinet prospect Bob Dechert’s sophomoric crush on a Chinese reporter. Add in a private member’s bill by a Tory backbencher to protect our right to wave the flag and the ongoing behaviour by Dean Del Mastro, the prime minister’s clownlike parliamentary secretary, and we have a very silly parliamentary season indeed.
And there are other things that are just plain outrageous. For example, Conservative backbenchers wanted to summon Supreme Court judges to appear before the government operations committee to explain a ruling — until somebody remembered from high-school civics class about the independence of the judiciary.
The Tories are not the first government to think deportment doesn’t matter much. The Liberals thought they could have a civil war over their leadership while the voters would patiently wait for them to decide the leader of Canada’s natural governing party.
But every government since Confed-eration reaches its best-before date sooner or later. It’s a good bet the current government will start worrying about its own political capital in the future — just as soon as it figures out what to do with Clement. IE
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