The political demise of
David Dingwall, as Parliament reconvened for its fall session, may have turned out to be little more than a one-day wonder in terms of impact on the Liberals. Still, it provides an interesting case study that offers many insights into the current political climate.

Let’s start with the days leading up to Dingwall’s resignation as head of the Royal Canadian Mint.

In the fortnight before the resumption of Parliament, a couple of stories cropped up in The Globe and Mail involving Dingwall. The articles had the resident conspiracy theorists in this city, of which there are many, speculating that someone who was once one of the most feared men in Ottawa was the victim of an anonymous campaign by the Martin government.

One story said Dingwall had accepted a forbidden contingency fee or commission in connection with a Technology Partnerships Canada grant. The other revealed that the former Public Works minister had failed to register as a lobbyist on behalf of another TPC applicant. Both stories obviously had to originate from sources deep inside the bureaucracy.

Such leaks have become so ubiquitous in the capital that it’s hard to deduce whether Dingwall was the victim of a so-called “black op” by the government or not.

Regardless, the stories probably helped the government by shifting attention to
Dingwall’s misuse of the TPC program and away from how the ill-conceived program has been managed.

In fact, Industry Minister David Emerson had just announced that the TPC was being overhauled into a new program to address many of the longstanding concerns with it.

In the subsequent week, of course, the story that finally forced Dingwall’s resignation broke from information obtained under the Access to Information Act.

Under the act, the government is not supposed to know about disclosures under its jurisdiction in advance. But no government has followed that rule since the legislation became law in 1983.

If the government knew the expense account story was coming — and we should assume it did — it would make strategic sense to get all the negative information about Dingwall out quickly before Question Period in the Commons resumed the following week. This would be similar to the common tactic of releasing bad news on a Friday night, or “taking out the trash” as it is known.

Regardless of what the government was doing behind the scenes, there was great surprise shortly afterward, when the Conservatives initially ignored Dingwall and pressed the government over mandatory sentencing and other law-and-order issues, as the Commons got back to work.

After all, this was the same Opposition party that revelled last spring in the revelations of the Gomery inquiry and was willing to pin its election fortunes almost entirely on public revulsion toward the findings.

When the story about Dingwall’s expense account broke on the third day of the fall sitting, the Conservatives were forced to ask questions about Dingwall in the Commons just as the government was forced to quickly accept the sudden resignation of its mint boss.

But the Conservatives’ initial reluctance to dig into Dingwall are likely very telling about their own electoral fortunes.

The law-and-order campaign was likely intended to shore up their core voters before the next election. In order words, the Conservatives may be in bigger trouble with the voters than the outside world realizes.

In addition, the Conservatives may be beginning to learn something that Richard Gwyn warned about in The Shape of Scandal, his definitive book on the Favreau scandal in the 1960s: scandal taints anyone connected to it, including the accusers.

The question remains, of course, whether the Conservatives have learned enough to begin offering Canadians a vision for which they can vote, rather than depending on Liberal peccadilloes for an election platform.

Finally, the fact that Dingwall was off the front page within two days shows how much the Martin government has learned about scandal management.

The warp speed in which the Liberals accepted Dingwall’s resignation prevented a drawn-out public spectacle in which the government would have had to defend its conduct.

Dingwall was the fifth CEO of a Crown corporation to have to resign under a cloud under Paul Martin’s watch as prime minister. Normally a string of resignations like that would be an issue in itself.

The Martin government may have finally succeeded in planting the message that wrongdoing should be connected with the Chrétien years; a sort of ‘Old Coke/New Coke’ marketing strategy.

@page_break@Certainly, the strategy seems to have worked with the Parliamentary Press Gallery, which seems to be devoting most of its scrutiny to the Opposition rather than the government of the day.

If the Liberals continue to have more luck with this rebranding strategy than Coca Cola did in the 1980s, they could very well leave the Conservatives with only the angriest and most malcontented of eligible voters — the kind who often don’t bother to go to the polls. IE