Sniff... They Grow Up So Fast...

I think it's fair to say that in federal politics, a party hasn't really grown up until they've had a multi-million dollar scandal.

The federal NDP has spent 50 years trying to get themselves into a position where they can actually have a multi-million dollar scandal. For the first time in their history, they are. So in terms of multi-million dollar scandals, they're batting a thousand.

Plenty of people have had serious concerns about the NDP's "satellite offices" they've been operating in ridings in which they do not have an MP. In my opinion the legitimacy of these offices focuses strictly around whether these offices, and the staff employed by them, are performing work on parliamentary business for opposition MPs or partisan work for the NDP. In my personal opinion, so long as they're doing the former, the offices should be fine. I've said this before.

But the problem is that the NDP lied. In October 2011, Jess Turke-Browne, Deputy Chief of Staff for then-interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel (not for Thomas Mulcair as I mistakenly reported earlier) lied to House of Commons staff when she insisted that the staff for these satellite offices would be working in Ottawa.

In response to this revelation, current NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has adopted an interesting approach: he's using the Pamela Wallin/Mike Duffy/Patrick Brazeau defense.

You've heard it before: they followed all the rules. The expenses were approved. They were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.

The consensus has become that this defense was laughable. I've never been so certain about that myself, as I don't consider the allegations against the Senators to have ever been adequately investigated. But what is certain is that Thomas Mulcair had a heyday with the affair. He was like a pitbull in question period. He'd found himself a fresh bone to chew and he gnawed it for all it was worth.

But now with his party under fire, let's look at how Mulcair is defending himself:

They followed all the rules. The spending was approved. They were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.

Sound like anyone you've heard of? Sure it does.

Except, they weren't. The employment forms the NDP submitted to House of Commons staff insisted that the staffers would be working in Ottawa. They weren't. Apparently, seven NDP MPs signed those forms. They aided and abetted Turke-Browne in her apparent deception of HoC staff.

And hear Mulcair: parroting Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau. Well done.

Whoever those seven MPs are -- they know who they are, and soon the rest of us will too (one of them is Guy Carron) -- owe the House their resignations. Nycole Turmel owes the House her resignation. And the buck stops with the leader: Thomas Mulcair owes the House his resignation.

With this scandal the NDP has finally grown up. Now they have to own up.

So Exactly What Was it All For?

So, Prime Minister Stephen Harper got his way. Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau have been suspended without pay, presumably because they allegedly violated Senate spending rules -- although Canadians still don't know for certain whether or not they did.

And now that they have been suspended, what do we find? That Senator Brazeau won't have to pay a dime on his alleged expense bill for the duration of his two-year suspension.

Presumably he won't be alone to this end. Which once again provokes a very serious question:

What exactly has all of this been for?

It obviously wasn't to get to the bottom to the entire affair. In fact, the suspension of Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau seems to have been calculated to avoid the sort of due process that would lead to a definitive answer to just what, if anything, these three have actually done wrong.

And it very clearly wasn't to prompt Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau to get the money repaid. Duffy paid -- part of an ethically-dubious deal hatched with the PMO -- despite the conclusions of a Deloitte audit that found his total ineligible expenses was much lower than the $90,000 Nigel Wright gave him to repay. And on top of all this, we now have the revelation that Brazeau won't have to pay for quite a while because of his suspension.

The Senate scandal has been a textbook case of how the actions taken to head off an embarrassing incident can balloon into an embarrassment far greater than that, and in time grow into a quite-genuine scandal.

In the wake of this revelation, Stephen Harper owes Canadians a damn good explanation. What was the rush to suspend Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau really for? At this point only Harper really knows for certain.

What Stephen Harper Should Have Done Right

Apparently, my last blogpost here was something of a bombshell. I think I've made it quite clear what I think Prime Minister Stephen Harper is doing wrong.

But I haven't yet made it clear how Harper should have handled the matter.

There's one thing Harper isn't wrong about: perception matters. Which is actually why, in making the decision to harangue Senator Mike Duffy -- a Senator he himself appointed to the upper chamber -- into repaying allegedly-ineligible expenses, he committed more than a simple error.

It's because perception matters that issues such as the one confronting Harper over Duffy and his colleagues Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau should have been handled in the open through due process, and should have been seen handled in the open via due process. The only role Harper should have had any point in this entire sad affair was calling a public inquiry to sort through the allegations against Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau and sort through the explanations each has -- none of which I find to be tacitly incredible, one way or the other.

That's exactly how the PMO should have handled the entire matter as well. And while Nigel Wright may or may not have acted without Harper's knowledge -- my opinion is that he likely did --  he was acting within Harper's stated wishes. It was Harper's desire that this go away quietly instead of the requisite questions being answered through due process that drove Wright to act as he did.

No one can argue that Harper isn't responsible for the actions of the PMO. Even if he didn't know what was going on -- the absolute least of which was Wright's cheque -- he should have. After issuing a directive that the Senate scandal be made to go away quietly, he should have checked up on exactly what was being done to make it happen. Of course, even this never should have happened, because Harper never should have even been so involved.

And now that Harper has been so involved he's attempting to roll on everyone else involved. He's changed his story on Wright so many times in so many ways that it's nearly impossible to keep track of it all.

He did it to himself, seemingly out of nothing more than a disdain for letting the matter be handled through due process out of the fear -- the mere fear -- of due process. And it may now be too late for him to turn back.

\Over this one comparatively inconsequential issue he's managed to lend fire to one of the left-wing Twitterverse's most impotent slogans; for the first time, Prime Minister Harper must resign.

Stephen's Chosen

Some may recall a blogpost entitled "Stephen's Choice." It was written very shortly after Brent Rathgeber left the Conservative Party caucus over the unacceptable gutting of his public service transparency bill.

In case you don't want to read the entire post again to get the gist of it, the message was fairly simple: that the Conservative Party of Canada, as Harper has built it, would either live or die based on the direction Harper took it in a party leader. If the party returned to its principles of open government by elected officials, the party, as Harper has built it, would live. If he allowed the trend of important decisions being made in back rooms by non-elected officials the party, as Harper has built it, would die.

Harper has made his choice. The party, as Harper has built it, has died.

A motion to suspend three former Conservative Senators without pay is an odd funeral. And yet here we are. And the same nonsense that has been going on ever since the allegations of impropriety against Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau arose seems to have flowed right out of the nonsense that surrounded Rathgeber's departure from caucus.

Today, Senator Patrick Brazeau reported that the government leader in the Senate, Claude Carignan, offered him what amounted to a backroom deal: if Brazeau agreed to apologize to Canadians for allegedly filing fraudulent expense claims, the punishment would be less severe.

"At approximately 10:20 am this morning, I was outside this chamber in the back and the leader of the Senate, the leader of the government in the Senate, took me aside. And I'll be very careful about my words here, but I was essentially offered a backroom deal," Brazeau explained. "And the backroom deal was that if I stood in this chamber, apologized to Canadians and took responsibility for my actions, that my punishment would be lesser than what is being proposed."

For his own part, Senator Carignan insists that he didn't intend to unduly threaten Brazeau, and that his words to Breazeau were meant as advice to a friend. Carignan insists Brazeau misinterpreted him. But given some of the interactions between Senator Duffy and the PMO, as well as some of his fellow Senators, I personally find that difficult to believe.

Whether phrased to Brazeau as an explicit offer/threat or not, Carignan was continuing a trend that allowed this affair to blow up as it has in the first place. Keep in mind that none of the allegations against Duffy, Wallun or Brazeau have ever been proven using anything even resembling due process -- something that Wallin noted when speaking in the Senate. There have been numerous audits that have supported, in turn, both the claims of impropriety and the defenses offered against them. This matter is far from settled in the mind of any fair-minded Canadian, one way or the other.

In the end, this is what the motion to suspend Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau is: an end-run around that due process; a desperate attempt to try to make this entire affair go away without the allegations ever being raised and sorted in a public forum of any sort. As Peter Goldring pointed out today, this is wrong and arguably a violation of the accused Senators' Charter Rights.

All of this when the best way to deal with all of this was, for better or worse, to deal with the entire mess out in the open, and to be seen dealing with the whole mess right out in the open. Where everyone can see what is happening, judge the evidence against Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau for themselves, and judge the government for its response to it.

Now the third of these three things is taking place, and because of the government's refusal to deal with it out in the open, that judgement has been overwhelmingly negative.

Inexplicably, Harper doubled down on this today. In an interview with John Tory, Harper insisted that the facts against the Senators were crystal clear. Given that some of the audits -- particularly those regarding Duffy's expenses -- actually support Duffy's claims, that Wallin and Brazeau each claim to have received approval from the Senate for the expenses they claimed, the only thing that is crystal clear is that nothing about this is crystal clear. At least not for those who haven't pre-judged the entire affair.

So in Harper's hands, the Conservative Party, as he promised all Canadians it would conduct itself in government, has died. There may now be no resuscitating it.

The form of this death should not be mistaken for the death that opponents of the party crave. The party exists, will continue to exist, and even though Harper's stubbornness and carelessness is currently dividing this party, there are still those within the party who can unite it again.

I'm by no means withdrawing my support for the Conservative Party. But I have withdrawn my confidence in the leadership of Stephen Harper. There's still time for the party to be revitalized and reunited under new leadership, provided that Harper can find it in himself to offer his resignation.

Keep in mind that the only viable alternatives to Stephen Harper as Prime Minister are within the Conservative Party. His principal opponents, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair, are fools who have no business even imagining governing this country, let alone ever actually doing it.

Stephen Harper has made his choice. Now he has to live with it. But the very least he can do is allow the party to find new life with new leadership.