Anybody who stayed awake during this week’s atrociously boring swearing-in ceremony may have spotted several problems with our nation’s latest bunch of leaders. If you could pull your eyes away from the decorating disaster of a room and blot out the jarring violin music and the Anglo ministers’ painful French, you no doubt noticed a Liberal turncoat and an unelected Conservative organizer standing with Stephen Harper’s cabinet as they posed for their first group shot together.
The defection of David Emerson from the Liberal party to become Harper’s minister of international trade and the surprise Senate appointment/cabinet post for Conservative organizer Michael Fortier cast the shadow of scandal on what was otherwise a pleasantly balanced crop of ministers, at least as far as regional representation is concerned.
Though Emerson claims that he just wants to serve his country best by continuing his work on portfolios such as softwood lumber, his crossover can clearly be seen for what it is: an opportunistic power grab, the manoeuverings behind it as sneaky as the ones that brought Belinda Stronach to the Liberal ranks-a sleight of hand Harper decried as bad form at the time.
Jack Layton’s proposal that MPs call a by-election if they wish to switch parties carries even more credence now, since not even a month passed before Emerson bolted. Why have political parties at all if voters can’t trust the people they elect under a partisan banner to stand by the party, no matter the result?
If Liberal voters knew that Emerson would turn Conservative right after the election, they may well have voted NDP, and the Grits would certainly have run a different candidate in the first place.
Forget Michael Ignatieff-in Michael Fortier, a long-time party organizer who has twice lost federal elections and was rejected as PC leader in 1998, we have the epitome of a parachute candidate, since he only began his “campaign” after the election was over. Fortier’s appointment as public works minister (as if that portfolio hasn’t had enough controversy lately) smacks of the kind of favouritism and patronage that Harper pledged to root out of government.
Everything about this looks ridiculous. Unelected ministers are part of the American system, not ours. Sneaking in an unelected official through the (apparently trivial) Senate to bolster a weak minority is unethical, and the Liberals have called Harper on it. We can assume Fortier will do no actual work as senator; he has said he will quit to run (and, if history is an indicator, lose for a third time) as an MP in the next election.
These examples don’t exactly glow with ethical purity, indicating that perhaps Harper left a few chapters out of the tome of ethical guidelines he distributed to his new team.
These moves also set a bad precedent for young Conservatives hoping to advance in the future. What does it say about the party’s competence when the leader brings in an opposition MP and an unelected organizer to fill spots that should go to homegrown hand-shakers? While it’s commendable and crucial to work with other parties on complex issues like trade, it’s not too inspiring to see that the PM doesn’t trust his own party members to handle the big jobs.
