"....In 2010, a former Liberal MP had asked the RCMP to examine spending in Tony Clement’s Muskoka riding. The former MP claimed that the spending on projects to ready Muskoka for the G8 summit somehow violated the law.
Over seven months, the RCMP reviewed the ex-MP’s charges. The RCMP found the charges groundless and have dropped the case.
Story over?
Maybe yes. But maybe not. The former Liberal MP herself, Marlene Jennings, previously the representative of the Quebec riding of Notre Dame de Grace-Lachine, will likely fade from public view. Yet she has bequeathed Canadian politics an ugly legacy — unless Canadians act promptly and decisively to quash and repudiate it.
One of the most impressive differences between Canadian and U.S. politics is that Canadians are much more reluctant to use criminal law as a tool of politics.
Make no mistake: Canadians despise corruption and expect legal action against those guilty of it.
But until the Jennings action, Canada maintained an effective distinction between, say, bribe-taking and, say, locating a Canoe Museum in the riding of the prime minister of the day...."
"...The honest politician does not shrug — and of all the hundreds of politicians I’ve known in my life, I’ve never met one more honest than Tony Clement, a friend of 25 years’ standing. The honest politician suffers from an attack on his reputation in a way that few people outside politics can imagine or understand.
But the outrage in the Jennings’ accusation is not the attack on Clement. It’s the attack on the norms of the Canadian political system. Possibly — probably — the complaint will prove a squib, a freak, a forgotten incident. But it could also prove a premonition, a harbinger, a warning of something new in Canadian public life.
In which case, this closed case may prove a very significant event — and Marlene Jennings’ otherwise not very notable political career will have culminated in one genuine if sinister achievement: Canadians will remember her as the person who imported American-style politics of personal destruction into the Canadian political ecology...."
3 comments:
I was gonna write you by email this morning, cuz last nite this was in-accessible, but happily it is here this morning. I am always amazed to think that somehow this lower form of life, David Frum (who seems more like the twin separated at birth from Ezra Levant) somehow slithered from the loins of Barbara Frum, someone who seemed to have an actual functioning brain and whose interview style I enjoyed for many years.
One minor redeeming quality in the human sea slug (sorry sea slugs) Davie Axe Grinder Frum is the way he has been somewhat busy tearing a new one for his former ReThuglican colleagues to the south, writing about how they have apparently lost their way. Of course when you are talking or writing about Michelle Bachmann and the Seven Dwarfs, it pretty well writes itself as tragi-comedy writ large!
His stooooooopidity fits in even betterer in the failing Empire of the Excited Snakes..........than in the land of his birth, in spite of Spiteful Steve's ongoing efforts to erase any and all differences between the idiocy level of the two nations!
Great piece, Ross -- very perceptive and interesting.
I have often thought that Barbara Frum's grave must be one of the most active in Canada -- all that rolling over every time little Davie writes just about anything.
Thanks Cathie--
I would hope so, but I am not entirely sure...I think Koot can comment on that.
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Koot--
I actually disagree with you regarding what Mr. Frum is doing down south. As I tried to make clear at the end of the post under discussion Mr. Frum is one of the guys who helped unleash the hounds of hell down there and now he is standing just off-stage, leashes in hand pointing a finger at a couple of the dumb beasts in an effort to protect those he really works for.
Which, of course, are the Breeders and their Henchmen*.
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Finally, lest anyone think I am being too hard on the obsequiousness of the good Mr. Frum, here is what he wrote about Canada in the pages of the NYTimes back in 2005 when everything was still just great in Bushworld and we (i.e. Canada) were still in the clutches of the evils of liberalism:
"....Many Americans see Canada as a kind of utopian alternative to the United States: a North American democracy with socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, empty prisons, strict gun laws and no troops in Iraq.
What they don't see is how precarious political support for this alternative utopia has become among Canadian voters in recent years. From World War II until the 1980's, Liberal power rested on two political facts: its dominance in French-speaking Quebec and its popularity in the immigrant communities of urban Ontario...."
Anybody interested can read what I wrote in response to this extremely corrosive, not to mention inaccurate, 'reasonable' bullshit way back then.
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*In this regard, do not ever forget that Mr. Frum was once (and is not now?) joined at the hip with Richard Perle, the truest of true evil mongers.
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Finally, it is very important to remember that when Mr. Frum first started going to ground in late 2006 (ie. when the Breeders and Henchman could see the end of Bushworld bleeding through the polling room walls) he wrote the following in his famous Vanity Fair (pretend) apologia:
"My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous."
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