Guergis affair derails any real debate
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Posted By MICHAEL DEN TANDT
Posted 4 months ago
Drum roll please. This is the moment when, according to the pollsterhood and my friends in the gallery, the Guergis-Jaffer affair turns seriously toxic for Stephen Harper & Co.
A story with legs? This has gams up the wazoo. Every news editor in Canada is doing internal handstands. A good-looking former cabinet minister; a shadowy businessman under investigation for fraud; high-priced hookers, (not the ordinary flat-chested sort but "busty," it is reported); offshore accounts; cocaine parties, strip joints; a mysterious gumshoe with Conservative Party ties. Wonderful.
Here's a prediction. There will be no voter backlash over this affair, tawdry and salacious though it is. It will run for a few weeks, perhaps a couple of months. Canadians will pay attention for a bit. Then they won't. It will die. It isn't sponsorship. It isn't Bob Reguly, tracking down Gerda Munsinger in Munich in 1966. Not even close.
It is what it is: Fourth-hand allegations about a minor minister, in a not-very-exciting, read dull, Parliament. That this has consumed most of our political oxygen for the past month is pathetic. That it will, in light of the latest "revelations," continue to do so for weeks, is even more so.
Consider the recent chain of events. Nazim Gillani (cue the ominous soundtrack), an apparently not-very-skilled "wheeler-dealer," has an association with Rahim Jaffer, Guergis' spouse and a former parliamentarian. Private dick Derek Snowdy (great name for a gumshoe), in the course of investigating Gillani, allegedly hears him boast about alleged cellphone pics of the Guergises partying among the aforementioned alleged hookers and cocaine.
Wracked by a pervading sense of doom and a sense of responsibility towards the party of Sir John A., Snowdy tracks down a lawyer friend with an appropriately waspish, pin-striped name, Arthur Hamilton. Hamilton spills all to the PM. Harper then boosts his former minister, with alacrity.
True to form, he tries to keep the whole sordid mess a secret. Good luck with keeping anything like this a secret, ever. It's just too good not to talk about. Plus, Conservatives themselves have had the knives out for Guergis for weeks. She's a bit on the snotty side, MPs say (anonymously), and has become a distraction. So, to the wolves with her.
Amid this storm of controversy (calling it a storm makes it bigger), the Tories face a precipitous slide in the polls, with speculation of a "snap election." We know this because EKOS pollster Frank Graves says so. "The resignation and controversy around Helena Guergis and her husband seems to have jumpstarted a moribund electorate in a way that ideas and debate could not," Graves delightedly tells the Globe's Jane Taber.
The evidence for this tsunami of popular outrage is a two-point drop for the Conservatives and a two-point rise for Michael Ignatieff's Liberals, resulting in them being tied at 30%. This is, in fact, where the two big parties have been mired for months, on account of neither being able to muster enough voter enthusiasm to power a 40-watt bulb. But don't let that get in the way of a good poll story.
Ideas, Graves says. Debate. Where? Where is there debate about anything that matters to Canadians? The Afghan detainee hearings are on again and they do matter because they get to issues of possible cover-up at the highest levels of government. Because of Guergis, they're a footnote. Ignatieff meantime has assured his caucus that he strongly supports medicare. Snore.
Jed Clampett said it best: Pitiful. We need a new broom. If only the mayor of Toronto hadn't already tried that.
michael.dentandt@sunmedia.ca
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