I may have been hasty in giving little importance to Maxime Bernier’s departure from Cabinet on Monday evening. I was writing moments after the bulletin had been posted on CBC.ca and even thought, at the time, that he might have been set-up by the PMO or others as a way of removing an embarrassment from office. As the hours have passed and more details have trickled out, seems more apparent that Bernier was a victim of his own gross incompetence in office, part of which has been documented here . There is more, but there’s no point in flogging the dead horse.
The scandal, which it has become surely, gets its legs from the prime minister’s initial lack of judgement in appointing Bernier to the foreign affairs post and from the prime minister’s and his minions’ defence of Bernier over the past weeks. On Monday, even as they were scrambling to assess how much damage the biker chick’s pending TV interview would do, the PM and ministers were denying anything was amiss. The PM was defending Bernier two hours before he fired him when he was well aware, or should have been unless the PMO is staffed with total fools, what would be going down before he flew off to Europe and away from questions. Could it be that the PM fired him as he left for Europe just so he would not be around for questioning and, as I wrote on Monday, the CPC official loon could dismiss everything as irrelevant.
There are so many questions about how classified documents could be missing from external affairs for over a month without being missed; were Bernier’s staffers covering for him even as he went down? We rightly should not be told what the documents were or their classification, but we need more information than has been disclosed to determine if the response to the PMO and other government offices has been appropriate and adequate.
The biker chick should be called to answer a lot of questions too and this may necessitate a full inquiry. Why didn’t she just call Bernier and tell him he left something behind? Why did she call he lawyer to discuss what to do? Selling her story to the media, of course, is part of the explanation, but if she was willing to sell the the media why should we assume she did not copy and sell the documents as well to her gangland friends? The CBC carried an informative report last night on how foreign spy agencies in Canada use organised crime contacts to gather and extort information. Ww would be foolish to think they didn’t, or won’t, try to exploit this mess. All to Canada’s embarrassment on the international stage.
The PM may try to draw on Pierre Trudeau’s “government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” edict, but the government still has a role to play in national security and the current government is failing miserably in fulfilling that responsibility.
The Harper government’s carefully honed, if false, image of competence and integrity has been shattered by this week’s events. Governments, as has been so often written, are not defeated but defeat themselves The CPC definitely is showing signs of reconfirming that theory.
