MP Dean Del Mastro earned his reputation as a pit bull when serving as Prime Minister Harper’s parliamentary secretary. If the Prime Minister’s Office officialdom declared black was white that day, Del Mastro would stand up in the House of Commons and tell everyone that black was white. He got away with that for a while but he met a judge the other day who said that Mr. Del Mastro was not credible.
And now that Del Mastro has been found guilty of breaking election laws, he wants to keep saying that black is white. The only problem remaining for the voters is that we seem to have to wait for him to be sentenced to see if he gets his ass kicked out of our parliament.
Mind you, Del Mastro does not appear to think he has done anything wrong. That seems to be a common attitude of many Conservative politicians. In a television interview after the verdict, Del Mastro said that the judge did not understand that politics is a rough and tumble game. While he says he does not want family members hurt by it, he seems to see no problem with dirty tricks, vote suppression, exceeding spending limits or anything else he thinks he needs to do to get elected.
He is hardly the first to have that attitude. Many of his colleagues think cheating is not the problem. Getting caught is the problem. If you can get away with it, then it is obviously fair game.
When Conservative candidates see the national campaign using out-of-context attack advertising to trash their opponents and robocalls to suppress opposition votes in an all-out attack, what incentive do they see for themselves to be fair?
And what happens is that mean spirited campaigning begets retaliatory mean-spirited campaigning. It poisons the entire election process and that carries on into the House of Commons after the election. And do not even get us started about the situation in Canada’s house of sober second thought: the Senate of Canada.
This is not to suggest that all local Liberal Party election operations were always on the up and up. Nor were the New Democrats always virtuous. One of the problems a campaign manager has to address throughout every election campaign is to keep workers focussed on the objectives. You know that dirty tricks supporters want to play on opponents are usually a waste of time and resources.
Dean Del Mastro is hardly the first candidate to ever lie in his election returns. His mistake was to get caught. We hope that his sentence is salutary so that candidates for all parties will pay heed. And that they make sure he is no longer in our parliament!
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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