THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 38, Season 2
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Host: Tom Clark
Guests: Marjory LeBreton, Tom Mulcair, Angus Reid, Jackson Proskow
Location: Ottawa
Tom Clark:
Welcome to The West Block on this Sunday, May the 26th. From the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark.
Well what another amazing week in Canadian politics. Last week on Parliament Hill it was all about dodging questions, ducking reporters and driving away. Will Canadians finally get some answers? Well government leader of the Senate, Marjory LeBreton joins us later on.
Plus, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair with his reaction and his own party’s ethical issues.
And the Toronto mayor’s brother is accused of dealing drugs as a young man. Councillor Doug Ford is promising to stop by.
So, we start with the Senate scandal that continues to take unexpected twists and turns, leaving in its wake an ever growing list of questions. So to keep you up-todate on who’s where in this game, here is your weekly West Block Primer:
When we last checked in, two of the main players were out of action. Senator Mike Duffy had ducked out of the Conservative caucus and Nigel Wright quit as the prime minister’s chief of staff. What we didn’t know then were some moves happening on the other side of the board. Two Conservative senators were accused of whitewashing Duffy’s report. And the RCMP joined the game on Thursday of last week, asking the Speaker of the Senate to hand over all documents relating to the audit. And that’s when the main players made their moves. That same night, Duffy quit the Conservative caucus. The next day, Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin took her turn and she also quit the caucus. Then it was the prime minister’s move. After a quick speech to his MPs, he jumped ahead to Peru, where finally he told the media he was angry and sorry and didn’t’ know about any of this.
Well joining me now to talk more about this is the government leader in the Senate, Senator Marjory LeBreton. Senator good to have you on the show, thanks for being here.
Senator Marjory LeBreton:
Great to be here Tom.
Tom Clark:
Let’s try and get right to the heart of the discussion. The deal between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy $90,000 dollars, to your knowledge, is there anything, a piece of paper, a post-it note, a sticky note detailing what was expected in that deal?
Marjory LeBreton:
Absolutely not. I absolutely do not believe that there was any kind of document, that’s my understanding, and to this point in time there has been no proof or any evidence there has been any document at all.
Tom Clark:
If there’s nothing, not even an email, not even a sticky note on this, what do you think was the implied deal here? I mean it’s unusual for somebody to write somebody else a $90,000 dollar cheque and say, here you go, no strings attached.
Marjory LeBreton:
Well, I don’t know Tom. I mean I’ve been in a political pressure cooker myself before and you know, when I think about it, I think Nigel and we of course the government as always wants to be so careful about taxpayers’dollars, I just think Nigel made a mistake and thought he could fix this himself. And so but you know, that’s…Tom, you know that’s all interesting conversation but the fact is, this whole mess in the Senate has to do with the institution itself and it really needs to change. And we really have to tighten the rules. And we either have to fix it and bring in some strong rule changes because it’s been too much of an old boys club in the past and people say to me well you’ve been the government leader in the Senate for seven years, why didn’t you fix it? I answer for the government in the Senate. I do not run the Senate, just like people don’t run the House of Commons. I have brought in as much as I could, to bear my influence on making the rule changes that we’ve made thus far because as you know, when we got the majority, we actually started posting quarterly senators expenses, otherwise no one would have been any of the wiser. And all of these things that have happened, do I like that they’ve happened? Absolutely not. And am I furious? Absolutely am. Disappointed? You’ve got it. But we’ve got to fix this place and you know the legitimacy of the Senate’s really in question here.
Tom Clark:
Senator, I want to deal with that in just a second but I want to deal also with one other sort of lingering question that’s been out there and that is, even if there was no deal between Nigel Wright and Mike Dufy, everybody’s pointing to the fact that the Senate report on Mike Duffy was substantially changed from its original draft to its final draft and it was changed in a way that it shielded Mike Duffy from the worst criticisms that were in the original report. Why was that done?
Marjory LeBreton:
Well, again, you know the idea that we don’t talk to each other is ludicrous. Of course we talk to each other.
Tom Clark:
You’re talking about the PMO talking to the Senate.
Marjory LeBreton:
Right. I mean I talked to the prime minister’s office. They were asking me what was going on, what we were doing about it. And we set up a process…we set up a process in the Senate, as you know, starting with the letter from the leader of the Opposition and myself asking for this money to be repaid. And so, in the committee, reports are written in committees all the time and they’re changed they’re drafted and they’re re-drafted. In the Internal Economy committee there are Liberals and there are Conservatives and when they’re working on those reports, language was used for Senators Brazeau and Harb to facilitate getting the money paid back. In the case of Senator Duffy, there was a debate in the committee about not using that language because the money had been repaid. And the committee itself, if the Liberals had such a big problem with this why didn’t they refuse to let the committee report?
Tom Clark:
Well I understand that but on that committee there were two Conservatives and one Liberal. And the one Liberal actually did speak out to say this was not unanimous, I disagreed with this and by majority vote the two Conservatives got to rewrite the report.
Marjory LeBreton:
But that’s the Steering Committee…no, no, but that’s the Steering Committee. The committee…the report was actually put to the whole committee of the Internal Economy, not just…
Tom Clark:
But the re-write was done at the small committee.
Marjory LeBreton:
Not just the three and again, again, when they put it to the whole committee, if the Liberals on that committee felt that strongly about it they could have actually spoke up and refused to let the committee report to the Senate.
Tom Clark:
Well they did speak up. They charged that there was political interference
Marjory LeBreton:
After the fact…
Tom Clark:
…in all of…
Marjory LeBreton:
Well we’re onto conspiracy theories here big time.
Tom Clark:
Well fair enough but I want to go to a larger question here. A lot of people might be saying, you’re the party of law and order, this has been one of the cornerstones and yet, when you have a senator, in this case Mike Duffy, defrauding the public, taking money that wasn’t his, the answer from the law and order party was well if you repay it that’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Move along nothing to see here folks. Is there a contradiction there?
Marjory LeBreton:
Well actually, a little bit of hindsight there Tom because a lot more information has come out since the reports in the Senate on the 9th of May. But the fact is, and of course over in the House of Commons we had three Liberals with the same provisions, the housing provisions pay back the money and that is what we asked to be done. You know, this was just an audit. This was not a criminal investigation.
Tom Clark:
Well it might become a criminal investigation. The RCMP are looking into it.
Marjory LeBreton:
Absolutely.
Tom Clark:
But the question is, why was it just sort of scott free, if you pay back the money now you don’t have to cooperate with the auditors. Now you don’t have to answer any questions.
Marjory LeBreton:
Well we never said….
Tom Clark:
Well Duffy did and nobody contradicted him.
Marjory LeBreton:
Well, we didn’t…once they were turned over to the outside auditors, I can guarantee you there was no interference whatsoever with the outside auditors and they reported their reports and they were in the Senate tabled fully. So, we’re dealing with a moving target here Tom. And we have done many things. We brought in the Accountability Act. I pointed out to you that we started to force senators, once we got the majority. Let’s not kid ourselves, the Senate has been a Liberal institution for all of my life, except for about six years and the moment we got the majority in the Senate we started issuing quarterly Senate expenses. Now is that enough? No it’s not enough. It clearly exposed some very serious issues here which we are now and I’ve put out a statement today, urging everyone to support it before we leave for summer in order to fix this once and for all.
Tom Clark:
Senator LeBreton, I’m sorry that we’re out of time…
Marjory LeBreton:
So am I…
Tom Clark:
…but I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much.
Marjory LeBreton:
Thanks very much Tom.
Tom Clark:
Well coming up next on The West Block, there’s more than one leader in Ottawa who’s having trouble with members of his caucus. Stay tuned for that.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well let’s go right now to Montreal where Tom Mulcair, the leader of the Opposition is standing by. Mr. Mulcair good morning. I want to ask you, Marjory LeBreton just told us that as far as she is concerned there is not a scrap of paper, not even a post-it note about the deal between Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright, the former Chief of Staff to the prime minister. Do you buy that?
Tom Mulcair:
No because we know that there’s at least a cheque and that’s paper. And we can find out who made the cheque and was it from a trust account and what are the rules of that trust account? There are email exchanges as well, we know that. So it’s not true that there’s no documentation around this. As usual Tom, the initial stonewalling is what’s causing the problem because now they’ve got to back it up with a series of excuses. Stephen Harper got elected on a promise of being accountable. Instead, he went into hiding in South America. We’ll have him back in the House of Commons tomorrow, Monday, and we’ll be able to start asking these tough questions that he’s been avoiding for a week.
Tom Clark:
You bring up a good point though that outside of Question Period there doesn’t seem to be in our system any other mechanism to further investigate this. Have you got anything up your sleeve in terms of what you might want to try and do on that front?
Tom Mulcair:
There’s such classics for the Opposition to on the one hand be asking for a resignation and on the other hand to be asking for an investigation or a commission of inquiry but you know what, that’s about all we’ve got in the Canadian system. I remember when I was in Quebec City in the Parliament there. In Opposition we asked for and obtained a commission of inquiry when the PQ we had found out had been using confidential personal tax information for partisan purposes. We were proven right by that commission of inquiry but it’s a long process. But it’s the only one we’ve got. The US has a lot of systems within their structures of congress that allows them to have hearings and get to the bottom of these things. For now, we’re stuck with the type of stonewalling and you know bafflegab that we get from people like Marjory LeBreton.
Tom Clark:
I know it’s the policy of your party that you want to abolish the Senate but until that magical day arrives, is reforming the Senate not a good thing to do while you’re waiting to abolish it?
Tom Mulcair:
No, we’re beyond talking about reform now. It has been the position of the NDP by the way, it didn’t’ start last week. We’ve been saying this for over 50 years. We were founded in 1961, that’s been part of our policy ever since. We don’t think that in a democratic society that people who are not elected are allowed to make laws. We just find that that’s a basic principle. The Senate as a structure is not working. We know we have to work with provinces and territories. We’ve said that since day one but we were really quite impressed to see that in the first 24 hours of our petition to roll up the red carpet to the Senate and get rid of it, we had over 10,000 people come and sign a petition asking us to do just that. Support across Canada…
Tom Clark:
But you and I…sorry, I just want to interrupt. But you and I know that even if the magic wand was waved and the Senate was going to disappear, it would take years before that could happen. And that magic wand ain’t anywhere in sight at the moment. My question is though that as long as the Senate is here, doesn’t it make sense to reform it while it’s still here?
Tom Mulcair:
We’re clear eyed about what has to be done. We know how hard it’s going to be but we know that the number one thing to do is to make sure that Canadians are onside and the ones across this country who want change to the Senate know that there’s one way to get it. It’s by voting for the NDP. As far as Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are concerned, he’s on the public record as saying the only problem with the Senate is there’s not enough Liberal senators. Well we take a different view. We want to talk to Canadians. We will consult, as we’ve said since day one, with the provinces and territories on this but we want to move it forward. Stephen Harper has been there for almost eight years. This was a key promise of the Reform party to get rid of the Senate if it couldn’t be reformed. He did nothing on reforming it. Now he’s punted it off to the Supreme Court. That’s not an answer to anything. He’s never been serious about it. We are. We’re determined. We think it’s an anathema in a free and democratic society to have people who were never elected being able to reverse laws. Remember Jack Layton’s Climate Change bill. What could be more important than making sure that global warming is kept under control? Well, the Senate reversed a decision of the House of Commons. The duly elected members of the House of Commons saw a law defeated by defeated candidates because there’s party hacks, bagmen in the Senate; a lot of defeated candidates, people who have been rejected by the voters actually daring to sit in appeal on the legally taken decisions of the duly elected people in the House of Commons. We find that a scandal in a democratic society and we want to get rid of it.
Tom Clark:
I want to move on to one other topic here. You’ve come across your own ethical issues last week. Two of your MPs have admitted that they didn’t pay their taxes. They are Hoan Mai and Tyrone Benskin, both from Quebec, both first-time MPs. Hoan Mai is still in your shadow cabinet as the deputy justice critic. Why?
Tom Mulcair:
Because that was already declared, that’s been on the public file for a long time. He’s taken care of the situation. He’s made an arrangement with them. He’s taken care of it. He used to work outside the country. He was working in Vietnam for a number of years and as often, those things got complicated. He made a deal with the tax department and he declared it openly to the Ethics Commissioner. In the case…
Tom Clark:
Well Mr. Mulcair, he didn’t actually in his first filing with the Ethics Commissioner. It was only a year after he was first elected that he declared it. And secondly, Tyrone Benskin, the other MP of yours who did lose his critic status but nevertheless, even as of today he has not declared to the Ethics Commissioner that he has this problem with Canada Revenue. Why?
Tom Mulcair:
Well that broke on Thursday. We excluded him the same day. Actually it was Friday I excluded him from the shadow cabinet. I found out about it 24 hours earlier when he gave us a heads up that a journalist had asked him the question. We hadn’t heard about it before then so he’ll obviously be making that filing this week. The two cases are substantially different. In the case of Tyrone, he’s an artist. He’s an actor. He lived precariously like a lot of actors do and he got behind the eight ball with regard to his Quebec income taxes. Quebecers pay separate taxes, his federal stuff was up-to-date. So, he’s going to take care of it but he won’t get back into my shadow cabinet until he does.
Tom Clark:
Tom Mulcair from Montreal, always too short but I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you very much.
Tom Mulcair:
Pleasure talking with you Tom. All the best. Bye-bye.
Tom Clark:
Well a lot of people in Ottawa are wondering just how much of an impact the Senate scandal will have on the prime minister’s popularity and the Conservative party’s standings in the poll. Angus Reid is a Canadian pollster who’s been prodding and poking at Canadians for decades now. We asked him how much of this story he thinks will stick.
Angus Reid:
You know, what’s interesting is that the money involved is in some respects a number that ordinary Canadians can relate to a little better than billions. Most Canadians we’ve polled in this but I think two thirds of Canadians when you say a billion dollars name a number that’s other than a thousand million. But when you start talking about $90,000 and $50,000 and you know hotel rooms at $400 bucks a night, you know for most people that’s beyond their grasp. That’s a lot of money. That’s stuff they can really wrap their head around. So this issue from the standpoint of Mr. Harper and the Conservative government is really going to be their first big test of I think a major political crisis.
Tom Clark:
Well that was Angus Reid of August Reid Public Opinion. You can catch the whole interview with him on our website: www.thewestblock.ca.
Well coming up next, if you think all of the political drama is in Ottawa, join us for an interview with Doug Ford about the jaw dropping goings on at Toronto City Hall. That’s next.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back to The West Block. Well we thought this might happen. Doug Ford has not showed up for the interview that he personally assured us that he would be here for. We have tried calling him. We have tried emailing him. We haven’t received anything back. As I said, we kind of suspected this might happen so joining us instead is Global’s municipal affairs reporter in Toronto, Jackson Proskow. And Jackson, first of all, does this surprise you at all that Doug Ford didn’t show up?
Jackson Proskow:
No, it’s usually good to have a backup plan with the Fords. I mean these are politicians who you can’t even organize to walk up to a microphone at City Hall. You have to chase them down.
Tom Clark:
Okay, you know yesterday was an interesting day on the Ford story. First of all, Global’s Shawn O’Shea tried calling him on the phone and Doug Ford used some, well let’s call it some colourful language and interesting imagery. Take a listen to this:
Doug Ford:
I think it’s pretty low and a bunch of sleazy, sleazy journalism. It has gone to the bottom of the barrel. I’ve done nothing, nothing but support this community for 30 years and it’s absolutely disgusting how you guys lower yourself. You’re lower than a bunch of “bleeping” politicians. It makes me sick!
Tom Clark:
Well what interests me in that is that Doug Ford has said there’s nothing lower than a politician and that’s coming from a politician. Tell me something about the language being used about all of this and the type of defences that you’re hearing from the Ford brothers.
Jackson Proskow:
Yeah, I mean you clearly hear for yourself, Doug was furious there to be having to deal with this calls himself which is funny because he’s the one who so often puts himself out there as the face of the Ford administration. He does a lot of the talking for his little brother the mayor. So it’s kind of funny that he’s not so happy to be hearing from the media. At the same time though, this is pretty typical of the way Toronto City Hall works. It’s kind of organized chaos. You never know who’s going to talk, when they’re going to talk. You just kind of pick up the phone, call somebody’s cell phone and hope that somebody gives you some sort of answer.
Tom Clark:
Let’s put this into some perspective because there’s really sort of two major things going on here: first of all, Doug Ford which is a little bit of a side show, the Globe and Mail yesterday, the front page and inside a deep investigative report citing sources that says that he was a drug dealer in his youth and that he consorted with a lot of people in that world. And that’s what Doug Ford was responding to yesterday. You sat down with Doug Ford yesterday Jackson and you know one of the key questions, and you asked this was, well if you’re innocent, if this is all made up as you suggest, then why don’t you sue the people who are writing it and here’s what he said to you. Take a listen to this:
Doug Ford:
And you want me to go out and sue big organizations like Bell Media that own the Globe and Mail? Bell Media, the CEO should be embarrassed that he has an organization like this.
Jackson Proskow:
Will you sue over this article?
Doug Ford:
I wouldn’t rule out anything but play the David and Goliath, to sue someone and drag it out for five years against a public company that has billions of dollars to go after a little guy that represents the people? Is that fair? I want to ask is journalism fair in this city? No it’s not fair.
Tom Clark:
Well in the interest of accuracy in journalism, Bell Media does not own the Globe and Mail as Doug Ford thinks it does. But nevertheless, it does raise the question Jackson that most Canadians would say, all we’ve got is our reputation. If somebody attacks that, you go and you defend it as strongly as you can. The idea that the Fords are little guys, I mean I thought the Fords were actually fairly well off, aren’t they?
Jackson Proskow:
They’re very well off. In fact, Doug Ford and if I’m not mistaken, the mayor as well both donate their salaries to charity. So they essentially don’t take a pay cheque from the City of Toronto. They are self-made millionaires. They own a very successful business with offices in Canada and the United States.
Tom Clark:
Well, let’s go to the main act here which is Rob Ford. He finally, at the end of last week came out, gave a statement, literally a statement, took no questions about it. He said I do not use crack cocaine. And a lot of people said, whoa those are some weasel words in there. What was your take on it?
Jackson Proskow:
Well I mean two things Tom: when’s the last time you can remember a politician who has actually had to come out and hold a press conference and say I do not use crack cocaine. I mean theses are what strange times we’re living in here but you’re right, a lot of people took issue with the language. They said he was using current tense, mentioned nothing about his past and the words were so brief and so carefully chosen that after eight days of essentially silence from the mayor, all he did in those eight days previously was call the allegations, quote ridiculous, that this little statement really wasn’t good enough. That it didn’t do anything to put the fears and concerns to rest. In fact immediately after that statement, a number of city councillors came out and said the mayor’s got no choice but to resign. He still has not addressed the allegations in a substantial or specific way. He did not take any questions from reporters. There are still many unanswered questions hanging out there. Too many, so many that many city councillors say that the mayor should no longer be the public face, the official representative, of the City of Toronto.
Tom Clark:
Yeah, it brings into question of course what this is doing to the reputation of the City of Toronto as well in the eyes of the public. Even the Rolling Stones were taking shots at them in their show last night. Jackson Proskow thanks very much for joining us this morning and being on standby. I appreciate it.
Jackson Proskow:
Thanks Tom.
Tom Clark:
Well that is our show for this week. Who knows what’s going to come up next week but we’ve got our eyes on everything as this rollercoaster continues. We’ll have everything you need to know about the people representing you, right here next Sunday. Join us then. In the meantime, have a great week ahead. I’m Tom Clark. See you next time.
Comments