Even if the name Serge Nadeau rings no bells, how long it took the RCMP to charge him should sound the Helena Guergis alarm.
It wasn’t until 14 months after the force’s still unexplained intervention in the 2006 federal election that the Mounties formally accused the senior Finance Department official of benefitting from insider information that Liberals wouldn’t tax income trusts.
Assuming the past informs the future, Conservatives needn’t fret that the RCMP will fully unravel the snarled web around Guergis and husband Rahim Jaffer before voters next cast ballots. Slim overstates the chances that the ponderous, politically skittish horsemen will plunge recklessly into whatever it is that’s so upsetting the prime minister about his party’s now unplugged power couple.
Around Ottawa, not much slows the flow of sensitive information faster than a formal police investigation. Wily Jean Chretien quickly grasped the counterintuitive truth that a government in trouble can often deflect awkward questions by asking the federal force to poke around in a scandal.
Fairly or not, using federal police to frustrate opposition parties became so closely associated with Chretien that Paul Martin, hurrying to distance himself from a tarnished predecessor, chose Justice John Gomery, not the RCMP, to probe the Quebec sponsorship scheme.
Flaunted first as a stroke of strategic genius, the commission became a tactical horror as revelations slowly exposed Canadians to the wisdom of forcefully separating Liberals from the public trough.
No fool, Stephen Harper learned from Martin’s mistake.
Along with sharing Chretien’s suspicion of hard-to-control inquiries, this prime minister appreciates the utility of being seen to be cleaning up a mess while letting the mud dry harmlessly.
Harper apparently expects justice to again take its sweet time.
By driving Guergis out of caucus as well as cabinet, the Conservative leader removes a future obstacle to running a fresh candidate in the Ontario riding that, coincidentally, she’s held since that same RCMP-tainted 2006 election.
With an elusive Conservative majority almost within reach, every seat counts and every one in pivotal Ontario is vital. In 2008, Guergis easily took Simcoe-Grey, where her family has deep democratic roots, winning 55 per cent of the vote in an era of plurality victories. She might well have repeated that as effortlessly in the coming election had she and Jaffer, a former Conservative caucus chair, not become punchlines to political jokes.
Now that the federal ethics commissioner has refused to examine the Guergis case, her prospects turn on what the RCMP learns and when it tells the country. Except the latest allegations against her are more speculative and less certain.
It took more than a year and nearly $500,000 to discover that no Liberal politician did anything wrong in the income trust case. But by then, as Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan confirms, the election that brought Conservatives to power had crossed a tipping point.
Harper is now benefiting a second time from an RCMP investigation.
Chretien would surely recognize the applied cynicism.
The police probe will drag on, buying priceless time for the scandal to fade.
A country that doesn’t remember Nadeau may soon forget Guergis and Jaffer.
Travers writes for The Toronto Star Syndicate.