[BRIEF NOTE] On Bev Oda's inevitable departure from cabinet

[rfmcdonald]

Journalist Chantal Hébert's Toronto Star column pointing out that Conservative MP and minister Bev Oda, who announced her plans to resign both parliamentary seat and ministerial position yesterday, was going to go anyway now that the Conservatives have a secure majority and don't need to be bothered with an underpar minister with a history of spending and other scandals, is dead on.

(The Globe and Mail reports that Oda was told she wouldn't survive the next cabinet shuffle.)

At 66 and with her parliamentary pension secured, the soon-to-be former international cooperation minister had no major financial incentive to sign up for another two to four years in the federal trenches.

A lacklustre performer in the House of Commons, Oda was never going to acquire the killer instincts of a first-rate political animal.

Up to that point her ministerial career had featured less spectacular hits than glaring misses.

She had turned out to be ill-suited to her initial cabinet mission as heritage minister. Fluency in French and English and an extroverted personality are basic prerequisites for success in that portfolio.

In her second and last ministerial posting, her role in the murky decision to cut the funding of the aid group KAIROS and in the doctoring of the move’s paper trail became the stuff of a full-fledged parliamentary scandal.

[. . .]

With data showing that the KAIROS affair had little legs in her riding, Conservative strategists were better off keeping her inside the tent as a candidate than have her stand as a living reminder of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s opaque approach to parliamentary accountability outside it.

[. . .]

Bev Oda’s pre-empted firing from the cabinet is the clearest signal to date that as far as Harper is concerned the IOUs accumulated over his crossing of the minority desert have passed their expiry date.

The debts of loyalty the Prime Minister has racked up along the way may be about to take a distant second place to the changing staffing needs of a majority government.

In the big picture, belatedly dispensing with Oda’s services in the wake of her travel expenses imbroglio amounts to just one baby step on the road back to a more straight and narrow Conservative spending path.