[LINK] "Stephen Harper’s real problem goes beyond Mike Duffy"

[rfmcdonald]

At MacLean's, Paul Wells argues that Stephen Harper's centralized control over his government is a real problem for his party.

“I’m certainly not going to comment on an ongoing court case,” Stephen Harper said this morning in London during his daily, and mercifully brief, interrogation at the hands of travelling reporters. “But all of the facts certify exactly what I’ve said.”

The court case, of course, is Mike Duffy. A cottage industry has sprung up in the land—a loose affiliation of lawyers and reporters—dedicated to establishing and spreading the news that the facts really don’t certify what the Prime Minister has been saying. The nexus of incredulity is centred in the person of Ray Novak, Harper’s discreet and amiable chief of staff, who travels with the Conservative leader but does not speak, at least to anyone in my line of work, and who—if we are to believe everything that has been said about him in the past 10 days by Duffy trial witnesses, Harper himself, and Harper’s chief spokesman Kory Teneycke—is some kind of human singularity. Laws of physics break down when he is near.

There was an email, you see, from Novak’s predecessor, Nigel Wright, to Novak, that Novak never read. There was a conference call in which he participated, but he didn’t hear the most important part of the conversation. There was a meeting at which the government’s own lawyer saw Novak, whose appearance is distinctive, and noted his reactions—but Novak wasn’t there. He’s like the hitchhiker in the Twilight Zone episode. If you tried to touch him, your hand would pass right through. No wonder Harper likes him so much.

After Tuesday’s extraordinary courtroom exchanges between Donald Bayne and Nigel Wright, many reporters wondered how Harper would handle the news that a witness normally friendly to his government’s goals—the Prime Minister’s own former legal counsel, Benjamin Perrin—had told police he saw Novak at a meeting where Wright’s personal payment to Mike Duffy was discussed. Perhaps Novak would be dismissed from Harper’s staff before dawn. Perhaps the Conservative leader would simply implode. No such dénouement presented itself today, for to say Harper is gifted at stonewalling is to flatter stone walls. He replied, in the manner of René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas un really big political problem. All of the facts, he said, certify exactly what he’s said.