Ottawa Sun
Published: Saturday, June 4, 2005

All taped out

Earlier this week, the identity of legendary Watergate figure deep throat was revealed to be none other than the former number two man at the FBI at the time, W. Mark Felt (now 91 years of age).

His tips to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped uncover the cover-up by the Nixon White House of the extent of its motives and prior criminality in a botched break-in attempt at Democratic Party HQ at the Watergate hotel/office/apartment building on June 17, 1972. In turn, these Post stories were instrumental in ultimately forcing Richard Nixon to resign his presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.

On the very same day as the Felt revelation stateside, Canadians were informed that the full audio tapes of Tim Murphy (Paul Martin's chief of staff) and his alleged wooing of Tory MP Gurmant Grewal and his wife Nina, also an MP, before the now infamous May 19 confidence vote which the Liberals barely survived, were posted and available on Mr. Grewal's website.

The contrast between U.S. history and present day Canadian political drama is striking and ironic. Over 30 years ago, the existence of alleged and then confirmed criminal activity led to the resignation of a president. Yet here in Canada, the alleged wooing of MPs through unspecified inducements to "sell" their votes or cross Commons floor hardly puts a dent in the natural governing party's public opinion rankings.

To be fair, this story is still evolving and only yesterday we learned that the full audio tapes of Mr. Murphy's conversations were not the full tapes and a new full set was being produced by the Conservatives due to earlier "technical" difficulties in transferring four hours of tape-based recordings to CD media.

Of course this only lent more credence to earlier protestations by Health Minister Ujal Dosanjh -- the early interlocutor in the Murphy-Grewal talks -- that the tapes were indeed selectively doctored.

While Liberal and Conservative war-rooms fired off, he-said, she-said news releases over the past few days, most national political commentators arrived at a consensus conclusion of sensible sanity: That this whole affair is sordid and left many of them wishing for a hot, disinfecting shower. Amen to that!

Apart from the damage to the institution of Parliament and the further deepening of public cynicism towards politicians of all stripes and at every level, this tape tale trickery also reveals the overt amateurism that is crowding out subtle professionalism in the conduct of hard-core Canadian politics.

For example, in crisis management, which is surely where the Liberals, and yes the Tories now find themselves, the cardinal rule is absolute: Don't do anything to make the situation worse!

Paul Martin's evolving story during question period this week clearly broke this rule; so did the Tories' re-release of the audio files after independent experts questioned the veracity and completeness of the tapes.

Next up is the lesson learned in Introduction to Political Staffers 101: Never put your boss in a position where she or he has to defend your actions. The primary role of any political staffer is to minimize risk for their boss, not maximize it! Yes, people are human, they exercise bad judgment and make mistakes, and the stakes are that much higher in a tenuous minority Parliament situation, fair enough.

However, one of the unwritten rules among staffers of all stripes used to be that if your actions compromised your political boss, you resigned, in a flash and without hesitation. Yet in the last two decades or so, this century-old convention has disappeared, likely forever, to the detriment of the Canadian body politic as a whole.

Finally -- and this is why Mr. Grewal's actions and motives are questioned even by some in his own party -- if you are going to engage in a sting operation and attempt to entrap others in the act of wrongdoing, prior recording of your "noble" motives during this time of "ignoble" happenings is imperative.

Imagine if Auditor General Sheila Fraser were to write a report on the tattle-tale Grewal tapes, she would repeat the phrase she used when first commenting on the sponsorship program, "they broke every rule in the book." Meanwhile, Canadians seem more resigned than ever to throw the proverbial book at the entire federal political system.