The Prime Minister's Detractors

Pretty pathetic, nothing less than that, when leaders of the opposition in the House of Commons mock common sense and common business and employment practice to desperately attempt to score another point. Their rabid assaults on Prime Minister Stephen Harper may make them feel good, and they may think they have raised their own credibility levels in the doing, but in fact they're simply pointing out how desperate they are to arouse voter rage over a non-issue.

Photographs...Toronto Sun -- left, Justin Trudeau, centre, Stephen Harper, right, Thomas Mulcair

The Prime Minister's former chief of staff Nigel Wright resigned in the realization that this is what he had to do. Had he not resigned, it would have been up to Stephen Harper, reluctantly yes, in view of past service, but necessarily, in view of a serious lapse in judgement, to remove him from that important post. Nigel Wright is held by all who know him to be an intelligent, honourable man whose business acumen is unparalleled.

He was, nonetheless responsible, in his lapse of judgement, for bringing a storm of controversy into the Prime Minister's Office, and in so doing unleashing a hurricane of febrile assaults against the veracity of the Prime Minister himself. Mr. Wright likely thought that as an executive assistant it was incumbent upon him to remove what irritants he could from the purview of the man whose best interests he sought to serve as best he could.

His best in this particular instance, offering to hand over to the disgraced Senator Mike Duffy, who was facing an official call to return to the Senate finances funding for housing he was not entitled to, a gift of $90,000 to rescue the man from further ignominy. His spur-of-the-moment charity backfired badly. He obviously hadn't taken the time to think through the implications of what he had committed himself to, and by extension the man he served.

And those implications were not lost on those looking for reasons to try to embroil Stephen Harper within a conspiracy to favour and rescue a Conservative Senator who had proved as adept as Mr. Duffy was in fund-raising for the party. In offering that monetary assistance to Mr. Duffy, however, Mr. Duffy's own presumed neutrality in the Chamber of Sober Second Thought was effectively diminished.

Mr. Duffy's despicable, grubby behaviour is no longer the issue here. His feelings of entitlement as someone believing themselves to be irreplaceable and without peer as a fundraiser for the Conservatives led him to pursue his own path to perdition. But Mr. Wright by all accounts and as evidenced by the esteem in which he is held by his colleagues and by Mr. Harper, is another matter altogether.

He has left the employ of Mr. Harper. He obviously had signed a contract setting out his duties, his remuneration and any additional benefits normally accruing to someone in such an executive position. That would include vacation pay and it would include normal severance pay.  The belittling picayune demonstrations of sophomoric parliamentary debate being indulged in by the NDP and the Liberals is patently absurd in this matter.

As a matter of public curiosity some have been debating what severance and outstanding vacation pay would amount to for Mr. Wright, and the figure appears to be in the neighbourhood of $20,000; a modest enough sum considering the office and the office-holder and the contract he most certainly would have signed. Yet the opposition is hammering the Prime Minister on the matter.

"Mr.Wright will receive only what is required under law -- no more, no less", affirmed Andrew MacDougall, Mr. Harper's director of communications. This logical statement of intent does not sit well with the opposition however; they oppose this paltry settlement for a man who spent two and a half years performing a difficult job in a trying environment, and who lapsed into poor judgement with unfortunate results.

"Nigel Wright took sole responsibility because he acted alone, and what he did was not in the interest of Canadian taxpayers and it was not a responsible decision", Heritage Minister James Moore repeated, in the hope that the logic of the situation and its faultless inadvertence on the part of the PMO and the former chief of staff would finally penetrate the consciousness of the Prime Minister's detractors.