Fast ‘not happy’ with Senate conduct
By Mike Archer. Abbotsford MP Ed Fast issued a press release from Columbia this week saying he was not happy with the conduct in the Senate which has left his government reeling.
Neither are we Ed.
The question most of us have, has to do with your second comment – “It does not reflect the broader caucus or government.”
Well, if the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, in whom Stephen Harper expreseds complete confidence after learning about the scandal, at least until the crisis got too big, does not reflect the broader caucus or government, who in your government does?
Your third statement, “We have worked hard as a party as a caucus and as a government to dramatically strengthen accountability rules in Ottawa, including the Federal Accountability Act,” strains credulity with even died in the wool conservatives are pointing out that … if true, it doesn’t seem to have worked.
As Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne said this week, “Paying a Senator under the table, for any reason, under any circumstances, is serious business. But when the recipient is under investigation by a Senate committee, when the purpose of the payment is to relieve him of responsibility for the expenses for which he is at that moment being audited, and when his benefactor is the most senior unelected official in the government, “serious” does not begin to describe it.”
Coyne also pointed out that the offences which may have been committed carry punishment of up to five years in jail.
Ed may prefer to face his conservative supporters and those who finance him and his party from Columbia on this matter but sooner or later he’ll have to come up with something better if he intends to continue soliciting his local supporters’ money when it looks more and more like everything which Ed and Stephen told us they stood for has now been demonstrated, right from the center of the beating heart of the government they created, to be either an absolute failure or a complete fabrication.