Turning vice into virtue

Svend Robinson, the former Member of Parliament for Burnaby-Douglas, has let it be known that he intends to stage a comeback, this time in the riding of Vancouver Centre. Well, it’s not official yet, but you know. “I'm pretty close,“ Mr. Robinson told the Globe and Mail last week. “It would take something pretty significant for me not to go ahead now. And I just don't see what that would be.”

Really? Think hard, Svend. Try to recall: What incident in your past might make you ineligible for public office?

Oh that: the theft of a $64,000 ring, pocketed in a Richmond, B.C. auction house. To be sure, Mr. Robinson turned himself in some days later, but not before his bit of shoplifting had been a) caught on tape, and b) reported to police. Though convicted of theft over $5,000 -- grand larceny, I think it’s sometimes called -- Mr. Robinson was given a conditional discharge, meaning no criminal record, on the grounds that he had suffered enough, what with losing his job and all. And besides, he had an explanation.

At first, it was the lingering effects of a hiking accident several years earlier. Later, Mr. Robinson declared he was mentally ill -- sorry, “living with a mental illness” -- which he has since revealed to be a bipolar disorder. But hey, he told his Globe interviewer, that doesn’t mean he’s crazy:

“Too many people, he said, hear the words and immediately think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. ‘That's how I thought of it, too,’ he admitted.”

This, from the man who says he wants to “remove the stigma” around mental illness. But he doesn’t to remove the stigma, he just wants to displace it: from those who, like him, are merely “living with” mental illness, onto the cuckoo-lala-nutsos. And after all, who wants to be one of them?

But this is more than just a matter of false sensitivity. It is central to Mr. Robinson’s strategy. And it’s working. He has hit the sweet spot: just crazy enough that he cannot be held to account for his actions, but not quite crazy enough to bar him from Parliament. So he avoids a criminal record on account of losing his job; now he gets his job back, if all goes according to plan, on account of not being a criminal.

Think it can’t happen? This is the riding that sent Hedy Fry to Parliament. Four per cent of residents surveyed by Robinson’s pollsters said his adventures as a jewel thief would make them more likely to vote for him.

I’d congratulate him on his ingenuity, but this is politics, or more precisely this is Canadian politics: there’s a template for these things. Take Dave Dingwall. Revealed to have racked up almost $800,000 in expenses in the space of a year, the Master of the Mint has resigned his office -- not, you understand, as an admission of any wrongdoing, but to clear his good name.

Perfect: He was not fired for cause, but rather resigned of his own accord. Yet his resignation, while voluntary, was not so voluntary as to disqualify him from a severance payment: two years at $250,000 per is said to be his asking price. He’s in the sweet spot, too: neither fired nor retired, admitting nothing and forgoing nothing.

Or take André Boisclair. The frontrunner in the Parti Quebecois leadership race was lately forced to admit to having used cocaine regularly while a cabinet minister in the former PQ government. You would think that having repeatedly and knowingly broken the law, while a member of a government sworn to uphold the law, would be something of an impediment to leading a party that hopes to be entrusted with government again. But that was years ago. It’s not like he’s taking drugs now, in opposition. He only takes them when he’s in cabinet. Sweet.

Or take Dalton McGuinty. Appearing on a popular talk radio show the other day, the Ontario premier took the opportunity to admit that yes, he had broken his word to the people of Ontario. He had made a promise before the last election not to raise taxes, and in his first budget after the election he had raised them.

The premier plainly expected, not to be condemned as a liar for having broken his word, but to be congratulated for his honesty in admitting he had done so: it was necessary, he said, in order to pay for health care. His reelection strategy now becomes apparent. He will not ask people to vote for him in spite of his broken promises, but because of them. He won’t ask them to trust him to keep his word, but rather to trust him to break it, should it become “necessary.”

The moral distinction he is making, so far as I can tell, is between a promise that was never intended to be kept, and a promise that was broken, as it were, in good faith: between lying before the election and changing his mind afterward. It’s not that he’s untrustworthy, in other words. It’s just that you can’t hold him to anything.

There’s just one problem with his story. It isn’t true. Mr. McGuinty did not promise not to raise taxes, which promise he was regrettably unable to keep. He promised not to raise taxes without first asking the public’s permission, via a referendum, which promise could very easily have been kept. And it wasn’t even a promise, really, since that was only what was required by law, under the province’s Taxpayer Protection Act.

So the promise the premier found impossible to keep was nothing more than a promise to obey the law. That ought to have told us something.