To all my family and friends who vote Conservative:

Hello to cousins and people from high school. I hope you're all doing really well. I am going to prevail upon our relationship and ask for a bit of your consideration. Over the past year I have had many conversations about my choice to abstain from voting in our current electoral system. If you are lucky enough to have avoided me in this, I congratulate you. If you are curious about my thoughts on it, here they are. I usually end these discussions by repeating that mine is a personal choice, and that I am not trying to tell anyone to abstain from voting.

Okay. So, it seems I am a hypocrite. This is an open letter to all my friends and family who have voted for Harper’s Conservatives in the past, and might do so again. Because you are my friends and family, I am going to assume that I like or even love you. Hopefully you like me, too. Please give me a few pages here as a favour. I am asking you to look at things from another angle. Not a partisan one, but perhaps an angle of just plain old, “what’s right and what’s wrong”. I call it  “how would you feel if your kids did what the Conservatives do?”

They play games to perpetuate and maintain their power. They do it in secret, then they lie to hide it. Forgive me. This may be a slog, but I’ll use the Mike Duffy trial as an example. I am going to try to explain this (mostly boring and convoluted, yet important, story) from memory based on the news I consumed over that past few months. Here’s the way I see it.

Harper hates the Senate and wanted to reform it, but that wasn’t working out for him. He realized he wasn’t able to change the Senate so he decided to beat it. He appointed a bunch of Conservative Senators, including TV celeb, Mike Duffy. Duffy was chosen to be a Conservative Senator to serve Stephen Harper, not the Canadian citizens. He was brought in as a charismatic, celebrity fund-raiser for the party. The rules allowing him to become a senator were problematic in that the only way to get him in was to pretend he was representing Prince Edward Island, which he wasn’t. He never had anything to do with PEI, what with spending his life doing media in Ontario. But, the Conservatives fudged and wriggled and Duffy bought some property in PEI and voila: PEI Senator. He was meant to be a warm body to vote party line for the Conservatives, but mostly he was made a senator to raise money for the Conservative Party on the taxpayer’s dime. He couldn't really have ever gotten the appointment without sleazy backroom tricks and meddling. And they knew it. 

Then Duffy got to work for the party, flying around on “Senatorial” business while appearing at Conservative fund-raising events. He also availed himself of the (I would say generous) expense claims that Senators have access to, including claims for housing in Ottawa, which is technically not where a PEI Senator resides. These $30,000 in claims had a dodgy look to them, and became a concern for the Prime Ministers Office. I capitalize PMO because it is not just a place, it is an organization… a taxpayer-funded professional cabal that seems to have one job only, and that is politically protecting Stephen Harper, like, you know… in a partisan way, not from terrorists and stuff…

When the folks in the PMO noticed these Mike Duffy expenses, they thought they might technically be legal, but they were still a problem. They might call into question the legitimacy of Duffy’s appointment as a PEI senator. The PMO told Duffy to pay them back out of pocket, but Duffy said, “Nope. I am a Senator and these are legit perks and I am too poor and you can’t make me.” So… in secret, the PMO began a process to just pay back the 30K that was owing from Mike Duffy with cash from the Conservative Party’s war chest. No money owed, no issue, no embarrassing media coverage to call into question whether or not Duffy should even be a senator / bag-man for the Conservative Party.  And there were even more problems.  

It seems that there was an independent financial audit happening regarding all Senatorial expense claims, and the Duffy stuff was going to show up in it. The PMO tried to pressure the auditing firm to  sleaze the report to leave Duffy out of it, but the independent auditing firm refused to falsify their reports.  Oh… also… that $30,000 that the Conservative party was going to pay for Duffy in order to make all this shit disappear? Turns out the numbers were way off… the real price tag was more like $90,000. Oops. Apparently that was a deal breaker for the Conservative Party’s Money Guys (all caps just for fun). They refused to pay it. Meanwhile, the accounting firm was saying they weren’t going to drop Duffy from their report. It looked like scandal and liability and embarrassment were about to splash out all over this mess in a very public way. 

That’s why (If your’e Harper) it’s nice if you have a guy like Nigel Wright running the PMO for you. He’s a hyper-partisan, Christian fundamentalist Alberta billionaire. (Totally MY peeps!) Nigel looked around and saw a log-jam in the situation. Like most people with tons of cash (I am assuming) he looked at the 90K figure and thought, “Goodness me… all this trouble over a mere pittance. Writing a cheque would make all this go away”. And that’s what he did. In his capacity at the PMO, in collusion with all the people who work closest with Harper in order to fight the never ending partisan political war. It was totally inappropriate and possibly criminal. They got caught, and it looked like bribery, and it might have been, or not… but here’s the thing:

Because Nigel Wright and others were compelled to testify, under oath, in the Duffy trial as to what kind of shenanigans they were up to, we got an unprecedented glimpse into the secret world of the back rooms of power. We got a peek at what those fuckers we pay to run our country are actually doing. What they are doing is shitty.

To recap: They broke the rules to get their guy in. They used him as a sleazy pawn to further their own political interests (on the taxpayer's dime). Their first instinct when they thought he might cause embarrassment was to obscure the truth, even to the point that they tried to manipulate a professional audit to hide their problems. They tried to bail him out  in secret, and when that didn’t work, they threw him under a bus. During the trial it’s become clear that many pivotal people in the PMO knew a lot about what was going on. The Prime Minister says he didn’t know at the time and that only Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy were accountable. 

Stop… wait… think about this: Our Prime Minister (who is reputed to be a control freak / micro-manager) would have us believe that he was not involved in any of this childish sleaze, and that he didn’t know about it.

Bullshit. I say he’s lying. 

I also believe no one will ever be able to prove it, because it is clear they have created “plausible deniability”.  Do you actually think Harper is actually telling the truth about this? If so, you can stop reading. We have nothing to say to one another here. Thanks for your time. See you at the family reunion.

But… if you are able to see that he’s lying, or at least misleading the Canadian public in this issue… I ask you to extrapolate. Liars lie, especially when they have a vested interest to protect themselves. I would say that pretty much everything that comes out of his mouth these days is misleading, manipulative, or just un-true. He would have us believe that this election is about the economy and security… but wait… what if Harper’s lying about “what this election is about”? 

What if this election is actually about honesty, fairness, accountability, and integrity? Looking at the information and evidence that’s come to light through the Duffy trial, I am embarrassed for Canada. This is what our government seems to think is appropriate behaviour. Extrapolate what else they might be doing and have managed to make sure we never know about. Remember that there’s a powerful institution called the PMO that seems to have this kind of chicanery as their job. I would expect that most of the time they get away with it. 

Are you still there, Conservative-voting friends and family? That was long and annoying, I know, but I felt I needed to lay it out as best I can. This wasn’t really about me trying to explain the Duffy trial. This was always about me asking you for a huge favour. 

Don’t vote. 

Harper is hanging on by a thread. If you are part of his base, then you are part of the 30% or so of voters that he knows can put him in a minority government.  Any less than that, and he fails. He wants you at the polls so badly on October 19th. I am asking you, pretty please, to deny him.

I am not asking you to vote for anyone you hate, or actively support an ideology you can’t agree with. I mean, if you want to, go ahead and support an opposing party. I don’t care. But, most importantly, if you are concerned about honesty and integrity, can you see how it’s likely that Stephen Harper ain’t your guy? Deprive him of your vote.

You wouldn’t tolerate this kind of behaviour from your kids. Why should you accept it from your Prime Minister?