Ontarians may opt on Thursday (June 12) to defeat enough Liberal party candidates to deny Premier Kathleen Wynne the seats to maintain her hold on power. Or they may not. But such a choice should not be influenced by the Ontario Provincial Police.
The force announced last week that it is seeking documents from Ontario Legislative Assembly staff to resolve allegations of possible misdeeds on the part of former premier Dalton McGuinty’s chief of staff as it relates to the ongoing gas plant cancellations controversy.
Although the OPP investigation into those costly 2011/12 cancellations – and the possible wiping clean of computer hard drives associated with that decision – has been ongoing for a year, the timing of last week’s revelation is mischievous.
Perhaps the OPP reminder of its continuing investigation was intended to offset the PC party’s complaints over the Ontario Provincial Police Association’s election advertising, which is damning of the Tory pledge to cut 100,000 public sector jobs.
It’s one thing for the OPPA, which represents rank-and-file OPP officers, to take a position on public policy. But it’s quite another for a police force to hint at criminal wrongdoing without laying charges during an election campaign.
Indeed, the timing of the OPP’s delivery of the court order at Queen’s Park is reminiscent of the RCMP’s infamously ill-timed intervention in the 2005-06 federal election campaign, which likely helped Stephen Harper’s Conservatives achieve a minority government.
In the middle of that campaign, then RCMP head Giuliano Zaccardelli announced a criminal investigation of the governing Liberals and a number of top ministers for allegedly leaking to Bay Street players plans for the taxation of income trusts. Liberal support plunged overnight, and Paul Martin’s minority government lost the election less than a month later.
Former BC premier and attorney-general Ujjal Dosanjh, minister of health in Martin’s cabinet at the time, described the RCMP announcement as “political interference.”
Dosanjh himself may have experienced a sense of déjà vu. His own premiership was the indirect result of the resignation of BC premier Glen Clark in August 1999 over his alleged granting of a casino licence in exchange for “free” (they weren’t) renovations to his property.
As with the probe of the Liberal income trust “scandal” (one bureaucrat was eventually charged with criminal breach of trust), the police investigation of Clark generated more heat than light though Clark was charged with breach of trust, he was later acquitted.
The RCMP suggestion of criminality and scandal inflicted not just immediate political wounds, but to the principle that police must not use their powers of investigation as political weapons against those with whom they may disagree. Moreover, these police actions may have served to deprive the people of a relatively decent premier and relatively decent prime minister.
If so, these police interventions were tantamount to a kind of quiet, very Canadian, very polite coup – by press release.
Indeed, the Clark and Martin government investigations, conducted with such malicious publicity, shredded the vital democratic principle of police neutrality.
Surely, the image of such objectivity was lost when newly minted Prime Minister Harper shared his first photo op with Zaccardelli.
So, to return to Thursday’s vote in Ontario. I’m no fan of any of the three main parties. A pox on all their houses. But if the Liberals are to lose votes, it should be due to definite sins committed (take your pick), not unproven allegations subject to an incomplete police probe.
George Elliott Clarke is the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University, 2013-14.
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