Will they ever learn?
Trailing in the polls with a weak leader, the desperate Liberals go negative
Kevin Steel - May 7, 2007
Imagine you are given a new job and a new office. When you move in, you discover a briefcase full of confidential files. Is it yours? Actually, no. "Even if we come upon something otherwise lawfully, for example, if we take over someone else's office lawfully, once we become aware of another person's property and we keep it, even temporarily, it is called 'theft by conversion,'" says Shawn Beaver, a prominent criminal lawyer with Taylor Beaver LLP in Edmonton. "The law does expect you not to detain, not to keep it, even temporarily. If you form the intent to return it to the authorities for turning it over to the rightful owner right away and you do so, then you haven't committed an offence. But detaining it for any time is called 'theft by conversion'--converting something to yours at least temporarily belonging to somebody else to your knowledge," he says.
Unfortunately, that's what the Liberal Party of Canada did as one of its first acts as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, when it decided to keep Conservative files that were supposed to be transferred by parliamentary movers as the parties changed offices last year. The Liberals had lost the January 2006 federal election in large part because the Canadian public viewed them as ethically challenged, so if the party was looking to rebuild, this probably wasn't the best way to start.
However, nobody outside the Liberal Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO) knew they had the files. For 14 months they held onto them--30 boxes full of personnel evaluations, private correspondence, newspaper clippings and who knows what else, some of it dating back to the Canadian Alliance and even the Reform party years in the 1990s--and kept quiet about it while the Liberal Research Bureau in the OLO rifled through them looking for dirt.
The fact that the Liberals would stoop to such depths, resorting to an almost Watergate-style skullduggery by snooping through private files they only had access to because of their theft, indicates they see themselves as being in big trouble. Indeed, their new leader, St?phane Dion, doesn't seem to be inspiring much confidence. In an SES poll conducted for the Sun Media chain between March 31 and April 5, only 16.7 per cent of Canadians thought Dion would make the best prime minister, compared to 42.2 per cent for Stephen Harper.
There are other signs of desperation. On April 3, Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak, an official with Dion's leadership campaign, produced an Internet TV ad taking a quote from Stephen Harper out of context in an attempt to portray the prime minister as if he enjoyed the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. (It was too much even for Liberal supporters and he took it down.) Then there's legal bullying; on March 23, failed Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy and MPs Navdeep Bains and Omar Alghabra served the National Post and columnist Jonathan Kay with a libel suit for a critical column published a month before. But rifling through stolen documents?
Tim Powers, a Conservative strategist, says it's pretty bad when people are going through the garbage or appropriating items that aren't theirs. "This speaks to the difficulty the Liberals are having themselves, developing an identity under Dion and com[ing] forward with meaningful stuff," Powers says.
It fell to 32-year-old Liberal MP Mark Holland to introduce to Parliament what the Liberal snoops had found. On March 22, Holland stood up in the House of Commons and said he had turned over to the RCMP private correspondence that showed that in 2000, then Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Jim Hart had asked for and received an inducement to step aside so the newly elected leader of the Canadian Alliance, Stockwell Day, could run in his seat. The Liberal press release of that day said, the "documents . . . came anonymously into [Holland's] possession." On the same day, however, the online magazine PoliticsWatch.com published a story with this revealing sentence: "An official in Liberal Leader St?phane Dion's office told PoliticsWatch that the Conservatives left approximately 30 boxes of documents in the Opposition leader's office last February after they moved into the PMO." In the House, the Conservatives pointed out that the RCMP had looked into the matter seven years ago. And so the story started to turn to the source of Holland's information.
As the story turned, it started changing. The next day, the Liberal-friendly Toronto Star published a report wherein the 30 boxes suddenly turned into "thousands and thousands of pieces of paper" with "Liberal staffers idly combing through" them, just happening upon what Holland said was the "smoking gun" in the Hart/Day business. It wasn't an "anonymous" source that gave Holland the Hart memos, after all. It was other Liberal staffers who found them amongst the stolen Conservative papers.
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