JAMES TRAVERS
Bernard Shapiro is proving that the future of a good man doing a bad job in the national capital is about the same as a bad man doing a good job.
Two years to the day after former privacy commissioner George Radwanski was chased out of town, the federal government's first independent ethics watchdog faces the same fate. Today, a Commons committee will consider, and is expected to approve, a resolution calling for Shapiro to resign just 14 months after taking the post Liberals promised to create a decade earlier.
As a lofty Officer of Parliament, only a formal recommendation to the Governor General can prematurely end Shapiro's five-year mandate. But politicians of most political stripes are hoping the former McGill University principal will, like Radwanski, take the hint and leave before the mood turns really ugly.
Shapiro's problems stretch well beyond his glacial, uncertain "shades of grey" handling of the Judy Sgro affair. As unhappy as opposition parties are with this week's report — a report that found egregious immigration abuses and yet seemed to let the minister off the hook — they are more concerned about his judgment, competence and political savvy.
His chances of survival are dramatically reduced by the fact that the respected and soon-to-retire Ed Broadbent is leading the charge. Careful not to question motives, Broadbent points to a series of dubious decisions as evidence that Shapiro is too slow moving and malleable for a tough task requiring timeliness and clarity.
The former NDP leader has it nailed. In his first year, Shapiro hired a well-connected Liberal law firm to help investigate a Liberal minister, lifted without explanation lobbying restrictions for two former cabinet ministers, and has so far failed to rule when Paul Martin's business interests make it necessary for the Prime Minister to withdraw from policy discussions.
At least as damning, Shapiro was the dupe in a communications scam prematurely proclaiming Sgro's innocence. Remarkably, the ethics commissioner saw nothing wrong with editing a key paragraph from a letter the former immigration minister then used as proof of her vindication.
Had political events unfolded as expected, that false impression would have been helpful to Sgro and the Liberals in a spring election. Instead, a final report seven months and $170,000 in the making found abuses that raise the spectre of an immigration system influenced more by partisan politics than personal merit.
What Shapiro found was that in the final days of the last election Sgro's campaign office was a clearing house for special temporary residency permits that in 74 of 76 cases opened the door to applicants with Liberal connections. Yet his report was vague enough to blunt the key points.
Still, the central complaint about Shapiro is not bias or malevolence, it's that an appointment system run by the Prime Minister's office and tilted toward friends has again found a misfit. Radwanski was a bad manager who took advantage of his position, staff and expense accounts while doing a good job defending privacy. By all accounts Shapiro is a good man who, in the absence of common sense, political acumen or an understanding of his environment, is doing a bad job defining ethics in a place that often fails to grasp the concept.
That's stiff judgment of someone with an impressive resume forced to break new ground with a vague mandate and staff he inherited from Howard Wilson, the watchdog kept on such a short leash by Jean Chrétien that he rarely barked and never bit. But at a time when federal ethics is an oxymoron, the country can't afford excuses or accept inferior performance.
Shapiro would do himself, Parliamentarians and Canadians a favour by following Radwanski's footsteps out of town. Good men are hard to find, but a good man doing a bad job is simply not good enough - TORONTO STAR
Squeeze me, I am a poli_ass pimple
Good poli_men are impossible to find, but a self-serving man doing a bad poli_job is as Martin as it get's.
And what's with this, "it's in the publics interest" crap concerning the liberal heathens take on legitisomizing ass plunderings???
I'm part of the public, and my interest is to see this heathen abomination scrapped.
Throwing in a little ass_rape for Martin would be rather fitting, as well.
One can dream. :wink: