Skeletons rattling for nothing

Here we are, involved in a low-intensity but expensive and long-term counterinsurgency and headed for an economic recession: all parliamentarians want do is charge each other with some scandal or other.

The Mulroney file has been joined by charges involving the late independent MP Chuck Cadman and alleged offers for his vote in 2005.

The Brian Mulroney-Karlheinz Schreiber saga - dredged up again for our collective boredom and disgust - should have been turned over to police. Period. Dillydallying with rhetoric and posturing only served to muddy the course of justice.

It has to be remembered: however bad the Mulroney-Schreiber debacle may make the old Tories look in the eyes of any political beholder still watching, many new Tories - Prime Minister Stephen Harper and company - are the political scions of the Reform Party. Blowing out of the west like a prairie fire in the 1980s, the Reformers were those conservatives who rejected the excesses, antics, omissions and commissions, real and imagined of the Joe Clark and Mulroney eras. There were also more than a few old-time Social Credit sorts mixed in (no need to dwell on that lot). The new party terrified and outraged old Tories and amused the Liberals, who based three majorities on the schism.

Mulroney himself acknowledged Preston Manning's Reform movement was as much aimed at him as the Liberals.

It all seems to have worked: the Reformers took over the Conservative brand, and then the government. Things looked good for them, even in a minority situation - at least until the Mulroney-Schreiber stuff re-emerged, and now there’s this new situation with Cadman.

The late MP's family and the author of a book on him have alleged the new Tories offered Cadman a $1 million life insurance policy if he helped bring down the Paul Martin Liberals in 2005. The only thing the Tories acknowledge is Cadman would have been brought back into the Tory fold, with all the benefits - financial and support. Cadman himself denied there was anything more. Where would the Opposition Tories back then come up with $1 million? Why would they spend it, especially after it became clear elements within the government caucus had no intention of allowing the blue-Liberal Martin to clean up his party?

Now Harper is suing Liberal officials for libel. At least he’s taking the right move - litigation.

As I've said before, the Liberals had better hold on to their seats in case somebody wants to take a look at their won history with the trouble-plagued Khadr family, particularly since Al qaeda's recent announcement of what a great guy the late patriarch of the family was in their eyes and how he hated the very West the Liberal government of the day helped him re-enter during the mid-1990s, springing him from a Pakistani jail.