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Stephen Harper’s silence is beginning to damn his government and his party.

Even that unshakeable base of his must be wondering what he takes them for.

This week, it was left to Green Party leader Elizabeth May to demand that Elections Canada reopen the Robocalls investigation. The astonishing thing is that someone had to ask.

Two court proceedings into this pathetic affair found that there was indeed evidence that others were involved in voter suppression in the 2011 federal election.

Michael Sona, now appealing his conviction, is the only person who has faced legal consequences. That was one riding, Guelph. At the minimum, there were seven others. In other words, a very serious crime remains unsolved and evidence is being ignored. That’s what they do in third world countries — never get to the bottom of things.

Why wouldn’t PM Harper himself be asking Elections Canada to make an effort to close this case with some semblance of justice rather than a sigh of resignation and a token conviction that may be overturned?

After all, the fraudsters who broke the law almost certainly used information from the Conservatives’ Constitutent Information Management System, CIMS, to come up with the lists used in making the illegal calls. Isn’t the PM worried about the alleged theft and abuse of this proprietary information, if it was a theft? Might it not happen again? If we take him at his word that the whole thing wasn’t done by the Conservative Party of Canada with a little help from its friends, why wouldn’t he want the culprits brought to justice?

While it is true that Elections Canada can’t compel testimony, the prime minister could call a public inquiry, as Norman Boxall, Sona’s original lawyer, has repeatedly pointed out. There was a time, after all, when opposition leader Stephen Harper was Mr. Accountability and Transparency, right?

All that public money was supposed to be paid back in cash and shares. In the end, $4 billion has apparently gone missing.

And if Harper doesn’t want an inquiry for some unknown reason, there is always the red serge option. This prime minister has been quick to involve the RCMP against a bevy of his dropped former friends and allies, including Bill Casey, Helena Guergis, Rahim Jaffer, Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin. So if not a public inquiry over something as fundamentally important as voter fraud, then why not an RCMP investigation — particularly now that Harper has gutted Election Canada’s investigative capabilities in the All’s Fair in Love and War Elections Act.

This subject is all the more important because the CPC is morphing into a kind of political cheaters society. With multiple convictions for cheating at elections, including former cabinet minister Peter Penashue and the PM’s former parliamentary secretary Dean del Mastro, there is a new stench in the air.

Robert Fife of CTV News is reporting that 10 top managers at disgraced engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and their wives wrote personal cheques to two federal riding associations that were not in electoral contention. The cheques to the non-contender ridings totalled $25,000.

Thirty thousand dollars was then transferred from these loser ridings to the riding of Christian Paradis, then Harper’s Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Paradis is now Harper’s Minister of International Development. SNC Lavalin would not say if the managers were reimbursed by the company.

It would not be news if they were. SNC Lavalin made $1 million in illegal campaign contributions in Quebec provincial politics and reimbursed managers who wrote the cheques with salary bonuses. Stephen Harper should be getting to the bottom of this alleged violation of federal election law publicly, not granting SNC Lavalin $800-million loan guarantees, when the World Bank won’t touch these guys for 10 years because of their record of international graft and corruption.

And what about Harper’s silence on the great auto bailout of 2009? Between Ottawa and Queen’s Park, just under $14 billion of public money was forked over to the automakers to stave off bankruptcy. The Auditor General’s report issued last week shows it was not a well-planned rescue mission: it was more like dropping money out of airplanes, or throwing candy canes to kids off Santa’s float.

Despite the laughable claim of strong financial management skills, the Harper government did not require the companies to issue detailed reports on how they used the government’s $2.8 billion loan for capital expenditures and warranty claims.

That’s bad enough. But AG Michael Ferguson also found that there was absolutely no documentation on another $528 million given to General Motors. Parliament was, if not left in the dark, then certainly in the candlelight when it came to getting information on this debacle. The public reporting was beyond poor.

All that public money was supposed to be paid back in cash and shares. In the end, $4 billion has apparently gone missing — after the companies involved returned to profitability. Harper, who allegedly abhors corporate welfare as much as the other varieties, has been silent as the Sphinx. Isn’t he interested in finding out what happened to all that public money he shelled out but never got back? Isn’t this the same guy who wants a poor Indian band to pay back a million bucks spent on housing because their accounting was “incomplete”?

The country remains deeply divided and uncertain about exactly what motivated Martin Couture-Rouleau and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau to claim their victims – Cpl Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Despite the prime minister’s rush to judgment that these were terrorist acts, more Canadians disagree with him about that than accept his claim.

There are some very thorny questions that need answering, for both reasons of security and how we treat the mentally ill. Since the Privy Council Office issued warnings about violent acts of terrorism in Canada days before the tragic events in St.-Jean-Sur-Richelieu and Ottawa, what did federal security chiefs do about it?

And if you’re going to warn provincial legislatures of a possible threat, why on earth would you not upgrade security on the grand-daddy of all targets, Parliament Hill? Even something simple like locking the front door. A public inquiry into how these outrages unfolded would be far more useful than Stephen Harper’s blatant politicizing of this issue. Did terrorists kill those two Canadian soldiers, or two mentally ill misfits? The answer is not trivial. It has vital consequences for the policy issues involved and how Canada’s various government agencies and services should respond.

Harper will never call a public inquiry or even talk about the growing list of debacles that speak of incompetence and corruption in his government, including the $1.1 billion he siphoned back from Canadian warriors out of the Veterans Affairs budget since 2006.

At the very least, maybe he could give the country a word or two on the former Conservative riding association member, Bryan Vanderkurk, who tried to vote twice in the May 2, 2011 election and got caught. When will this PM denounce dirty tricks?

Or perhaps Stephen Harper is one of those who believes that if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, recently hit number one on Maclean’s magazine’s top ten list for Canadian non fiction.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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