Chris Alexander is being pilloried as ferociously as he was praised enthusiastically four years ago when he entered Parliament. The oft-cited reason for his precipitous fall from grace is that the former suave diplomat had to transform himself into a crude Conservative huckster to succeed in the court of King Stephen where you follow every order and parrot the hyper-partisan talking points handed you by the juveniles in the Prime Minister’s Office and the central command of the Conservative Party.

But the oleaginous Alexander flamed out not just for drinking the Harper Kool-Aid. He lacked the discipline and the judgment to know where to draw the line, what not to say, when to shut up.

He also did not have command of his complex portfolio and was seen to be winging it or lying. Paul Dewar, NDP foreign affairs critic: “You make everything up, Chris.” Liberal immigration critic John McCallum: “Nobody believes a word Chris Alexander says.” A less partisan critic, Charles Taylor, the philosopher, told me: “For a highly educated man, Alexander says the most stupid things.”

Like other Harper ministers, Alexander had little power over policy and legislation. He had to operate within the government’s excessive secrecy, use obfuscation and doublespeak to defend the indefensible, such as “subsuming the refugee file in the government’s war on terror,” as Alex Neve of Amnesty International told me. Or slipping in sectarianism into refugee selection, to bring Christians from Iraq and Syria, avoid Muslims.

Still, Alexander’s penchant for posturing, sniping and getting testy is mostly his own doing.

No sooner had he dramatically “suspended” his election campaign recently and closed his office in the riding of Ajax-Pickering to go deal with the Syrian refugee crisis than it was reopened and he was back on the hustings.

Soon after being named minister in 2013, he was slammed by the Canadian Council of Defence Lawyers for calling a murder suspect a “murderer,” before the man’s trial.

When he cut health benefits to refugees, he insulted Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins, who, not surprisingly, is headed to Ajax to campaign against Alexander and for the Liberal Mark Holland.

On Ottawa’s ban on the niqab at citizenship ceremonies, Alexander was more inflammatory than Harper and even Jason Kenney. He associated the niqab with criminality and barbarity: “We are concerned about protecting women from violence, protecting women from human smuggling, from barbaric practices like polygamy, genital mutilation, honour killings.”

He told the website vice.com, “We’ve done a lot to strengthen the value of Canadian citizenship. People take pride in that. They don't want their co-citizens to be terrorists.”

This prompted Liberal MP McCallum to say in the Commons: “It is the most predictable thing in Canadian politics. Someone says ‘Muslim’ and a Conservative minister says ‘terrorist.’ The minister of Citizenship and Immigration assumes all Muslim women who wear the veil are terrorists, unless proven otherwise. He equates terrorism with niqabs.”

Alexander responded by accusing the Liberals of having been “the racist party in this Parliament over decades.”

Outside the Commons, he snapped at reporters, “You are partisans, you journalists?” Last year, he hung up on Carol Off of CBC Radio’s As It Happens. There was the recent flare up with CBC-TV’s Power and Politics.

He can lay it on thick to curry favour. In Nov. 2013, meeting a delegation of Coptic Canadians on Parliament Hill, he matched their over-the-top anti-Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric by promising to declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization. This was contrary to the government’s stand, and also that of our American and European allies.

Speaking to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress this year, he accused Vladimir Putin of “behaving like a terrorist,” and calling on the world to wage war on him. “The whole world is standing against him, with every option on the table … (and) standing with Ukraine with military assistance … The buck stops in Ukraine … Let’s join that fight.”

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Alexander can brush the truth under the rug. Just before entering politics, he released The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, a well-written account of his years as our ambassador and also a UN representative there. In 320 pages, he never mentioned the torture of Afghan detainees handed over by Canadian troops to the Afghan authorities.

Former Star columnist and editorial page editor emeritus Haroon Siddiqui returns Thursdays and Sundays for the federal election. siddiqui.canada@gmail.com

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