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Sooner or later, the country is going to realize that there is something terribly wrong with Stephen Harper’s judgment.

And sooner or later, the Conservative party is going to realize one-man bands are great until the tuba player runs out of breath.

At the moment, judged only by his record in Senate appointments, Harper’s eye for talent appears to be made of glass.

Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy have become media migraines for the government. Both have tarnished the Tory brand. They were the PM’s picks. Blow the draft choices, face the consequences. (For the record, I look forward to Stephen Harper’s hockey book: Roy McGregor is such a good writer.)

Consider the case of Brazeau. At the time of his appointment to the Red Chamber, there was lots of buzz that he wasn’t exactly the man on the top of the wedding cake. There were media accounts of sexual harassment allegations in the workplace, of missed child-support payments, and drinking on the job. None of those allegations were proven. And while his current run-in with the law is well documented, Brazeau is guilty of one thing: the non-statutory offence of atrocious poetry.

Native groups were writing the PM about spending irregularities at the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), though the PM’s former director of communications, Kory Teneycke said that happened before Brazeau became national chief. Still, why didn’t the prime minister exercise due diligence? If he truly didn’t know a thing about Brazeau’s less marketable side, his vetting process is worse than his judgment.

Perhaps the PM was more interested in what he did know — that Brazeau, and at the time, CAP, backed the Conservatives when the Assembly of First Nations was solidly with Paul Martin and his “new deal” for native peoples. It was the age-old battle over reserve and non-reserve aboriginals and the differing treatment they receive from the federal government. Harper got his first minority government in 2006 in part because Brazeau, then CAP’s deputy-national chief, helped kill the Kelowna Accord. Two years later, he was in the Senate.

Like some of his appointments, the Senate itself is further evidence of poor judgment by the prime minister. Instead of the refreshing promise of reform, Harper has turned the Senate into a bank machine for the Conservative Party, using his appointees to raise money at endless fundraisers and to fiddle the system.

Harper’s broken promise is bad enough, especially the part about patronage having no role to play in the parliament of Canada. The reality check? No one has outdone the current PM in sending party hacks, bagmen, failed candidates and media sycophants to the trough.

The difference between this PM and his predecessors is that he didn’t stop at stacking the Senate with pork. He remorselessly used it as just another partisan forum, on one occasion deploying a patronage-based Senate to kill a climate-change bill that had already been passed by elected MPs. That hadn’t happened in seven decades.

Then there was the disastrous hiring of Bruce Carson as a key advisor to the prime minister. People make mistakes, yes. But I am still looking for another prime minister who hired someone with a criminal record to sit at his right hand. A fraud conviction is not usually a big selling point when looking for work.

Carson’s dubious appointment is small potatoes in comparison to the lack of judgment involved in welcoming confessed money-launderer Nathan Jacobson into the Conservative party’s inner sanctum.

Jacobson, who was proudly photographed between Prime Minister Harper and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in 2010, (or 2012 if the PMO is to be believed), acted as the seeing-eye dog for senior Harper cabinet ministers anxious to meet top Israeli politicians. When it became public that their wealthy donor and door-opener was actually a man who was guilty of more than $40 million in money laundering in the U.S., cabinet heavyweights like Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Treasury Board President Tony Clement displayed shock. They claimed they hadn’t known a thing about Jacobson’s shady criminal past until a warrant was issued for his arrest in the summer of 2012 after failing to appear for sentencing in California.

It was the same story with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. He was set to receive an award from Nathan Jacobson at a glitzy social event in Toronto. Jacobson was abruptly dropped from the program when it emerged that the well-connected businessman was a fugitive from U.S. justice.

There were so many red flags about Jacobson that even Ferdinand the Bull would have charged. More to the point, the Canadian government knew about them.

In 1998, Jacobson launched a lawsuit against the Attorney-General of Canada and various members of CSIS, Export Development Canada (EDC), and the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) for alleged government reports linking him to the Russian mafia.

During the legal proceedings, Jacobsen himself admitted that he made small payments to a CSIS employee. That case dragged on for nearly six years before it was mysteriously settled without any details being made public.

In 2007, Jacobson was chosen for a diplomatic appointment by the Costa Rican government. The Canadian department of Foreign Affairs twice refused to accept him, a rather unusual occurrence in diplomatic circles.

Harper himself couldn’t have missed the news when Jacobson sued Conservative MP Mark Adler for $140,000 last September. Adler’s statement of defence in the now settled case was that Jacobson had given him the money in 2009 and 2010 as “a friendly gesture.”

Assuming Adler’s story is true, Harper’s judgment is once again highly questionable. Since the ethical standard of any government is set by the prime minister, he appears to be saying that it’s okay for MPs to accept large cash gifts from people who routinely work hard to make contact with politicians who may prove useful in the future.

Interestingly, Jacobson is still in Canada. He is involved in a legal battle over extradition to the United States, where he faces a lengthy jail term for his admitted crimes.

The Harper government, which has insisted in the past that Canadians who commit crimes in other jurisdictions should go to jail there, has been silent about the Jacobson case.

And now we have the developing case of another Harper appointment that raises questions about the PM’s judgment — the enigmatic Arthur Porter.

Porter was head of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), from 2004 until 2011. Harper met him while touring the old Montreal General Hospital in 2006. The PM appointed Porter to health advisory boards and then, oddly, recommended to the Privy Council Office that Porter be named to the Security and Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC).

Less than two years later, Porter found himself chair of our spy services oversight committee, a position in which he had access to all of Canada’s intelligence secrets. He was appointed to the Board of Air Canada and made a Queen’s Privy Councillor.

Porter also was connected to self-described arms-dealer and former (alleged) Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe. The two were involved in a dubious business deal involving a $120 million investment by Russia in “port development” in Africa.

It turned out that Porter was also claiming to be ambassador plenipotentiary of Sierra Leone, one of the most corrupt countries on earth — an obvious conflict with his SIRC role.

When these stories broke, Porter hastily resigned as chair of SIRC. A month after leaving his CSIS job, and again with unseemly haste, Porter resigned as director of the McGill University Health Centre in December 2011. MUHC was left with a $115 million deficit. Porter did not repay $317,000 he had borrowed from the university. The university sued and Porter was ordered to repay that money after failing to show up in court in January.

Quebec’s anti-corruption police raided MUHC looking for incriminating documents concerning the $1.3 billion contract to build a new super-hospital. Some of the documents they seized belonged to Porter. The consortium that got the contract was led by Quebec engineering firm SNC Lavalin, now mired in scandal.

LaPresse reported that $22.5 million of the $56 million in “irregular” payments that Lavalin admitted doling out to win contracts was spent on the super-hospital project. The money was paid to a mysterious company called Sierra Asset Management Inc., registered in the Bahamas, where Porter now lives.

Strangely enough, the address given for Sierra Asset Management Inc. is the same one as a branch of the Compagnie Bancaire Helevetique (CBH). It is run by the man who introduced Porter to Ben-Menashe in 2010.

According to Porter, the man who runs the CBH, Hermann-Josef Hermanns, was just “a guy whom I trusted.” Porter says he is the vicim of a witchhunt and denies knowing anything about the $22.5 million or Sierra Asset Management.

With his party and his parliamentary secretary now under investigation by Elections Canada, you have to admit, Steve sure can pick ’em.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article referred to Treasury Board President Tony Clement as a “friend” of Nathan Jacobson. Mr. Clement’s office informs us that the minister is not a friend of Mr. Jacobson.

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. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

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

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