Baying Hounds

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responds to a question from the opposition leader during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 29, 2013. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

That favourite old expression of the first President Bush: "watch my lips", might stand Prime Minister Stephen Harper in good stead if he were to quietly repeat it ad infinitum. Which would measure the number of times that the opposition insists on addressing the Prime Minister with the very same questions over and over again. They ask their question and refuse the response, behaving as though it had never been given.

They may wish to behave like automatons, unthinking mechanical minds, returning like a broken record back to the same questions in an indefensible attack on the integrity of a man whose moral foundation needs no lessons from them, but those attacks must be taking their toll on the mind and the patience of a man who has far more weighty concerns to relate to. The tedious Question Period performance of the official opposition is without credibility.

Little wonder the Prime Minister seems subdued. He must be feeling a good measure of charitable despair at the lack of integrity in the minds of those who share the upper echelons of political life in Parliament with him. Giving the average voter a fine lesson in character, and demonstrating just how little the country would gain by replacing Stephen Harper with the likes of Thomas Mulcair or Justin Trudeau.

"When we knew this information, it was all rendered public," assured the Prime Minister. His patience never growing dim, not yet, though it's questionable how much more often he can repeat the obvious truth. He had no knowledge of the decision made by his former chief of staff to intervene in an ill-judged move, to use his private funds to bail out Senator Mike Duffy's dilemma of having to repay to Senate funds unentitled housing allowance and other expenses he had claimed.

The Prime Minister is guilty of not being in possession of hindsight. His trust in the judgement calls of his former chief of staff was given a jolt of reality; we are all, at one time or another, capable of making hasty and poorly-thought-out moves that will come back to haunt us because we haven't given adequate thought to their ethical footing, and possible consequences.

The buck must stop somewhere, and since the awkward and suspicious-appearing event impinged on the PMO and directly on the Prime Minister, through an act undertaken by his trusted chief of staff, he now bears the burden of regret, apologizing that this further complication of an already-tawdry affair that has shaken the confidence of the public in the soberness of the Senate, has slopped over into the PMO.

In pursuing the Prime Minister so relentlessly, grimly determined to make their point, and make it stick in the consciousness of the voting public for clearly partisan, ideological gains, the official opposition is more than willing to smear the officeholder and the office of the highest executive order of the land. That is his choice and that of his colleague.

But that choice redounds poorly on their own judgement.