I don't care about Helena Guergis and neither does the PM

I don’t generally talk about scandals on this blog. For one thing, everyone does so if someone is interested in such a topic they can easily find it somewhere else and I usually don’t have a unique or interesting perspective on scandal. For another thing scandals are usually a boring and normal by-product of government.

Every government in the history of mankind has had some corruption, it is the nature of the beast (the beast being Humanity). Certainly those that are caught should be punished and publicly shamed but there is no way to stomp it out and no political party is completely innocent. All that we can hope for is that mechanisms can be in place to deal with corruption adequately enough that it doesn’t become rampant or too severe. If you don’t like that you can always join the anarchist league. You can sign up wherever their meetings spontaneously occur.

So I am only interested in scandals if they appear to have wider policy or political repercussions. This Helena Guergis business, however, doesn’t seem to have any legs to it. Polling data shows that the Conservatives aren’t being hurt and the damage is being isolated to a Minister that was pretty useless to begin with. Honestly I think the opposition should just take their victory and move on.

I was motivated to write this blog after reading a column from Stephen Harper’s most inarticulate critic, Tabatha Southey of the Globe & Mail. In her column, much to her own shock, she agrees that Mr. Harper did the right thing by removing Ms. Guergis. She rightly takes the Liberals to task for trying to turn her into a martyr and she writes that Mr. Harper had a right to ‘ruin her life’ because “he also largely made her life. He made her a cabinet minister. That's big.”

Her point appears to be that, in the words of Sir Humphry Appleby, “The Prime Minister giveth and the Prime Minister taketh away, blessed be the name of the Prime Minister,” and every politician worth her/his salt should know this. In a sense this is true but ultimately I don’t think it was the scandal that caused the Prime Minister to taketh. It was her incompetence.

Since the beginning of Stephen Harper’s Premiership, Helena Guergis has been steadily moving down in the ranks. The Prime Minister showed such a consistent lack of faith in her abilities that it is a wonder why he didn’t just ice her before. Except it isn’t a wonder because Helena Guergis is a woman and the media and women’s groups would scream bloody murder if this Prime Minister fired a highly visible woman.

In fact I will go farther and claim the only reason why she was a Minister to begin with is because she is a woman; this gives irony to the complaints of some that she is being treated differently from Maxime Bernier because of her gender. Stephen Harper waited until there would be minimal political cost to getting rid of her, and then got rid of her.

The story of Helena Guergis is much more a story of the failure of identity politics than it is a story of corruption. And I really don’t care about her ultimate fate.