If the Government Violates Electoral Regulations in the Woods And No One's Around ...

... does the resulting scandal make a sound and/or cause an election?

“If the words of federal politicians have any meaning, the final act of the 40th Parliament is already underway,” writes the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert. Of course, there’s very little indication politicians’ words do mean anything, ever, but Hébert’s point is that the opposition tabled a non-binding motion Tuesday that denounced the “in-and-out” affair, calling it “an act of electoral fraud … [an] assault on the democratic principles upon which Parliament and the electoral system are based.” If the opposition really believes this language, continuing to support the government is “morally impossible,” Hébert says. Of course in Ottawa, morally impossible does not necessarily mean actually impossible.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland says “we may indeed be about to stumble into the most unnecessary election since Joe Clark … dar[ed] the House to defeat him in 1980.” If we are, McParland says it is a result of politicians’ “new levels of hysteria over issues few Canadians show any sign of caring about.” But does the fact that most Canadians are not paying attention to the Conservatives’ alleged ethics violations really mean that they are not serious enough to trigger an election, as McParland suggests? It’s certainly arguable that the “in-and-out” affair is not the crime the opposition is painting it as, but in the Newsroom’s opinion just because the majority of Canadians have yet to tune into it is not proof that it’s not a troubling scandal.

Frances Russell at the Winnipeg Free Press certainly thinks the Conservative government has committed serious transgressions. “It is dismantling, layer by layer, nearly 150 years of Canadian parliamentary democracy,” she writes. That might be overstating the case a bit, but we suspect you would be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Conservative Party headquarters who would claim the Tories have ushered in a new era of accountability and transparency in government, their central campaign pledges in 2006.

Perhaps the least controversial and most true thing we’ve seen written about the ultimate upshot of the “in-and-out” affair comes from L. Ian MacDonald in the Montreal Gazette. For the Conservatives, he writes, “Competence plus trust equals a majority; competence minus trust equals a minority.”