GuelphMercury.com: Special deals could stain Conservatives

March 11, 2010

Conservatives in power quickly grasped that nothing sticks like a label. Tax-and-spend Liberals were branded as soft on crime, the NDP leader became Taliban Jack and diplomat Richard Colvin was a terrorist dupe.

But in politics as in real life, what goes around, comes around. A ruling party that’s been so successful reducing rational debate to emotional slurs now has a keen interest in keeping voters from jumping to conclusions.

Along with presiding judge Doug Maund, most Canadians recognize the legal break that let former Reform poster-boy Rahim Jaffer walk out of a provincial court this week with barely a scratch and no criminal record. In their guts those same law-abiding, taxpaying citizens just absolutely know they wouldn’t be nearly so lucky in plea bargaining their way off the twin hooks of impaired driving and possession of cocaine.

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Still, it’s more than awkward for “do-the-crime, do the time” Conservatives that Jaffer, once the front-man for the Conservative caucus and still the husband of testy junior cabinet minister Helena Geurgis, is so widely seen as escaping the full weight of the law. Self-evident in their equivocal support for a former colleague and member of the Conservative family is the certain knowledge that they, too, are now victims of pubic suspicion, clinging perceptions and snap judgements.

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http://news.guelphmercury.com/Opinions/Editorials/article/607529