Wednesday, June 11, 2008

A Grain of Salt

The biggest thing in Ottawa today is not Stephen Harper's cold shoulder, but instead it's the Bernier ScandalTM. Now for those of you who are unaware of what happened, good old Maxy and his new wife Julianne Coulliard got married some time ago, and when they did several questions were asked about Mrs. Coulliard's past affiliation with the Hells Angels. Of course Ottawa assured us that everything was fine, that Mr. Bernier wouldn't leak anything secretive from the ministry of Foreign Affairs to his wife or anything bad like that.

Oops.

A few months later, Bernier has slipped up and is demoted to back-bencher MP. His hopes of one day becoming the new Tory leader or even Prime Minister were dashed across the rocks along with his privacy. An witch hunt has been called in Ottawa and the crosshairs are on Max.

To me, the whole thing seems absurd. Certainly, his choice of wife is questionable, but I would argue that his marriage to her indicates that he trusts her. So, if he trusts her, then wouldn't he share information with her anyways? And shouldn't we trust his judgement as an elected official and a former Cabinet minister (from Quebec mind you, which is no small feat) to be a good judge of character? Call me naive, but I think that regardless of who his wife was there is an almost implied danger of both man and wife knowing all the details of whatever cabinet post he holds.

I think, and this is a rare case, that I'm with Harper on this one. Stay out of Max's private life, and you won't be forced to cast your opinion on something that doesn't even matter. Like I said before, she's his wife for Pete's sake. She's supposed to know what he does. It's her job.

And even if by some random turn of events, what if it leaks to the Hells Angels? What are they going to do with it? It's Foreign Affairs. Maybe they'll find out that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't particularly like Western governments. Big surprise there.

1 comment:

~Julia said...

I agree with you on this one, though the media certainly didn't - they were all over him on this one. Yea - this would certainly classify as a big oops.

Though really, do you think that Harper hasn't left some super secretive documents lying around that his wife, or even his kids have read? I mean honestly... it must have been a really slow week for stories. --'