Canada can learn from the Catholic Church’s experience, writes Prof. Michael Higgins
When lawyer and co-author Peter Kavanagh and I were researching for our book Suffer the Children Unto Me: An Open Inquiry into the Clerical Sex Abuse Scandal, we discovered again and again that protection of the perpetrators took precedence over justice for the victims because the integrity of the institution, the reputation of the structure, was deemed paramount.
The cover-up by prelates, apologists and lay administrators was conceived not as a deception but as an imperative: avoid scandal at all costs in order to ensure that the institution and its office-holders were not sundered in their mission.
No one would make that argument now. Pope Benedict XVI himself in his pastoral letter to the Irish Church lamented the “misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal”. In the last couple of months, Pope Francis has requested the resignations of three American bishops for failing to be diligent – spiritually and legally – in protecting the innocent and holding abusers to account.
No bishop anywhere gets a free ride anymore.
Secular equivalents
But what is true for ecclesiastical power is no less true for its secular equivalents. The BBC had to own up for the rampant abuses of its ‘entitled’ celebrities like Jimmy Saville, Pennyslvania State University had to face the ravages to its football titles and dignities with its blind tolerance of coach Jerry Sandusky’s predatory behaviour and Silvio Berlusconi’s Tiberian excesses had to be checked even by a wobbly Government coalition.
The cover-up, any cover-up, in the end, doesn’t work.
Which brings me to the Canadian Senate scandal with Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright and Stephen Harper: a cover-up is a cover-up irrespective of the content and motivation.
Throughout most of the summer, Canadians were enthralled and appalled by the various disclosures surrounding the Senate scandals that have roiled the country over the last two years. The Canadian political system is bicameral, in some ways similar to the British governance structure.
Both countries have a House of Commons to which members are elected and both countries have second chambers, the House of Lords in the case of Britain and the Senate in the case of Canada.
These latter are unelected bodies; their functions are defined by tradition and convention; they are repositories of patronage and reward; their political purpose is circumscribed by law.
When Senator Mike Duffy from the province of Prince Edward Island was alleged to have double-dipped on his living allowance and per diem travel expenses, he found himself in the public glare and he was required to pay some $90,000 (€60,000) to the public purse. He didn’t have the money.
The Chief of Staff for the Prime Minister, Nigel Wright, having failed to secure Conservative Party money for the payment, chose to give him a cheque to that end from his private purse. When the press found out, they demanded an explanation. The PM, Stephen Harper, denied knowing that his chief had handled the Duffy payback in the way he did and Wright resigned. Harper more than hinted that he was fired.
A national court inquiry followed — during a national election campaign, no less — with new revelations daily, though the trial has been recessed since August 26, its 46th day, until November 18, a month after the national elections. Tempest in a teapot? Or an indicator of moral compromise?
Behaviour
Wright insists he did what he did — paying with his own money (he is quite wealthy, on his own admission) — to bring closure to a potentially embarrassing event for the government.
He justified his behaviour by quoting St Matthew arguing that his act of generosity must remain secret — the right hand should not know what the left hand is doing—and there should be no public acclamation for doing good. He was saving the reputation of the government and of the PM. That justified it and the Gospels appear to have validated it.
But when you undertake to “protect” the reputation of an institution — in this case, the Red Chamber — and when you seek to insulate any governing body — in this case, the PMO and the Prime Minister — from the taint of scandal, and you do this through spin, sophistical argumentation, and lawyerly legerdemain, any gains are provisional, any result pyrrhic.
It is, of course, supremely naïve to think that political parties, government specifically, will not attempt to stem the negative impact of bad press. After all, it is in the nature of the beast to deploy every possible resource for damage control.
But when reputation becomes the summum bonum, when obfuscation and deflection are the modi operandi rather than transparency and forthrightness, then integrity suffers, perhaps irreparably.
Esquire columnist Stephen Marche succinctly captured popular Canadian cynicism regarding the composition of the Senate when he observed of that august collectivity that it is a “mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs”.
Although such a perception is widespread it is hardly fair. Senators of the calibre of Lois Wilson, Frank Mahovolich and Romeo Dallaire, to name but a few, are hardly worth inclusion in a wholesale indictment of a structure that has in fact atrophied, become a storage tank for unelectable operatives, a safe if not anodyne sanctuary of reward and privilege — but it need not remain so.
It is worth more; it is worth salvaging; it is worth scouring.
And the most effective, in fact only effective, road to that end is truth-telling.
Stephen Harper, his advisers, staff, media consultants, and legal counsel could learn something from the Catholic hierarchy’s ill-conceived strategies to preserve its reputation from being tarnished.
Nothing short of honest accountability will work. What applies to a universal institution of ancient lineage like the Catholic Church is no less relevant for the occupants of the chamber of sober second thought.
The Catholic Church learned the cost of choosing institutional “well-being” over the ethical imperative to speak and act truthfully. The Canadian government can benefit from the Church’s experience.