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1/ Seems to me we have settled on three angles in the WE Charity thing. First is the the Jesse Brown angle: WE is bad so any dealings with WE are bad. Second is "the ethics *around* the contract are bad" angle. Failure to recuse, difficulty remembering $41,000 travel bills etc
2/ The first is undeniably full of schadenfreude goodness but it's more an indictment of the ruling class in general than it is of Libgov specifically. The second is bad and in Morneau's case should be a firing offence, but it is still more about appearance than substance
3/ But there's a third angle, actually the one we started with but now seem to have forgotten: did anyone *direct* or even nudge the civil service to sole-source this contribution agreement to WE Charity? Suddenly no one seems to want to focus on it.
4/ I don't know if it's because no one wants to get into the mechanics of government, or because they think this line of questioning is too boring/won't get them on the evening news, or whatever. But it is the one that should matter most.
5/ We know that CSSG was hastily conceived, and drawn up without much real consultation with the public service. We know that ESDC, upon seeing program parameters realized there was no way it could deliver program itself and wanted to go the contribution agreement route.
6/ We know that ESDC decided pretty quickly that *contrary to the assumptions made by Finance and PMO* the challenge in implementing the program was going to be outreach, and because that was the way they framed the project, they went with WE Charity.
7/ The heart of an actual corruption charge - as opposed to an "appearance of conflict of interest" charge - is: did PMO/Finance design CSSG in a way that ESDC would have no choice but to choose WE Charity as the partner? Yet no one is going after that line of questioning.
8/ Is it because they think they can't make the charge stick? Is it because the Jesse-Brownification of this scandal has made people chase irrelevant (to the issue of governmental corruption at least) but quote-worthy distractions around property ownership in downtown YYZ?
9/ To be clear: I think WE does need to be taken down, that the Ontario elites that adored/shielded the Kielburgers need to be properly humiliated, that Morneau needs to go, and that the CSSG was bad policy. None of which proves the contribution agreement itself was crooked.
10/ If you view politics as a game, none of that matters, it's all just about scoring points (and there are lots of points to be scored). But if you want to *learn* anything it helps to understand what actually went wrong. And the current process seems ill-equipped to do that.
11/ I guess my broader point here is that politics, policy & administration are three different things, and neither the opposition nor the media covering of the WE scandal seem to want to make those distinctions. I fear as a country we are getting stupider about this stuff.
12/ And I should really stop writing these so quickly because too many typos/grammar errors. Sorry, everyone.
