Do the Liberals even understand what a conflict of interest is? Does a fish know it’s wet?

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Do Liberals understand the concept of conflict of interest? Do they have any coherent theory of the division between the partisan or personal interest and the public interest? Does the distinction even occur to them?

The question arises in the wake of the Greg Fergus affair. Mr. Fergus, though newly selected as Speaker of the House, is no stranger to politics. He has been a member of Parliament for eight years, and a parliamentary secretary to various cabinet ministers for most of that time. He would presumably have watched other Speakers in action, and would have some notion of what the job entails: in particular, refereeing between the contending parties in the House – a job for which the first requirement is impartiality.

The Speaker must not only be fair to all sides, but must be seen to be, if he is to command the cross-party confidence needed to maintain control of the House. Since the Speaker is also an MP, elected to Parliament as a member of a particular party, the onus is on the Speaker at all times – but especially on a new Speaker – to show that he can put those partisan ties aside. I belabour this point not because it is new or surprising, but because it is obvious.

And yet one of his first acts as Speaker was to make a testimonial video for a partisan chum, to be shown at a partisan gathering, and to do so wearing the robes of his consummately non-partisan office.

This is hardly the most serious issue before Parliament. On its own it could be put down to an individual error of judgment. But coming on the heels of a string of similar errors by Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers, it suggests something, shall we say, systemic.

The Prime Minister alone has been responsible for at least three, from the Aga Khan trip to the WE Charity affair to SNC-Lavalin; the latter two also ensnared his finance minister, his principal adviser and the clerk of the privy council. Then there are your garden-variety ethical lapses, from the MP who hired a relative to run her constituency office to the cabinet minister who awarded contracts to a friend.

Mr. Fergus himself was previously caught in an ethics violation, as parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, after writing a letter to the CRTC in support of a television channel with an application before it, leading an exasperated ethics commissioner to call for mandatory training in conflict-of-interest issues for all ministers and parliamentary secretaries.

The thing about all these scandals is that they did not seem, for the most part, to stem from a desire for personal gain or a conscious intent to break the rules: Even in the matter of SNC-Lavalin, those involved seemed somehow to have persuaded themselves they were colouring within the lines.

Rather, what appears to have been at work is a kind of vast unawareness, a genuine cluelessness that anyone could find the promiscuous commingling of interests on display – political, personal, business, bureaucratic – objectionable. That does not make it better; if anything, it makes it worse. Crooks at least know what laws they’re breaking.

Certainly it is more intractable. It is the consequence of decades of Liberal hegemony, not only political (since 1891, the federal Liberals have won two elections in every three) but more broadly. Liberals, and liberals, are so dominant in our politics, and in the little worlds that revolve around politics – the bureaucracy, the courts, the universities and, yes, the media – that I think it really is difficult for them to imagine that there exists a world outside their own, except in some vague theoretical sense.

Add in the thousands of activist groups the party has taken care over the years to cultivate with public funds, or the immense archipelago of subsidies to businesses large and small across the country, the whole apparatus of Liberal clientelism, and you have a whole agreeable universe of Liberaldom, a cosmos of comity. A person could spend their whole career inside without ever encountering an unfriendly face.

Thus if they reward or are rewarded by or otherwise are too close to their friends, it is not because they are Their Friends, since as far as they can tell there is no other kind of person. To ask, do Liberals understand conflict of interest, is to ask: Does a fish know it is wet?

Take Mr. Fergus. I said he was no stranger to politics. I understated the matter. Before he was an MP, he was national director of the federal Liberal Party. Before that he was a staffer to two cabinet ministers. Before that he was president of the Young Liberals of Canada. His whole life, in short, has been spent in the company of other Liberals.

That hardly makes him unique. The most blinkered partisans on the Conservative benches are also political lifers, of which the party has more than its share. But Liberal lifers have two things their Conservative counterparts lack. One is assured access to power. Two years in three, historically, Liberals have been in government; in the third, they have been busy preparing for it.

The other is the divine rightness of their cause. Liberals have always been prone to being corrupted by power, but the current crop of Liberals are unique for being corrupted by their own virtue. The preening moral vanity that is a signature of the Trudeau Liberals – the gratitude, as in the Pharisee’s prayer, that they are “not like other men” – is not, alas, an act. They truly believe it, to the point that they are literally incapable of conceiving of themselves doing wrong.

It isn’t only that they are surrounded by people like themselves, in other words: They are surrounded by people who think like them, and whose first thought at all times is that whatever it is they are thinking must be for the Good. If they are aware that there are other types of people or other ways of thinking, it is only as a cautionary tale – like the ogres in folk stories, an example of the threats that lurk for the unwary.

So, for example, when it came to appointing someone to look into allegations that China had interfered in Canada’s elections on behalf of the Liberals – and that various Liberal cabinet ministers had looked the other way at it – it was the most natural thing in the world for the Prime Minister to appoint, as “special rapporteur,” a lifelong family friend, one of 23 governing members of his family foundation, and a previous beneficiary of the same government’s patronage.

A cynic would suggest the Prime Minister appointed someone he could count on to keep shtum. I think it literally didn’t occur to him there was anything wrong with it. I think he thought this was a perfectly splendid appointment. As, indeed, did many others outside his immediate circle, who applauded it at the time. Some still do.

If all of this leaves the impression that the Conservatives are the victims of the piece, it shouldn’t. Liberal political and cultural hegemony is as much the Conservatives’ doing – not only for the political ineptness that has so often delivered the Liberals safely, even miraculously, into power, but for their own willingness to inhabit the stereotypes Liberals make of them.

If people in the bureaucracy, or the law, or the universities, are inclined to see the Conservatives, and conservatives, as the barbarians at the gate, it is not entirely a matter of snobbery or bias. It is also because, all too often, especially of late, they have acted like it. Tory paranoia is not entirely unwarranted, but neither is it entirely undeserved.

The long and honourable conservative tradition of skepticism of intellectuals – that is, of overzealous, overweening intellectuals – has congealed into a hostility to science, to expertise, even to facts. The proud conservative tradition of defending Parliament, and parliamentary prerogatives, has given way to fantasies of abolishing judicial oversight, or ignoring the division of powers, or simply defying the law. Conservatism, as such, with its bedrock insistence on rules-based orders and limited government, has increasingly been subsumed by populism, which acknowledges no such rules or limits.

None of this is the least bit necessary. It is not written in stone that the universities must always be hostile to conservatives: If conservatism is not adequately represented in the academy, the answer is to reform the academy, not to demonize it. If the courts lean left, focus on building a body of conservative legal scholarship, and conservative jurists, rather than running roughshod over judicial independence. If the media aren’t giving you a fair shake – oh, come on: You’re in the media manipulation business. And we’re easily manipulated.

Would an incoming Conservative government be viewed with some suspicion by the Ottawa bureaucracy? After all that has gone before, probably. But most of them are fair-minded professionals with a job to do. A smart Conservative government would look for ways to build alliances and get things done; it would give the benefit of the doubt to those that gave it the benefit of the doubt. A dumb Conservative government would carry on with the same strategy of polarization and picking fights that got it there.

Each of the parties has its faults, in other words. Both are, in their own way, the product of Liberal hegemony – what the late Richard Gwyn called “one-and-a-half-party rule.” If the besetting Liberal sin is arrogance, the feeling they are (literally, in some cases) born to rule, the besetting Tory sin is resentment, the sense that everyone and everything is stacked against them. Given power, then, both tend to abuse it: the Liberals, because they can, the Tories because, as they see it, they must.

There is only one cure for this, in the end: contestable politics. Only when either party, in any given election, can as readily expect to be in government as in opposition, will each be relieved of its particular historical baggage. Only then will our politics converge on decent democratic norms.