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October 16, 2005

Blow your house down

This leader in Saturday's Guardian has unintended relevance to Canadian politics:

…we can only say that smoking a joint at Oxford is not the same thing as doing lines of cocaine while serving as an MP. The former would clearly be a private matter; not so obviously the latter.

It is hard not to have reflexive sympathy for [Tory leadership hopeful] Mr [David] Cameron on all this, however. Everybody does silly, even illegal, things at some point, politicians and journalists not excepted. But we elect political leaders more for their public than their private qualities. Of all the things that may matter about Mr Cameron, it is hard to believe that this is the most important one.

I suppose I'm a bit of a prude when it comes to the banned substances. THC is the only illegal thing ever to have polluted my bloodstream, and I don't much like the stuff. I'm not going to storm out of a party on principle at the sight of a Class A drug, as the Brits call them, but nor does the situation arise very often.

As for public representatives, put it this way: I think I expect my MP to have zero parts per billion in his system of anything and everything stronger than pot. So I was a little surprised to find that it's at least partially up for debate whether it really matters that André Boisclair "took cocaine" when he was a PQ minister. It sounds even worse in French:

Cocaïne, excès d'alcool, fins de semaines exaltées au terme desquelles on ne sait plus où se trouve l'auto qu'on a louée... Immature et arrogant, le jeune politicien roulait à tombeau ouvert.

Roughly: Cocaine, excessive amounts of alcohol, weekends at the end of which he didn't know where to find the car he'd rented — and on Monday, remember, he was serving his constituents. This matters a great deal, and the idea that it can be chalked up to "youthful indiscretion" is absurd. He was 31, for heaven's sake — two years older than I am now. These sorts of shenanigans might get you kicked out of student government. He may deserve a second chance, but it's incumbent upon him to prove it.

It's interesting to compare and contrast Boisclair's situation with David Cameron's. His own drug use, whatever it consisted of — he wisely shut his yap about it after the media feeding frenzy began — dates from his university days, and may have gone no further than marijuana. Even if did go further, though, unless there's some history of addiction there, it should be a non-issue as far as British voters are concerned. Cameron owed them nothing when he did whatever it was he did, and to make a stink about this is only more encouragement for politicians to lie even before they take office.

Posted by Chris Selley at October 16, 2005 05:48 PM

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Posted by: Dustin Clark at October 29, 2005 09:52 PM