The issue of Jason Kenny allowing, (probably directing) that government letterhead be used for a demand for financial support to fund a Conservative “full court press” on immigrant communities in target ridings is the smaller part of the story. The fact that this guy has used his power as Minister of Immigration as a tool for shaping the political leanings of immigrants is the real issue. Immigrants traditionally have a favourable bias towards the party that is in power at the time they came to Canada, and yes, the Liberals having been in power for so long, (as Canada’s natural governing party) have benefitted from this tendency. However, what we have here is clearly a ministerial conflict of interest. Mr. Kenny has used the office he holds to, in effect, run a clandestine immigrant recruitment drive. For me, the bright side of this story is that, those efforts have obviously not worked as well as the Conservatives had hoped, ergo the need for this last minute and expensive pre-writ campaign. I am also pleased to see that the sacking of the bureaucrat responsible for the miscue has not gone down well with the public who see in that act yet another example of how the PMO works. Pretty hard to believe that in the all-controlling environment of this secretive government, this underling made that decision without direction from “on high”. The Conservatives will be criticised more for throwing their guy under the bus than the less resonant issue of the letterhead.
AH
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