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cameronr:

“Ethical standards are fragile enough in politics. Too many partisans view it as war by other means, exaggerating the stakes in order to justify their behaviour to themselves. In the case of the federal Conservatives, that predisposition to expediency is overlaid with a swaggering, bullying style, yet one that betrays a deep insecurity: the insecurity of a party that, for good reasons and bad, believes the system — the media, the bureaucracy, the judiciary — is stacked against it, and that it is therefore obliged, if not entitled, to take a few shortcuts to even the odds.

It is a party that believes it has had to fight twice as hard to get where it is, a belief that has only hardened through each of the many compromises it has made on the way. The progression is sadly familiar. Having first compromised its beliefs, a party finds it is easier to compromise its principles; having compromised its principles, it learns to compromise its ethics; and compromises of ethics, as we have seen in other parties, lead sooner or later to compromises with the law.”