In House Panel - Can Stephen Harper get past the Duffy story?
The questions just keep coming. And coming. And coming?
Stephen Harper has been fielding questions about the Mike Duffy trial for two straight weeks.
It's thrown the Conservatives off message. But will their be lasting consequences to all this?
In House panelists Andrew Coyne, columnist for Post Media and the National Post, and Rosemary Barton, host of Power and Politics on CBC News Network weigh into the story that's been dominating the campaign thus far.
On Ray Novak:
RB: There's a direct liability traveling on an airplane with Stephen Harper during the election campaign and his name is Ray Novak. The question for (the Conservatives) at this stage is, OK, we're going to keep (Novak) around because he's important to the campaign and we don't want to admit he's a problem, but there he is every day — a reminder that he was in the room, at least according to Perrin, and he perhaps knew more than we understood.
AC: It's clear that everybody, including me, overlooked the question of what Ray Novak knew. (The Conservatives) didn't have a good answer when it started to emerge...and right away they tipped their hand that they felt this was a vulnerability. Here we are, two years plus after the story, middle of an election campaign, and you've got the Prime Minister's former chief of staff and his former legal counsel saying diametrically opposed things at a criminal trial? Holy smokes.
The Duffy trial's impact on the election:
RB: I am not one of these people who think people aren't paying attention. I do think people are engaged with the story. The question is, how do you keep that narrative moving forward? And I'm not convinced the opposition parties will be able to do that.
AC: If it starts to congeal in the public's mind that this is a campaign in trouble, a government in trouble, those things can then lead to slip-ups and trip-ups in reaction from the party. So they're not out of the woods yet, just because the trial goes dark.
RB: It will be a confluence of things. It won't be just Mike Duffy...it will be the softening economy, it will be those GDP numbers in the beginning of September, it will be all those things together that could cause (the Conservatives) trouble.