By now, you will have read that our long-standing federal member of Parliament, Windy Hallett, recently stepped down from his position as chairman of the Commission on Ethics in Banking. After 25 years of “bringing home the bacon” for Petunia Valley, as he described his role in Ottawa, Windy was brought down by a simple parking ticket, reminding us once again how difficult it is to conduct one’s affairs in the unforgiving spotlight of public life.
Well, I suppose it wasn’t just the parking ticket. A lot of this grief could have been avoided if Windy had simply paid the ticket without making a fuss. But Windy went to City Hall and pounded on the desk of the chief assistant to the assistant chief, telling him that MPs should have some kind of diplomatic immunity when it comes to late night business conducted in the service of the country.
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Windy did not notice that the assistant had an observer in his office, a reporter from the Canadian Press who picked up the ticket and noticed that it occurred outside the premises of a well-known house of horizontal refreshment run by the Russian mafia. These houses are common enough, but who could have known that this particular one was at the centre of a patiently-constructed police investigation into money laundering and international bankcard fraud? Not the press reporter, anyway, at least until he came to the house that very night and started taking pictures. The flashes from his camera spooked the surveillance team into a hastily organized raid on the premises.
Still, you would think that the breakfast news the next morning would have celebrated the apprehension of hardened mobsters by vigilant members of the Emergency Task Force. Instead, we were treated to the macabre sight of a middle-aged man in his underwear flanked by two busty professional ladies from the Coq d’Or nightclub. It is a sad truth that the national media are far too often distracted by cheap sensationalism and a willingness to pander to the base elements in our nature.
But as they say, “if it bleeds it leads.” Or to be more up-to-date, “if he cheats, it tweets” or “if he snogs they will blog.” And Windy did offer an embarrassment of riches to the press corps. This may not be the first scandal out of Ottawa but it is the first to offer porn, pork, police and parking alongside the usual pants-down stuff.
Back in Petunia Valley, that one photograph of Windy has eclipsed all memories of any ribbon-cuttings, sewage plant openings and fall fair speeches from the last quarter century. There was nothing else for us to talk about in the Kingbird Café for days afterward. It was April, for Pete’s sake. Windy went into seclusion somewhere in the Gatineau Hills for a week and emerged to announce that, he was “not a quitter” and after grave deliberations and a struggle with his conscience, he was giving up his position as chair of the Ethics Commission but would stay on in the House as an independent.
“Why wouldn’t he just get it over with and resign?” asked my neighbour Vern Bunton, blowing steam off his coffee.
“His pension kicks up to a higher level in September,” explained Bob Pargeter. “There’s nothing political about it.”
And so, Windy moves to the far corner of the House where, in a figurative sense, he stands in the pantheon right alongside Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Jesse James, Adam Giambrone and any number of disgraced public figures from the past decade. Some say it was tragic, but people who knew Windy thought he was very much like one of those Imperial policemen in Return of the Jedi, riding the Speeder Bikes that zipped through the forest at impossible speeds. You just knew in your heart that sooner or later he was bound to hit a tree and explode in flames.
Mercifully, there was no tight-lipped wife to stand behind him at the podium and mutter through clenched teeth that she would forgive and forget. Mrs. Hallett left Petunia Valley many years ago to work for an aid group that specializes in women’s issues in various failed states around the world. Apparently, she finds it much easier to improve the lot of women in places like Uzbekistan than she ever did in Petunia Valley.
