It's far from the craziest thing to appear on the National Post's Full Comment page today. But since Jon Kay is happily pointing back to his old posts now that the RCMP has dropped its investigation into the Cadman affair, I'll point back to mine in an inevitably futile effort to stop his gloating.
That there won't be charges laid isn't exactly a shock. It's been obvious from the start that, with an apparent lack of any documentation, this thing wouldn't get very far in court. But it's unclear how this puts the matter to rest.
For that to happen, we'd still need a coherent explanation from Stephen Harper as to what he was talking about when he told Tom Zytaruk that party officials offered to "replace financial considerations [Cadman] might lose due to an election," and that those officials were acting on the theory that resolving concerns about "financial insecurity" might convince the late MP to help bring down the government.
The Prime Minister has been less than eager to offer that explanation, to say the least. The story may not have legs, since it's highly unlikely that any more evidence will emerge to move it forward. Also, we collectively have the attention spans of termites. But if a scandal stops being a scandal simply because it can't be proven in a court of law that something criminal happened, we sure are setting the ethical bar pretty low.
