February Issue 2007

The year didn’t start off well for Wajid Khan. The Pakistani-born Canadian Member of Parliament entered 2007 with a whirlwind of rumours swirling about him. Before the first week of the new year was over, the car salesman-turned-politician became headline news — and the latest poster boy for self-interest and dishonesty in Canadian politics.

Elected to the federal parliament with the centrist Liberal Party of Canada in January 2006, Khan, just seven months later and out of the blue, was named as special advisor on the Middle East and Afghanistan to the new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. For many, this set-up was odd: why did a member of the official opposition have this special relationship with Prime Minister Harper, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), the party that broke the Liberals run of 13 straight years in power?

It seems Khan’s “dual-political citizenship” irked his own party the most. On January 4, the new leader of the Liberals, Stephane Dion, gave 60-year-old Khan a very Bush-like ‘with us or against us’ ultimatum. “You can’t have a foot in the government and a foot in the opposition,” Dion told reporters after the news broke. “He needs to choose.”

Speculation was already high that Khan was being wooed by the Tories. So Dion’s ultimatum was a strict and very public attempt to lay down the rules for his party and pressure Khan into staying.

But the move backfired. The next day, Khan crossed the floor. Observers called the ultimatum a rookie mistake by Dion, who had just won the Liberal leadership race one month earlier in December.

Nonetheless, many Canadian voters were more upset with Khan than Dion. So it’s unsurprising that an online petition protesting Khan’s move, popped up just days after his official announcement. The petition’s author, Jason Cherniak, feels hoodwinked, and he does not even live in Khan’s riding of Mississauga-Streetsville, just west of Toronto. “But I have volunteered in the riding and for Mr Khan in the past as a Liberal helping a man who I believed to be a Liberal,” says Cherniak. He believes his petition voices the concerns of Khan’s constituents. “They feel betrayed and powerless. They want to punish Mr Khan.”

In Canada, it is generally accepted that voters base their voting decisions much more on the party than individual candidates representing the riding. “Mr Khan was elected as a Liberal Member of Parliament in a riding where the Liberals are very strong,” says Cherniak.

Comments by signatories to the petition confirm this. “My vote,” writes one disgruntled voter, “was not for Wajid Khan, it was for the Liberal Party of Canada.”

Some of his former Liberal colleagues offered more personal criticisms. “Good riddance to him,” said one Liberal; another characterised Khan as someone who does whatever necessary to get ahead.

Others were not surprised. “He started out as a conservative,” says Tarek Fatah, a journalist and activist familiar with Khan’s career trajectory. Fatah, also a native of Pakistan, is rankled by all the fuss generated by Khan’s move to switch parties. “It shows people’s ignorance and prejudice,” says Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC). “Winston Churchill did it not once, but twice.”

There have been many instances of party-switching in Canadian politics, too, says Fatah, including by Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada’s most beloved prime ministers. Since 2004, more high-profile defections, which were much more clearly motivated by self-interest — MPs crossing the floor for cabinet posts — have occurred.

If anything, Khan’s move was to keep the small post as an advisor that he had already been doing for five months. And some don’t blame him. He was forced to make a choice. Besides, what politician wouldn’t want to make a move that would make him feel like his voice mattered?

And according to inside sources, Liberals were not interested in his voice. After the leadership convention, Khan reportedly approached Dion and said, “This is my area of expertise; I want to help.” Dion simply walked away. Khan reportedly didn’t like the slight. Then, in the following weeks, a discussion on the Middle East in a Liberal caucus meeting reportedly erupted in a shouting match, with Khan being lambasted by deputy leader Michael Ignatieff, the world-renowned writer and former Harvard professor-turned-politician.

So Fatah may have a point. If Khan is just one in a long list of party-switchers, was not rewarded with anything new, and was not even respected by his own party, then why the fuss?

Fatah claims that Omar Alghabra, a Saudi-born Liberal MP, is behind the campaign to vilify Khan. They may both be Muslims from the Mississauga-area but they’re “on opposite sides,” says Fatah: Alghabra is considered to be an Islamist, while Khan is a secular Muslim. Fatah, quoting a MCC executive, says it’s a smear campaign based on “misguided jealousy.”

Of course, some of the criticisms hurled at Khan from the pro-Arab Islamist corners don’t seem off base. For instance, how much of an expert is Khan, a self-made millionaire car dealer who left Pakistan in 1974, on the Middle East and Central Asia?

“A little bit more than a person who has no idea where Central Asia is,” jabs Fatah. Plus, Khan, says Fatah, as a former Pakistani MiG-19 fighter pilot who was shot down in the 1971 war between India-Pakistan and spent a year as a prisoner of war, has some insight into politics in the region. “Nobody questions any white man’s competence, ever,” finishes Fatah.

Still, others say the real criticism on Khan has nothing to do with ethnicity or his qualifications. It’s about ethics. “Party-switching should only be allowed in certain situations,” says Duff Conacher, coordinator of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa-based watchdog and lobby group, “like when your party has broken all its election promises, the leader is found guilty of a legal breach, or the party has changed direction.”

Wajid Khan actually claimed the latter during a press conference announcing his defection: “The Liberal Party has moved away from people like me, people who believe in free enterprise, support for families, and a stronger, more assertive Canada on the world stage.”

But Conacher doesn’t buy it. He says the Liberals, under their one-month-old leader, never had time to change direction; they hadn’t formulated any major policies yet.

In fact, Fatah doesn’t agree with floor-crossing either.

“The best way is to resign and stand for re-election,” he says. What has made Fatah speak out in favour of Khan is people’s reaction, their agenda.

Conacher, like many, though, finds it impossible to defend Khan because he finds his recent track record ethically dubious. As Harper’s special advisor, Khan made a trip to the Middle East in the fall of last year and then submitted a report that he promised to make public. Now, Khan says he can’t. Some media reports say there are some in Ottawa who even doubt the existence of the special report.

“In every survey completed in the past 15 years, a majority of Canadians have said that they want their politicians to take directions from voters, and act with honesty and accountability,” says Conacher. “Khan has failed to act with honesty.”

It was natural to assume that after a week or so the maelstrom surrounding Khan would have settled down a bit. But by January 15, instead of dying out, the storm picked up speed. Elections Canada, the non-partisan agency that oversees public elections, announced it had deregistered Khan’s former Liberal riding association for filing its 2004 and 2005 financial returns late. But there was more. It was publicised that Khan took $180,000 in loans from his own successful Mazda car dealership to help finance the association and his own campaigns. That may not sound odd, but Elections Canada has strict rules about campaign funding. Loans have to be repaid within 18 months. His were not. And because campaign contributions had been legally capped at $5,100 and $1,000 for personal and corporate donations respectively, Khan’s unpaid debts effectively became illegal contributions sitting on the Liberals’ head after he jumped shipped. A MP for the NDP, Pat Martin, characterised Khan’s move this way: “He’s a shrewd businessman who exploited a loophole most capably.”

Conacher has been busy trying to plug loopholes like this and has been actively spearheading other ethicsrelated legislation. “Wajid Khan is just another reason why we need an ‘honesty law,’” says Conacher.

Meanwhile, Cherniak’s petition has yet to get much traction. By the end of January, even after all the controversy involving the loans, the online protest had only received 287 signatures, and many of those were fakes (Cherniak blames Conservatives for sabotaging his petition).

And Fatah, who has spoken directly to Khan after the whole controversy erupted, says while “nobody’s happy or excited” with his floor-crossing, Khan “is confident he made the right decision.”

If Khan decides to run as a Conservative in the next election, which could be as far away as 2011, voters will ultimately have the final say on his career. But for now, all Khan has to face are a few words from his critics, like these words from an angry voter who petitioned against the Pakistani-Canadian MP: “I voted for a Liberal government, not a Conservative one. He is a ‘lota’ in the truest South Asian political sense: he used the people and then turned on them.”