Liberals have 'skeletons in closet,' too: Wallin
There are people working in Liberal campaign headquarters who have had "run-ins" with the law and been allowed to continue to work for the party, Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin said Wednesday.
Drawing an implicit parallel with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former security adviser Bruce Carson, whose criminal past has become a political issue in the current federal election, she questioned whether such matters should be campaign fodder at all.
Wallin, was speaking on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon's daily podcast (the podcast including her remarks is available here). With her on the political panel were Scott Feschuk of Feschuk Reid and Ian Capstick of MediaStyle.
"We have people in the Liberal campaign headquarters who've had run-ins with the law before, and they do their time and pay the price, and they come back," she said. Challenged by her fellow panelists to name names, she would not.
"The media are driving this," she said of the Carson issue.
"If people start opening up all of these cans of worms and trying to run with that, then you're going to get your own hands dirty," Wallin said.
"Everybody's got skeletons in the closet. There are legitimate questions about other people in other campaigns, and interestingly enough, those stories are not being told."
The Liberals responded by also challenging Wallin to be more explicit. "Senator Wallin should name names or she should retract, " a party spokesperson said.
Wallin, a former broadcast journalist with CTV and the CBC, was named to the Senate by Harper in December 2008. She was also at one time consul general to New York, appointed in 2002 by the Liberal government.
