N.S. premier's mea culpa over impaired driving more about damage control than real contrition

This column is the opinion of David Rodenhiser, who covered Nova Scotia politics during his 18 years as a journalist at the Halifax Daily News. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Premier Iain Rankin's confession Monday regarding his old impaired driving charges was more about damage control than public contrition.

Surely he and his advisers would have planned for this day. Yet they came up with a response that was gratingly less than forthright — both in how he did it and what he said.

Making his mea culpa at the beginning of Monday's COVID-19 briefing was all about media management. Those are tightly controlled events at which reporters are restricted to two questions each. None of the reporters attending would have had any background on the story. So most stuck to what they were sent there to do and asked questions about COVID cases and vaccinations.

Rankin faced only four questions about his impaired driving charges. His attempt to limit questions succeeded, but doing so has prolonged the story as reporters pursue followups that could have been wrapped up in a "one-and-done" scrum.

Moreover, the script Rankin read from Monday was designed to diminish his transgressions, not atone for them.

"I make no excuses for my behaviour," he said. "I was wrong and I made a bad decision. I'm very, very sorry for my actions half a lifetime ago."

Note he says "a bad decision." Singular. Just one. So he's remorseful for the 2003 impaired driving charge that he was convicted on, but he wants Nova Scotians to discount his 2005 charges, asserting that he was "eventually found to be innocent" of them.

But there is no "innocent" verdict in Canadian courts. In the 2005 case, the trial judge threw out a charge that Rankin was over the legal limit on a technicality — police couldn't produce the original breathalyzer reports showing Rankin blew 115 and 150.  However, the judge determined there was enough witness evidence to convict Rankin of impaired driving. On appeal, that conviction was set aside because the trial judge made factual errors, including misnaming one of the police officers who testified.

The appeal judge ordered a new trial. The Crown chose not to proceed. This is not the same thing as being innocent of plowing your car into the ditch and blowing nearly twice the legal limit.

But, hey, guilty, not guilty, or innocent, that was all "half a lifetime ago."

Rankin was also less than completely honest about the timing of his confession, stating: "I was never asked by any media source."

WATCH | Premier Iain Rankin addresses impaired driving charges:

In fact, Brian Flinn of the online media outlet allNovaScotia had contacted Rankin's office earlier in the day and asked to speak to the premier about the impaired driving charges. Flinn had received an anonymous plain brown envelope containing court documents related to the 2005 case. Flinn hadn't had the opportunity to ask Rankin directly only because the premier hadn't responded to his request for an interview. Another technicality, at best. 

Rankin is by no means the first Nova Scotia politician to have clear cadavers from a closet after a reporter calls. In 1999, Robert Chisholm's campaign to become premier was hobbled after an anonymous tip revealed he had been convicted of drunk driving in the 1970s at the age of 19. The conviction wasn't so much the problem; it was that he hadn't revealed it a couple of days earlier in a "20 questions" feature that I'd written for The Daily News. I'd asked each of the three party leaders if they had ever broken a law.

Two years later, when Darrell Dexter decided to run for the NDP leadership, he was much more proactive in going public with an impaired driving conviction he received at the age of 19. His campaign didn't suffer for it, and he went on to become premier. 

Similarly, Nova Scotians didn't hold it against Jane Purves, then education minister in John Hamm's government, when she disclosed in 2000 that she had been addicted to intravenous drugs in her 20s. That story began as a tip given to me during a party. Years later, I learned the tip was a plant and I'd been set up by political operatives to get the story out in a controlled fashion. After I interviewed Purves for my "scoop," she issued a news release and held a press conference to go public, using me as the foil who had dug up a tragic piece of her past. (Purves later became editor of The Daily News and was one of the best bosses I ever worked for.)

The lesson here is that Nova Scotians forgive politicians for the mistakes of their youth when they're candid about them, and they mistrust politicians when they aren't. 

For Rankin, his impaired driving charges alone probably aren't enough to hurt him in the pending election. But his failure to be entirely forthright in addressing them builds on a troubling pattern on more pertinent issues. 

He's never fully explained to Nova Scotians things like his apparent inability to get New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs on the phone to co-ordinate border reopenings, or why his government gutted the Biodiversity Act in response to a disinformation campaign mounted by Forest Nova Scotia. We still don't know why charges haven't been brought against the Ontario visitors and their local hosts who held the gathering that sparked Nova Scotia's deadly and expensive third wave of COVID.

These are things that will matter when Nova Scotians go to the polls. And Rankin won't be able to simply declare himself innocent, regardless of technicalities.