A week ago, Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber phoned the board of directors of his constituency association at their monthly meeting and announced his resignation from the Conservative caucus. One board member, Doug Elniski, resigned in support.

Then Rathgeber informed the Speaker, the Prime Minister’s Office, the chief government whip, and finally, he posted a tweet to the world. He acted by the book. More important, he acted: his resignation was an event, an unpredictable interruption of routine procedures. Accidents are unpredictable too. Rathgeber’s resignation was no accident, but the result of that internal deliberation we usually call thinking. Moreover, because it was public and concerned matters of public policy, it was political in the fullest sense of the term. Public action means the actor bears responsibility for his deed, which gave an unusual gravity to Rathgeber’s words of explanation.

In the past few weeks, the Canadian government has used words in the opposite way, to veil and obscure rather than to reveal the meaning of their deeds. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy affair. To date, no words at all have been uttered by anyone that make sense of why Wright cut a cheque to Duffy so he could repay taxpayers for claiming expenses improperly.

To put it another way, when Rathgeber resigned, he revealed who he was. He disclosed a unique and distinct personality, which is always risky. This is why even those who thought his action rash at least admitted he was brave. His supporters called upon others to emulate him. They thought his deed was glorious and Rathgeber a hero.

As with the Homeric meaning of hero, Rathgeber had a story to tell. Much of it he told over the past few months on his blog.

He is a lawyer, a Queen’s counsel who understands that by the law of the Constitution, his job is to represent his constituents in Parliament and the job of Parliament is to hold the government to account, especially over its stewardship of public resources. It is not his job to present the views of the executive to the people of Edmonton-St. Albert. Reformers used to call the latter process “becoming Ottawashed.”

The occasion for his resignation was the amendments made in committee by seven Conservative MPs (six of whom were from Ontario and so devoid of Reform party recollections) of his private member’s Bill C-461, The CBC and Public Sector Disclosure and Transparency Act. Had the bill become law, it would have made the salaries of senior mandarins and CBC operatives public. Now, it may be true that making salaries public does not necessarily reduce costs. But no one made that argument in committee. In fact, no one made any arguments, because months ago, the executive decided to raise the threshold for salary disclosure. No one said a word about that either.

Why the PMO is protecting disclosure of senior bureaucrats’ salaries, let alone refusing to widen access to information criteria for the CBC, is a mystery. That would be the same CBC that refused to answer an access to information request about the size of its vehicle fleet on the grounds of “journalistic integrity.”

Rathgeber knows he will suffer the consequences of his action. In response to a blog post last summer, “Of Orange Juice and Limos,” dealing with ministerial opulence, when the House reconvened in the fall, Rathgeber’s desk had been moved to the back row.

There are consequences for the government as well. Like a Rhinestone Cowboy, “there’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to the Tory horizon.” And as Rathgeber said, “I can only compromise so much before I begin not to recognize myself.”

In the months to come, the rest of the country will ask whether the Conservative government, as Rathgeber said, had “morphed into what we once mocked,” namely a new incarnation of the principle-free, entitlement-obsessed Liberals of Chretien’s day. If the Tories are oblivious of compromise because they have lost principles to compromise on, then they owe Rathgeber a vote of thanks for providing a reminder of what they have lost.

Barry Cooper is a senior fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and a columnist with the Calgary Herald.

The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@theprovince.com. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.