A
Are Be
Guest
After all, there's nothing wrong with grand scale corruption when the glorious Liberals are behind it!
|
|
|
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
A
Are Be
Guest
Christie Blatchford
Ire over scandal, unfortunately, will not persist
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 1:08 AM EST         Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2004
Advertisement
My fear, and it is sufficiently rank that you may actually be able to smell it wafting off the paper in your hands, is this.
For all the outrage there would seem to be in the land at the federal Liberals now, my hunch is that it will not last, and that once again, I will get the government that many of you deserve.
I expect the fury will endure through to the next election — whenever Prime Minister Paul Martin calls it — only in Alberta, where sensibilities are so different, even separate, from those elsewhere that it is that province, and not Quebec, which ought to be the reference point in discussions about "the rest of Canada," or ROC.
In Toronto, in Ottawa, in the central vote-heavy part of the nation, that sound you hear is the hiss of dissipating anger.
I first heard it myself on Saturday night, or less than a week after the full sponsorship scandal engulfed the PM and his government, at dinner with some bright professional friends.
They said all the right things, of course. They just aren't going to do the right thing, which is to vote anybody but Liberal.
They were deeply saddened by the revelations in Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's report; they were shocked; they were even angry. But one by one, they veered back to the Liberal mothership. "Prime Minister Stephen Harper?" someone said with a delicate eastern shudder. "What are the alternatives?" someone added. Besides, said one of the men, "Don't you believe Martin when he says he didn't know anything?" One of the women muttered ominously, "Abortion."
I didn't even know if Mr. Harper had a position on abortion — and it's difficult to determine from the press clippings what it might be — but at that moment, if I could have mobilized the unborn, as the right-to-lifers insist on calling fetuses, I would have. "Better the unborn than the undead!" sums up my bottom line pretty nicely.
As for the question of whether Mr. Martin, embroiled still in his Mad as Hell cross-country media blitz, knew what was going on in Public Works and Government Services Canada, or better yet how much he knew, it's almost irrelevant.
He doesn't have the right to be mad as hell.
He was a senior member of the government that allowed all this to happen. He was the finance minister for the whole shabby time the folks at Public Works were throwing my money away. Whether there are 14 top political masters and/or bureaucrats, or 140 (and my bet is the number is closer to the latter than the former) who were deeply involved, they were not aliens from another planet. They were, respectively, Liberals and civil servants sufficiently politicized they looked the other way as the rules were busted and the cheques written. The handful of Quebec ad agencies that billed huge fees for cheque-transferring services and very little in the way of real work were not neutral shops that went through a proper bidding process, but Liberal friends and Liberal Party contributors, and not merely friends of the now-private citizen Jean Chrétien.
The fine distinctions now being drawn by political insiders — between Mr. Chrétien's top Quebec political operatives, from whom Mr. Martin was reportedly distanced, and senior Quebec cabinet ministers like him — don't count with me.
Good heavens, word of the bloody program even (clearly, mistakenly) leaked out beyond Quebec's borders and reached Alberta in 1999, with the result that, as Ms. Fraser documents in her report, a poor Edmonton soccer club applied for funds just the way a Montreal soccer club had, only to be told there was no money left.
Only after an MP contacted the public works minister did the government cough up some dough — a fifth of what the Montreal club got the year before. And of course, the Montreal club got another grant, too.
Ordinary Albertans had heard of the potential windfall to be had, but we are to believe the then finance minister had not?
Mr. Martin's curiously worded pledge made over the airwaves last weekend ("Anybody who is found to have known that people are kiting cheques, that people are falsifying invoices — me or anybody else — should resign") is hardly a bedrock pledge to quit if implicated.
Indeed, it is rather more reminiscent of the difficulty Shelley Martel, a former member of the Bob Rae New Democratic Party government in Ontario, once found herself suffering. Accused of spreading confidential information about a Sudbury doctor, Ms. Martel actually took a lie-detector test to prove she had been blowing smoke out of her ass, and not private data.
On the scale of reassurances, the flavour of Mr. Martin's promise is closer to Ms. Martel's bizarre action.
Does anyone really believe that any Liberals, after winning the next election, would voluntarily resign even if excoriated by a public inquiry?
This, alas, is not Britain, where, you may recall, the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, instantly quit when the broadcaster was harshly criticized for its role in the events leading to the death of British weapons scientist David Kelly.
I would bet Mr. Davies had no more or less intimate knowledge of the intricate details of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's famous "sexed-up" story than Mr. Martin arguably may have had of the sponsorship scandal. But he quit in a New York minute, because, as the man at the top of the totem pole, it was the correct thing to do.
I watched Mr. Martin on Cross-Country Checkup. I admired that he was putting himself out there, to be cut to ribbons by callers, but I did not mistake what I was watching as a Prime Minister being held accountable by the people. And I saw it not as courage, but gall, the gall of a man who has wanted the PM's job for so long he can hardly believe he may be in jeopardy of losing it.
Besides, Mr. Martin knows Canadians better than I do. The anger in the country is going, going, soon to be gone. As a caller to a Toronto radio station, explaining why he will vote Liberal again, said yesterday of the current scandal, "I think people should just get over it." Yes, indeed. It's been a week, after all. Time to move on. The government Torontonians deserve is this way coming.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Ire over scandal, unfortunately, will not persist
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 1:08 AM EST         Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2004
Advertisement
My fear, and it is sufficiently rank that you may actually be able to smell it wafting off the paper in your hands, is this.
For all the outrage there would seem to be in the land at the federal Liberals now, my hunch is that it will not last, and that once again, I will get the government that many of you deserve.
I expect the fury will endure through to the next election — whenever Prime Minister Paul Martin calls it — only in Alberta, where sensibilities are so different, even separate, from those elsewhere that it is that province, and not Quebec, which ought to be the reference point in discussions about "the rest of Canada," or ROC.
In Toronto, in Ottawa, in the central vote-heavy part of the nation, that sound you hear is the hiss of dissipating anger.
I first heard it myself on Saturday night, or less than a week after the full sponsorship scandal engulfed the PM and his government, at dinner with some bright professional friends.
They said all the right things, of course. They just aren't going to do the right thing, which is to vote anybody but Liberal.
They were deeply saddened by the revelations in Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's report; they were shocked; they were even angry. But one by one, they veered back to the Liberal mothership. "Prime Minister Stephen Harper?" someone said with a delicate eastern shudder. "What are the alternatives?" someone added. Besides, said one of the men, "Don't you believe Martin when he says he didn't know anything?" One of the women muttered ominously, "Abortion."
I didn't even know if Mr. Harper had a position on abortion — and it's difficult to determine from the press clippings what it might be — but at that moment, if I could have mobilized the unborn, as the right-to-lifers insist on calling fetuses, I would have. "Better the unborn than the undead!" sums up my bottom line pretty nicely.
As for the question of whether Mr. Martin, embroiled still in his Mad as Hell cross-country media blitz, knew what was going on in Public Works and Government Services Canada, or better yet how much he knew, it's almost irrelevant.
He doesn't have the right to be mad as hell.
He was a senior member of the government that allowed all this to happen. He was the finance minister for the whole shabby time the folks at Public Works were throwing my money away. Whether there are 14 top political masters and/or bureaucrats, or 140 (and my bet is the number is closer to the latter than the former) who were deeply involved, they were not aliens from another planet. They were, respectively, Liberals and civil servants sufficiently politicized they looked the other way as the rules were busted and the cheques written. The handful of Quebec ad agencies that billed huge fees for cheque-transferring services and very little in the way of real work were not neutral shops that went through a proper bidding process, but Liberal friends and Liberal Party contributors, and not merely friends of the now-private citizen Jean Chrétien.
The fine distinctions now being drawn by political insiders — between Mr. Chrétien's top Quebec political operatives, from whom Mr. Martin was reportedly distanced, and senior Quebec cabinet ministers like him — don't count with me.
Good heavens, word of the bloody program even (clearly, mistakenly) leaked out beyond Quebec's borders and reached Alberta in 1999, with the result that, as Ms. Fraser documents in her report, a poor Edmonton soccer club applied for funds just the way a Montreal soccer club had, only to be told there was no money left.
Only after an MP contacted the public works minister did the government cough up some dough — a fifth of what the Montreal club got the year before. And of course, the Montreal club got another grant, too.
Ordinary Albertans had heard of the potential windfall to be had, but we are to believe the then finance minister had not?
Mr. Martin's curiously worded pledge made over the airwaves last weekend ("Anybody who is found to have known that people are kiting cheques, that people are falsifying invoices — me or anybody else — should resign") is hardly a bedrock pledge to quit if implicated.
Indeed, it is rather more reminiscent of the difficulty Shelley Martel, a former member of the Bob Rae New Democratic Party government in Ontario, once found herself suffering. Accused of spreading confidential information about a Sudbury doctor, Ms. Martel actually took a lie-detector test to prove she had been blowing smoke out of her ass, and not private data.
On the scale of reassurances, the flavour of Mr. Martin's promise is closer to Ms. Martel's bizarre action.
Does anyone really believe that any Liberals, after winning the next election, would voluntarily resign even if excoriated by a public inquiry?
This, alas, is not Britain, where, you may recall, the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, instantly quit when the broadcaster was harshly criticized for its role in the events leading to the death of British weapons scientist David Kelly.
I would bet Mr. Davies had no more or less intimate knowledge of the intricate details of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's famous "sexed-up" story than Mr. Martin arguably may have had of the sponsorship scandal. But he quit in a New York minute, because, as the man at the top of the totem pole, it was the correct thing to do.
I watched Mr. Martin on Cross-Country Checkup. I admired that he was putting himself out there, to be cut to ribbons by callers, but I did not mistake what I was watching as a Prime Minister being held accountable by the people. And I saw it not as courage, but gall, the gall of a man who has wanted the PM's job for so long he can hardly believe he may be in jeopardy of losing it.
Besides, Mr. Martin knows Canadians better than I do. The anger in the country is going, going, soon to be gone. As a caller to a Toronto radio station, explaining why he will vote Liberal again, said yesterday of the current scandal, "I think people should just get over it." Yes, indeed. It's been a week, after all. Time to move on. The government Torontonians deserve is this way coming.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
A
Are Be
Guest
               
Feb. 18, 2004. 01:00 AM
Martin will have to keep his promise
Never make an ultimatum you're not prepared to have someone act on.
Never make a promise to do something you have no intention of living up to.
And never, ever — unless you're really sure of the ground under your feet — make the promise that you will quit your job if it turns out you're to blame for something.
And there's the funny place Prime Minister Paul Martin finds himself in right now.
Faced with outright hostility on Sunday about the federal Liberal government's sponsorship funding scandal on CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup, Martin suggested that he would not only thoroughly investigate the spending, but also said that anyone found responsible for the fiasco should leave government.
Clearly, Martin had to do something; fallout from the scandal has seen the previously invincible Liberals fall nine full points in public opinion tracking in just a few days.
And why wouldn't the numbers fall? Federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser reported that $100 million of the federal government's $250 million sponsorship funding program went to Liberal-friendly Quebec advertising firms, which basically did nothing for the money, sometimes charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for something as simple as issuing a cheque.
So it's no wonder that Martin has promised to investigate how the millions of dollars were allowed to go astray.
Concerns about the sponsorship funding were handily dismissed by former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who seemed comfortable with the fact that a million dollars or so might have gone missing.
If nothing else, this scandal shows just how dangerous it is to have one political party safely ensconced on the government side of the House of Commons with little fear of being unseated.
The only possible reaction now is something close to overreaction — Martin was, after all, federal finance minister when this spending was at its height, and it is going to take an awfully thorough investigation to come close to proving a finance minister knew little about the cheques going out under his imprimatur.
Let's hope that our current Prime Minister, when he gave a national radio audience his commitment to leave politics if found to be involved, had fully examined his own memories and records for the time in question.
As Socrates pointed out, the unexamined life may well not be worth living.
It's even clearer that the unexamined government is not worth having.
This is an edited excerpt from an editorial that appeared in the St. John's Telegram.
› Get 50% off home delivery of the Toronto Star.
FAQs| Site Map| Privacy Policy| Webmaster| Subscribe| My Subscription
Home| GTA| Business| Waymoresports| A&E| Life
Legal Notice: Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.
Feb. 18, 2004. 01:00 AM
Martin will have to keep his promise
Never make an ultimatum you're not prepared to have someone act on.
Never make a promise to do something you have no intention of living up to.
And never, ever — unless you're really sure of the ground under your feet — make the promise that you will quit your job if it turns out you're to blame for something.
And there's the funny place Prime Minister Paul Martin finds himself in right now.
Faced with outright hostility on Sunday about the federal Liberal government's sponsorship funding scandal on CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup, Martin suggested that he would not only thoroughly investigate the spending, but also said that anyone found responsible for the fiasco should leave government.
Clearly, Martin had to do something; fallout from the scandal has seen the previously invincible Liberals fall nine full points in public opinion tracking in just a few days.
And why wouldn't the numbers fall? Federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser reported that $100 million of the federal government's $250 million sponsorship funding program went to Liberal-friendly Quebec advertising firms, which basically did nothing for the money, sometimes charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for something as simple as issuing a cheque.
So it's no wonder that Martin has promised to investigate how the millions of dollars were allowed to go astray.
Concerns about the sponsorship funding were handily dismissed by former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who seemed comfortable with the fact that a million dollars or so might have gone missing.
If nothing else, this scandal shows just how dangerous it is to have one political party safely ensconced on the government side of the House of Commons with little fear of being unseated.
The only possible reaction now is something close to overreaction — Martin was, after all, federal finance minister when this spending was at its height, and it is going to take an awfully thorough investigation to come close to proving a finance minister knew little about the cheques going out under his imprimatur.
Let's hope that our current Prime Minister, when he gave a national radio audience his commitment to leave politics if found to be involved, had fully examined his own memories and records for the time in question.
As Socrates pointed out, the unexamined life may well not be worth living.
It's even clearer that the unexamined government is not worth having.
This is an edited excerpt from an editorial that appeared in the St. John's Telegram.
› Get 50% off home delivery of the Toronto Star.
FAQs| Site Map| Privacy Policy| Webmaster| Subscribe| My Subscription
Home| GTA| Business| Waymoresports| A&E| Life
Legal Notice: Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.