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| 'Angry all over again' - Wednesday, February 11, 2004 at 10:33 |
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UBLICATION: National Post ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the mother of all Canadian political scandals. Yesterday's Auditor-General's report revealed a situation in Ottawa so serious, so shocking as to be without precedent in our country's history. Previous scandals -- and we've had lots of them -- pale by comparison. A government of honourable men and women would realize that its only recourse now is to go to the people in a general election to see if it can regain their confidence. These are hard words. Many of us are having to struggle to measure the words we use to describe a situation so serious that the Auditor-General could not find words herself. We don't want to give in to anger or partisanship and jump to reckless or unfair conclusions. That said, it is hard to see that these words are untrue. The public treasury has been systematically abused by supporters of the Liberal Party of Canada, both in and out of government. The Liberal government has even tried to buy favour with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The current Prime Minister's personal reputation lies under a black Every other Liberal Member of Parliament lies under the cloud of having been, at best, acquiescent. Your Member of Parliament, if he or she is a Liberal, went along with a system widely suspected to be corrupt, asking no questions. The words we should not use are the ones that will come naturally to many English-speaking Canadians, beginning perhaps with Don Cherry: Why have so many of our scandals for so many years centred in Quebec? Are there different moral codes if you do politics in Canada in English or in French? And so on.These statements are unfair to Quebec only because the rot is more widespread. Old-fashioned political boondoggling, based on the idea of giving sweetheart deals to your political friends, is still as deeply entrenched in Atlantic Canada as it is in Quebec. Nor are these just the politics of "old Canada" east of the Ottawa River. We in Ontario get new whiffs every now and then of the manure left behind by our former Progressive Conservative government. The rot in Ottawa also has a class dimension. The other shoe is the way that our most wealthy and most powerful politicians, the Cabinet ministers of Canada, bypassed procedures to buy themselves brand new Challenger jet planes, while requiring the ordinary men and women of the Canada Forces to make do with vehicles of doubtful reliability. This is the mentality, not of English or French, but of the rich and privileged who take privilege and luxury as their due. One of the mentality's other characteristics is an inability to understand why citizens should make fusses about such useful facts of life as tax havens and flags of convenience. When the lid comes off, you deny knowledge, deny responsibility, and blame the underlings, exactly as prominent Liberals are doing today. There is a certain validity here: We ought to be very worried about incompetence or corruption in the civil service of Canada, the people who gave us the absurdity of the national gun registry, the people who under-estimated by ten thousand per cent the amount of business Canada does with Canada Steamship Lines, the bullies who tried to destroy the former president of the Canadian Business Development Bank for standing up to the former prime minister. Your Liberal Member of Parliament is bound to use the "I saw no evil" excuse. It hinges on the notion that a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet minister assumes the rules are being followed until the Auditor-General blows the whistle. It also assumes there is no accountability in the civil service or Parliament except through the Auditor-General. The opposition parties and to a degree the media -- and in fact the Auditor-General -- have been blowing whistles about these Liberal practices for years. Sponsorship programs and "national unity" spending have been whispered about as a sinkhole ever since the Trudeau era. Members of Parliament, Cabinet ministers, and most certainly the minister of finance and the prime minister have a continuing moral responsibility to uphold the highest standards in government. That they have not done this, that they have blithely and complacently looked some other way while some Liberals were shovelling out Canadians' money to other Liberals, and co-opting the police en passant, is going to take a lot of explaining. The explanations ought to be made directly to Canadian taxpayers/Canadian voters in a general election. The only way to remove the stain of scandal, the cloud hanging over this government, and especially the new Prime Minister, is to see if the people will give it another mandate. The scapegoating ploy -- let's blame it all on Gagliano or perhaps Chretien -- is a cowardly evasion. The public inquiry may make sense, but the public certainly knows enough to pass a basic judgment. Does the Liberal Party of Canada, led by Paul Martin, have a mandate to continue to govern the honest citizens of the country? It may very well go to the people and get its new mandate. The two or three cynical spin doctors not currently working for Belinda Stronach will say that scandal doesn't play long in Canada. Historically, that's been true, although Sir John A. Macdonald was driven out of power in 1873-74 by revelations arguably less shocking than yesterday's. Canadian voters might also decide to forgive or excuse the Liberals because they don't like any alternative. In the one-party state, you learn to live with this sort of thing. It's also possible that Canadians have become so comfortable and so complacent that these practices by the politicians and their friends just become part of the game. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The broad strategy of modern governments is to make us all dependent on princes' favours. Make us all reliant on our grants, subsidies, social programs, and special tax breaks (why not buy the support of the mayors of our big cities?), and then we're all complicit. When we're all pigging at the trough we stop noticing the ones who eat with their fingers and elbows. The current scandals are surely going to tell us whether Canadians have a capacity to focus their moral outrage. Make no mistake: Power has undermined the scruples of the Liberal Party of Canada to the point where even the integrity of law enforcement in our democracy is at stake. This is about as serious as it gets in Canadian politics. |