"Canada Steamship Lines"
.... PING! ....
Posted on 04/25/2005 11:21:40 AM PDT by GMMAC
He should have known
Lorne Gunter
National Post
April 25, 2005
During the Watergate scandal, protestors used to taunt U.S. president Richard Nixon with the chant, "What did he know? And when did he know it?"
In light of Prime Minister Paul Martin's cornball apology last Thursday, in his nationally televised address on Adscam (that "I am sorry ... I wasn't more vigilant"), perhaps Canadians should take to the streets calling, "What should he have known? And when should he have known it?"
Frankly, I'm convinced Mr. Martin must have known of the rot and corruption for years before the stench reached Canadians' nostrils. And if he didn't, then it wasn't from lack of vigilance, but rather from wilful blindness.
Take the letter sent to him by Akaash Maharaj in February, 2002. Mr. Maharaj was at the time national policy chairman of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Mr. Maharaj wrote in his capacity as a senior party official and asked Mr. Martin to conduct an internal investigation "regarding the issue of Groupaction and the federal sponsorship programme [sic]." He explained that at meetings he was holding with provincial and territorial policy chairs the subject was already coming up. It had been raised openly at a Liberal policy conference in B.C. As well, he added, "I am receiving an increasing number of e-mails from party members at large on the subject."
Recall that the Auditor-General was not called in on the Adscam file for the first time until March, 2002 -- a full month after Mr. Maharaj's letter -- so Mr. Martin was warned even before the A-G began her first, tiny investigation.
Even then, Sheila Fraser examined only allegations of fraudulent billing by Quebec ad firms. She did not investigate the possibility that sponsorship money was being squeezed from ad agencies and kicked back to the Liberal party.
But Mr. Maharaj was already hinting at such a scheme. So Mr. Martin had warning of both at least three years ago.
"There are persistent and growing rumours that funds from the sponsorship programme [sic] are being diverted to partisan purposes," Mr. Maharaj cautioned, particularly "partisan purposes connected with the 2000 general election campaign in Quebec."
How right he appears to have been.
And if the national and provincial policy chairs -- not exactly backroom insiders in any party -- had a sense for what was going on, then surely someone as connected as Mr. Martin had at the very least heard the same rumours. Mr. Martin was, after all, finance minister, vice-chairman of the treasury board, the government's senior Quebec minister and a Montreal MP.
Mr. Martin claims never to have seen Mr. Maharaj's letter. And, in fact, Mr. Maharaj only ever received a form letter in reply, a fact consistent with Mr. Martin's claim.
If Mr. Martin didn't see the warning, it may have been because his office was swamped with correspondence and he had no time to review every piece. But one former Cabinet minister I spoke with said his staff would have immediately "red-flagged" such a letter for his attention, especially one coming from such a credible party source.
It is just as likely the future PM wanted to retain plausible deniability for Adscam, about which he already knew a great deal by early 2002. So he had a standing policy with his staff that they were to deep-six anything that later might show he knew about the scandal very early on.
At about the same time -- January, 2002 -- Jon Grant, the former head of the Canada Lands Co., was telling reporters that during his six years at the helm he was under relentless pressure to hire Liberal friends and award Liberals contracts.
Nearly a year earlier than that -- May, 2001 -- as the first allegations against advertiser Groupaction began to swirl, Martin flak Scott Reid was telling reporters that a Martin government's first priority would be to clean up Ottawa, so disgusted was Mr. Martin by the "seemingly endless" chain of Liberal scandals.
In 2000, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe insisted publicly that after the 1995 referendum "it was decided to find a way to set up for themselves [the Liberals] a propaganda organization for Quebec ... and reward the friends of the regime, and that's exactly what the (sponsorship program) is." If this was widely known among the Bloc, it almost surely would have been widely known among Liberals, including, one would think, Mr. Martin.
It seems likely that either Mr. Martin has for years known a great deal more than he is telling, or that he was deliberately blind to the malfeasance around him.
There is, I suppose, a third explanation, that he genuinely did not know. But to buy that you have to see the PM as a lone man in a dinghy being pushed along by a tsunami. And that's not exactly the description of a man capable of cleaning up the sleaze, any more than the other two explanations.
© National Post 2005
How close is the government from falling up there? I've been watching this scandal through the CBC on Newsworld International which is like watching the liberal media down here. But our liberal media has never covered a DemoRat scandal like the CBC has on their own pals.
PING
Please let me know if you want on/off the Adscam ping list.
How deluded!
Nah. This would assume that Adscam is the only scandal out there. I submit that $2,000,000,000 or more for a "gun registry" that doesn't work, stinks of corruption as well.
And the billions spent on the Health Service leaves a LOT of room for skimming and other nefarious schemes.
And watch out for kyoto. They're going to spend BILLIONS upon BILLIONS on that, probably 40% of which will go to graft, corruption, nepotism and more crimes.
Godspeed
Martin can call an election at any time as Prime Minister.
The opposition can vote the government out on a "non-confidence vote", when a "confidence motion" is being voted on. (Budgets, etc.)
The opposition do have 'opposition days', when they can put forward motions.
Last week the Liberals canceled something like 4 or 6 of the opposition days.
If we had an election today, the Conservative Party of Canada would win a majority.
JBG, can you correct me or clarify further? Thanks.
You're absolutely right.
Paul Martin was Canada's Finance Minister during all this time, and before!
Here's a big AS IF from one Canadian taxpayer!
That's very possible - and the only truly "national" party (unless the NDP can pick up some in Atlantic Canada). I'm starting to think that the Conservatives may be able to win a few seats in Quebec just by playing the "morals" card (trying to go after the leftover truly preaching Catholics and undo the Quiet Revolution) with no special deals!
There are still MANY moral people, and all we need to do is reach them.
That's correct, primarily outside the big cities (especially ultra-liberal Montreal).
The more that the Government manages our money, the more the propensity for it to be misapropriated into schemes to perpetuate thier management control...it is human nature. That is why we cannot give them too much of our hard earned dough.
Dithers reminds me of Nixon; alot.
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