He should have known
Lorne Gunter
National Post
Monday, 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
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