J'accuse: the blaming begins

Chr‚tien government knew of 'criminal' acts, Martin official says

Robert Fife, Ottawa Bureau Chief, with files from Anne Dawson
CanWest News Service

Thursday, February 12, 2004

OTTAWA - The Chrtien government concealed "criminal" wrongdoing
in the Quebec sponsorship scandal from Cabinet ministers, including Paul
Martin, according to the Prime Minister's senior advisors, who blame the
fiasco on Jean Chrtien and his lieutenant Alfonso Gagliano. The accusations
came as the opposition took Mr. Martin to task for the scandal, while Mr.
Martin himself blamed it on a ''small group'' of civil servants.

''There was a very sophisticated cover-up that was taken on by the small
group who did this. Those people were not going to come to the government
and say, 'We are breaking every rule in the book,''' Mr. Martin told the
Commons. ''It was intolerable. There is no excuse for what happened. Those
people who took that money should be punished.''

Yesterday, a senior government official approached CanWest News Service to
lay out Mr. Martin's defence: that he was unaware of the scandal, which
took place from 1997 to 2001, when he served as finance minister and a
senior Quebec minister. "[The Chr‚tien government] had a team of
people who believed in a certain approach to politics in Quebec that was
negligent of rules and unconcerned with proper conduct," said the
senior official. "This public inquiry is going to pin it all on
them."

Sheila Fraser, the Auditor-General, revealed on Tuesday that tens of
millions of dollars was funnelled to Liberal-friendly ad agencies in Quebec
through fake contracts, artificial invoices and elaborate accounting. Mr.
Martin has ordered a judicial inquiry. The opposition says Mr. Martin had
to have known about the wrongdoing in the $250-million program, as he was
Mr. Chr‚tien's most powerful minister.

Mr. Martin served as vice-chairman of Cabinet's Treasury Board committee,
where all spending decisions were supposed to be made. But the senior
Martin official said the sponsorship program was never put before the
oversight committee or Cabinet as a whole because Mr. Chr‚tien's operatives
did not want the abuses to be known. "You have people who were
deliberately running a program under what appears to be essentially
criminal directives. They are certainly breaking administrative rules and
in many cases, it appears they could be guilty of fraud," the official
said.

The official said those making such spending decisions did not routinely
advise Cabinet's Treasury Board committee of their activities. Details of
the sponsorship program were so "tightly managed" it was not even
raised at the Cabinet committee on communications chaired by Mr. Gagliano,
the official said. It only became known to Cabinet in 2001, when it became
a media story.

The official said Mr. Chr‚tien deliberately kept Mr. Martin out of the loop
on Quebec matters. The party was split between the Martin and Chr‚tien
forces, particularly over the approach to Quebec, the official said. Mr.
Chr‚tien believed the federalists' razor-thin win in the 1995 Quebec
referendum justified spending millions of dollars to buy Quebecers'
affections, while Mr. Martin wanted solutions through federal-provincial
agreements, the official said.

"Let's face facts. There were two tribes with respect to Quebec and we
were not welcome in Jean Chr‚tien's tribe and this is the unpleasant
reality," the official said. "This is Jean Chr‚tien and his
fundamental belief and those around him that the end justifies the
means.... That old ward-heeling, pump-house politics thesis is exactly the
approach the Prime Minister personified and Alfonso Gagliano personified
and the team they put in place personified."

Mr. Chr‚tien is in China and not available for comment, but Liberal Senator
Jim Munson said the former prime minister was never involved in any
wrongdoing. He noted Mr. Chr‚tien called in the Auditor-General to
investigate.

The Martin official insisted sponsorship program details were never allowed
to be raised in Cabinet because Mr. Chr‚tien did not countenance ministers
raising unpleasant subjects. "The way Cabinet operated under Chr‚tien
is he did not have open, genuine back and forth conversations. The Prime
Minister said this was the agenda and people moved throughout it and nobody
spoke out in terms of the conduct of Quebec," the official said.
However, the senior official said Mr. Martin did complain about Mr.
Chr‚tien's approach to politics in Quebec and was punished for it. Mr.
Martin was stripped of his responsibilities for oversight of Quebec
regional spending programs and his supporters were punished, such as former
Quebec finance minister Raymond Garneau, who was dropped as Bank of Canada
director.

"Paul Martin expressed his displeasure about how things were being run
in Quebec in general terms, and for his efforts he got consistently branded
on background as soft on Quebec," said the official. "So why
didn't Paul Martin know people were acting in a criminal way?... [Because]
Jean Chr‚tien did not want him to have anything to do with his Quebec
strategy."

Mr. Martin told Parliament he acted as soon as he could to clean up the
mess by cancelling the program outright the day he came to power in
December. The opposition accused Mr. Martin of intentionally turning a
blind eye to the corruption because he did not want to jeopardize his
opportunity to become Prime Minister.

In Question Period, Grant Hill, the interim Conservative leader, demanded
to know if the government would allow the public inquiry to get to the
heart of the scandal -- the 'Liberal Party of Canada.' "Mr. Speaker,
the Liberal culture of corruption is alive and well. Taxpayers' funds
poured through Liberal-friendly firms in Quebec. This was a money
laundering scheme hatched by the Liberal party for the Liberal party. This
scam was set up to put money in the hands of Liberal-friendly firms."

A poll of 501 Quebecers conducted yesterday by Lger Marketing found that
75% of respondents believe Mr. Martin knew of irregularities in the
sponsorship program while he was finance minister. Thirteen percent believe
Mr. Martin did not know of the problems and 12% have no opinion. Asked to
assign blame for the problems, 35% of respondents fingered Mr. Chr‚tien and
33% Mr. Gagliano. Forty percent predicted the scandal will have a negative
effect come the next election while 43% foresaw no effect. The poll has a
margin of error of 4%.


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