Martin puts his job on the line
vows to resign if inquiry shows prior knowledge of sponsorship scam

ALEXANDER PANETTAANDJIM BROWN
Canadian Press
Monday, February 16, 2004

OTTAWA -- Paul Martin gambled his political life Sunday by boldly promising
to resign if the facts prove he had prior knowledge of a federal
sponsorship scheme that funnelled $100 million in taxpayers' money to
friends of the Liberal party. "Anybody who is found to have known that
people are kiting cheques, that people are falsifying invoices - me or
anybody else - should resign," the prime minister said on CBC's Cross
Country Checkup. "Anybody who knew that kind of thing was going on and
let it happen, they don't belong in public life."

The prime minister dropped his bombshell near the end of a two-hour session
in which callers to the open-line radio show vented their outrage over a
scandal that has plunged his Liberal party into disarray.  A pair of
weekend opinion polls suggested the Grits had dropped to their lowest level
of support in years. And that plunge was reflected in many of the comments
aimed at Martin.

"Election after election in the 32 years that I've been eligible to
vote I have voted Liberal," said one listener, who sent an e-mail that
was read on air. "So why am I your worst nightmare? . . . I am the
beginning of a groundswell, the angry tide that will wash you from
office."

A caller from Toronto told Martin that casting a ballot for his party in
the next election would suggest that taxpayers will tolerate being ripped
off.
"What kind of message would we be sending to you in Ottawa if in fact
we voted Liberal? We'd be saying, 'You can steal from us and that's OK,'
" said Brad Smith. "It's enough, Mr. Martin. It is enough. It
makes my stomach feel sick." 
The prime minister remained composed and sat stone-faced while under fire,
insisting he is as mad as anybody else and wants to get to the bottom of
the affair in a series of upcoming investigations. But he dodged a key
question that kept popping up - would he delay an anticipated spring
election until after all the facts have come out on the sponsorship affair.
"Canadians have got to have as much information as they possibly can
before we go to the polls," said Martin. "When we go to the
polls, I'm really not in a position to say."

He did offer one hint by expressing hope that a House of Commons committee
could soon provide some answers - suggesting that it wouldn't be necessary
to hold off on his election call until he gets a full report from the
separate public inquiry he has commissioned.

Martin again insisted - as he has done repeatedly - that he had no inkling
of the extent of the scandal until just before he left his post as finance
minister under Jean Chretien in 2002. "Did I hear rumours, were there
articles in the newspapers that obviously I read about this? Clearly, yes,
I did hear rumours. I read the articles in the newspapers. If the question
is, did I know that people were kiting cheques, that people were making
payments that were inappropriate, did I know all of those things? . . . The
answer is absolutely not. I did not know that."

Martin and his government have been under fire since Auditor General Sheila
Fraser reported that up to $100 million - of a total $250 million in
federal sponsorship funding - went to Liberal-friendly advertising firms
that did little to advance the objective of promoting Canadian unity.' Some
in the Martin government have pictured he scheme as a sin of the former
Chr‚tien regime.

Martin himself praised his former boss Sunday as a man of
"unquestioned integrity," but in the same breath cited his poor
relationship with Chr‚tien as the reason he remained in the dark about the
sponsorship program. "It's not a coincidence that in June 2002, that I
left cabinet because tensions had been building up. . . So of course I
wasn't on the inside."

Chr‚tien is now practising law and has declined to comment on the scandal
since his return from a visit to China. One source close to the former
prime minister said he wants to avoid another confrontation with Martin and
spare a repeat of the leadership battle that split Liberal ranks in recent
years. "He (Chr‚tien) feels that he has nothing to fear, and that it
would be prejudicial to get into comments now that there's an inquiry
coming," said the source. "He's very relaxed, very calm. It takes
two to have a civil war."

CBC host Rex Murphy predicted the upcoming election will hinge on how
Martin defuses the current scandal. "Nothing like this has hit the
Liberal party in quite a long time," Murphy said. "The outcry has
been astonishing . . . down on the street, in people's homes and in 1,000
offices."

One caller accused the prime minister of turning a blind eye to the scandal
when he was finance minister. "I'm tempted to suspect that your
ignorance was in part wilful, and that you may have taken a decision, at
some point very early on, not to find out about some of these things,"
said Bruce Toombs of Montreal.

He maintained the next election must be delayed so "justice is done at
the polls if it's not done judicially." Speaking earlier to reporters
in St. John's, Nfld., Martin insisted he had few ties to the people cited
as key players in the sponsorship controversy. But the prime minister
acknowledged contact with at least one - during his first, unsuccessful run
for the Liberal leadership in 1990. "He was involved in my leadership
campaign but left really before the campaign got under way," Martin
recalled. "There was some tension." 
He did not name the man, but he appeared to be referring to Claude Boulay,
president of Montreal-based Groupe Everest, who has previously been
identified as having a role in the 1990 campaign. The prime minister said
he may have met some of the other private-sector executives caught up in
the affair, but he indicated any such contact would have been casual.
"It's conceivable that I've met the others. I don't know them. I've
met a lot of people when I'm obviously in Montreal, but I don't know
them."


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