Grit or Tory, same old story

But let us not dwell too long on the fleshpots of Ottawa, city of sin. Let us return to provincial politics, to Toronto, Toronto the Good, and a simpler, more decent time: a time when Tories, not Liberals, were in power, and life was good and pure and true. You remember the Mike Harris Tories: "We're not the government," they told us, "we're the people who came here to fix the government." Some of us bought it, for a time. But what's this? "Top Tories got fat Hydro deals?" $5.6-million in untendered contracts to four top Conservative operatives: Tom Long, Leslie Noble, Paul Rhodes, and Michael Gourley?

One of the contracts showed that Egon Zehnder International, a headhunting firm where Mr. Long is a senior official, received $83,000 to recruit Debbie Hutton, an adviser to Mr. Harris, as the utility's vice-president of corporate relations.

That must have been a long hunt, since "Ms. Hutton and Mr. Long worked closely together for years on behalf of Mr. Harris and were in his inner circle of advisers for the 1995 election campaign." But then, she was clearly the right person for the job:

Other documents released previously have shown that Ms. Hutton used her position at Hydro One to take Mr. Harris out to lavish dinners.

Still, thank goodness that nice Dalton McGuinty is premier now, with a Liberal government quite unlike the Tories, and integrity and honesty and, er ... oh, never mind. ADDENDUM: Writing in the Globe, Murray Campbell notes the scandal is an example of "how some Tories used the privatization of the old Ontario Hydro as a cover for some awfully expensive scratching of each others' backs." Murray, can I let you in on a little secret? There was no privatization of Ontario Hydro. That's the point. Had it been privatized, they would never have been able to stuff it with Tory hacks. SECOND THOUGHT: Well, that's not quite right. Given the Tory reluctance to go to an open, deregulated market, there would still have been abundant opportunities to game the regulators, requiring the services of lobbyists and senior executives with impeccable Tory connections. But at least they would have been paying Egon Zehnder out of their own pockets.