I knew nothing... noth-ing!

Chantal Hebert nails it: If Alfonso is out of a job, why are Jean Pelletier and Andre Ouellet, who helped him run the money through their chairmanships of, respectively, Via Rail and Canada Post, still employed? And as for Paul Martin:

As finance minister, he did make it a practice to stay well away from Chr�tien's post-referendum operations, deliberately keeping his staff and himself out of the unity loop. But at the same time, Martin and his Quebec operatives were also engaged in taking over the Liberal party. Their undeniable success in wrestling the party controls away from Chr�tien speak to their street smarts. Echoes of the sponsorship scheme had to have come to the attention of such sophisticated political operators, especially since they were keeping their ears very close to the ground for their leadership purposes. After all, many of the non-government players in the affair were working out in the open. Quebec MPs routinely used the program to finance pet projects, often bypassing civil servants and sometimes dealing directly with the private firms that got paid by the government to dole out the sponsorship money. The Quebec federalist network is a tightly knit clan. As in every family, very little happens without everyone eventually getting wind of it � especially when it continues, like the sponsorship program, over so many years and on such a costly scale.