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Okay, maybe it's true that every last one of Paul Martin's hand-picked Quebec cabinet ministers was opposed to holding a public inquiry into Adscam (this has been reported before, but apparently it didn't have the desired impact, so it's been leaked again). But don't they understand? There's a new sherriff in town. Why, his hand-picked Quebec lieutenant, Jean Lapierre, has even commissioned an external audit of the federal Liberal Party of Quebec's finances, just to show there's been no funny business. Whoops: the auditors who will be looking into the affairs of certain well-connected contributors to the party, Deloitte & Touche, are themselves well-connected contributors to the party. The firm has given the Liberals $218,000 over the last five years, plus a further $52,000 to Paul Martin's "leadership campaign." (Some day somebody is going to look into why a candidate who had already won the leadership needed to raise $12 million.) In addition, Pierre Pettigrew, Minister of Health, was a VP at the firm for many years. But it's not like they were going to find anything anyway. After all, if the party were on the receiving end of even a sliver of the missing $100 million, it wouldn't be $3.5 million in the red, would it? But there's a mystery in itself. How could the Liberal party, with all the advantages of office and its massive fund-raising machine, be in debt? Well, partly because, as Lapierre tells it, some $1.5 million that the party thought it had on hand has gone missing:

What is even more troubling, according to Mr. Lapierre, is that $1.5-million of riding trust funds � set up to help local riding associations in the next election � has disappeared. No one knows where the money went, he said. "Not only was the party $3.5-million in the red, but even the trust accounts for the ridings, they were emptied," he said... "Those trust funds were emptied and we don't know why."

This would never have happened while Andr� Ouellet was alive. POST-SCRIPT: These trust funds, on the other hand, are chock-full.