Nobody stole $100 million in Salem

Emerging Liberal talking point/press gallery consensus: It's a witch-hunt! It's a partisan frenzy! It's McCarthyism! Or, in the case of John Ibbitson's column this morning, it's all three. He quotes from The Crucible. (Chantal Hebert strikes a less dramatic note.) The Bédard testimony was a gift in this regard: wild, unsubstantiated allegations, followed by indignant denials all round, followed by sly insinuations about her sanity, followed by claims that this throws the whole thing into doubt. Warren Kinsella, inevitably, writes, "this whole 'scandal' is descending into farce..." The whole scandal. Or rather, 'scandal.' Let's just review some of the latest developments, shall we? Item: the half-billion dollar "honeypot." The current Prime Minister's staff first asserted that he knew nothing about it. Now we hear from multiple sources, including the former chief of staff to Jean Chretien, Eddie Goldenberg, that he did. The Prime Minister himself says the fund was set up under Brian Mulroney, only to be contradicted, in an unusually detailed rebuttal, by Joe Clark. The fund was at first denounced by the Prime Minister's own officials as a slush fund, and killed in the budget. Then it was a routine matter, used only to fund Canada Day and Terry Fox runs. (What, no Musical Ride?) Then we discover it was the seed money for the whole sponsorship program. But it's all in the public accounts, we are assured. Which is news to the Auditor General. Are all these people part of the witch-hunt? (Actually, that's emerging talking point number two: the A-G is out of control! She's out to get us! She's a rampaging, self-promoting Ken Starr of the North! Again, I cite Warren Kinsella as my authority.) Item: Alfonso Gagliano's testimony before the Commons Public Accounts committee. The former ambassador to Denmark is attempting to cast himself in the role of Goody Proctor. "As far as witch hunts go, this one is pretty good," a friend remarks. So then, is Huguette Tremblay, whose testimony flatly contradicts his, part of the witch-hunt? Is Ran Quail, his former deputy, who testified that Gagliano and Guité had an unusually close relationship, bypassing proper lines of authority? Are they all in it together, maybe with the help of the Auditor General? Is there some sort of conspiracy here? Item: Denis Coderre. The former minister of Amateur Sport is also singing the victim tune. It's lies, all lies, he thunders in Parliament, after Tremblay fingers him as one of the ministers calling Guité's office. "I never saw Chuck Guité in my life!" Maybe not, but as he acknowledged afterward, he talked several times with Pierre Tremblay, Gagliano's former chief of staff and Guité's successor in charge of the sponsorship program. Indeed, as the Toronto Star had earlier reported, "Coderre was in regular touch with Pierre Tremblay in clandestine meetings, and conversations over secure telephone lines," while Huguette Tremblay testified that agenda books were deliberately left unfilled to cover over any political interference. For background: This is the same Coderre who, cabinet documents show, had urged that verbal agreements should be used in sponsorship deals; who has a close relationship with Claude Boulay, senior partner of Groupe Everest, to the point of staying in his condo -- a fact he had earlier denied; who used to work at Groupe Polygone, another of the advertising and communications firms implicated in the scandal. All this has been reported widely, including by the Toronto Star and the CBC. Are they part of the conspiracy? Item: Michel Vennat's wounded piece in the Globe yesterday. An innocent man traduced, dismissed from employment on trumped-up charges, hounded by the government at every turn, and all just for doing his job. No, not Francois Beaudoin: he's talking about himself. You'd never know this was the same man whose testimony was described by a Quebec Superior Court judge as evasive, contradictory and not worthy of belief. You know, the point about a witch-hunt is that there were no witches. POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and Bédard? Probably she's out to lunch about the drugs and the multi-million dollar payment to Jacques Villeneuve (though it's ironic that the good souls fretting about witch-hunts are so quick to burn her), and it's true that the committee should have challenged her on these (And not just the Opposition members. Listen to Liberal MP Dennis Mills: "When I was listening to her, I was mesmerized. I thought that she was as straight, as sincere, as honest a person as I've ever listened to.") But then there's this interesting tidbit, from an interview in the Star with Alain Richard, a former Groupaction executive, who is to testify next month:

Richard said he had no knowledge of the allegations that Bédard had made. He said, however, that a Groupaction executive did boast to him that he had managed to get Villeneuve to wear a Government of Canada logo on his helmet for a sum of "something like $500,000."

Well, he's probably crazy, too. He's the one who keeps reporting receiving death threats.