Pelletier's version

Well, this is odd. The Prime Minister is reported to have backpedalled on his earlier assertion that "there had to be political direction" for the dense web of improper transactions between Liberal advertising firms and Liberal-headed government agencies known as Adscam -- which in itself was a bit of backpedalling from his earlier assertion that it was all the work of a handful of "mechanics" in the civil service. Now he says he doesn't have "all the facts," and anyway he was only talking about the involvement of the Crown corporations (whatever that means), and so forth. All this, on the very day that Jean Pelletier, the former Prime Minister's chief of staff, was confirming that there was political direction of the program. That's not the way it has been reported. The Globe, for example, said "Mr. Pelletier was defiant Tuesday, contradicting the earlier testimony of other public servants, who said there was widespread political direction from senior Liberals in the program." Which would certainly fit the pattern of political stonewalling that we have seen to date. But if you listen carefully, Pelletier's testimony amounts to what they call in the business a "non-denial denial." Yes, he told the Public Accounts committee, he did meet regularly with Chuck Guité. And yes, he did discuss with him how the program was to be run.

"There is not the slightest doubt that we did make recommendations — as any member of Parliament or any minister supports the files of a constituent with respect to a program," Mr. Pelletier said of his time in the Prime Minister's office. "Never did we take any final decision on a particular activity that was to be subsidized or sponsored in any way. We made representations — that was our duty."

This is more or less exactly the defense Chretien offered in the matter of his phone calls to the president of the Business Development Bank -- that is, after he had admitted to making the phone calls, having (what's that word again?) backpedalled from his earlier denials. He wasn't interfering, he insisted: he was just representing his constituents, as any member of Parliament would. But the final decision was up to the bank. Compare Pelletier's version.

"We would transmit the requests that we had. We would give our opinion on what should be accepted or not," Pelletier explained. "We would not make the decisions. We would then ask what decisions had been made so that we were able to go back to the people asking for assistance from the program." As the final decision and its subsequent implementation were made by the program's administrators, there was never any political interference, he said.

It was preposterous then, and it's just as preposterous now. Is it to be imagined that Guité would take these "recommendations" from the Prime Minister's chief of staff, the man they called the Velvet Executioner, as anything other than explicit marching orders? Yet having made these concessions -- knowing that Guité is to testify in two weeks' time -- Pelletier blithely asserts "I am not aware of any political direction for the administration of the program." Emphasis added, but that word, "administration," is plainly important to him. "When it comes to the actual administration of the program, let me say that I was a bit surprised by [Martin's assertion of political direction] and I don't know on what it was based... Never, to my knowledge, did the Prime Minister's office intervene in the eternal administration of a program." (Eternal? This is either a too-literal translation -- for permanent, maybe, or continuing -- or a typo for internal. Either that, or the Grits really do think they rule by Divine Right.) So if Guité says anything to the contrary -- he's already testified the original green light to bend the rules came from within the Privy Council Office, just down the hall, so to speak, from the PMO -- Pelletier can shrug it off as a misinterpretation. Dear me. He said I told him that? But it was just a recommendation. POST-SCRIPT: It's odd that Pelletier would meet so regularly with Guité, a mid-level bureaucrat, when two of Guité's own ministers, David Dingwall and Alfonso Gagliano, claim to barely know who he was: Gagliano said he met with him perhaps three or four times a year, while Dingwall had to think hard to summon up a possible encounter "10 or 11 years ago." Odder still, when Diane Marleau, who was Public Works minister between Dingwall and Gagliano's tenures, testified he walked into her office uninvited on her first day on the job, breezily informing her he reported directly to the minister. How, one wonders, did he get that impression? POSTER-SCRIPT: Frequent commenter and sometime poet Michael J. Smith corrects me: As a program director, Guité was actually quite a Big Deal in the bureaucratic scheme of things. All the stranger, then, that Dingwall and Gagliano should have so little recollection of him. POSTEST-SCRIPT: PoliticsWatch has the full transcript of Pelletier's evasions.