My Saturday column

Here is what we are asked to believe. We are asked to believe that Jean Chretien, having created the sponsorship program, having personally secured funding for the program out of the so-called “unity reserve,” having personal authority over every request for funds from that allocation and having been warned in writing by the Clerk of the Privy Council that he would thus be personally responsible for every grant made out of those funds, should accept no personal blame for anything that went wrong under the program. We are asked to believe that, although the program was critical to achieving “the unity of Canada … my number one priority,” he had no knowledge of and indeed took no interest in the way the program was run because “I’m not a micro-manager”; that, in particular, he had no knowledge that a company controlled by Jacques Corriveau, a close friend and former vice-president of the Liberal Party, had received millions of dollars in sub-contracts under the program, nor that, prior to receiving these commissions, he had complained to Mr. Chretien’s closest political advisers that he had not been paid for work carried out in the 1997 election campaign, nor even that he had contributed thousands of dollars to Mr. Chretien’s personal election campaign. We are asked to believe this, notwithstanding Mr. Chretien’s demonstrated penchant for “micro-managing” on behalf of friends in search of federal funds. It was, after all, in those same post-referendum years when the sponsorship program was in its heyday that Mr. Chretien somehow found the time to make repeated phone calls to the president of the Business Development Bank of Canada on behalf of the proprietor of the Grand-Mère Inn, the serial fire-victim Yvon Duhaime, who was mysteriously granted a loan for which he was ineligible. And Mr. Duhaime was hardly the only friend of Mr. Chretien’s to benefit from federal largesse. For example. there was Claude Gauthier, a long time friend and political contributor who was awarded a $6-million CIDA grant on which he was ineligible to bid, and who was later given a $1.2-million “job creation” grant for a company in bankruptcy proceedings, after Mr. Chretien’s officials intervened. We are asked to believe that Mr. Chretien was so insistent, when it came to federal advertising and sponsorships, that “all the rules, regulations and guidelines had to be followed,” that he appointed Jean Carle, then his director of operations, to police it. That would be the Jean Carle who has admitted to having later participated, as vice-president of the Business Development Bank, in a scheme to launder $125,000 in sponsorship funding to a Montreal film producer through the Bank. But perhaps that was his only lapse. We are asked to believe, likewise, that Mr. Chretien was so concerned to remove any partisan taint from federal advertising practices that he assigned the task to David Dingwall, his first Public Works minister; and that Mr. Dingwall and his executive assistant, Warren Kinsella, were so seized with non-partisan zeal that they went to unusual lengths to ensure Chuck Guité was put in charge of the program. Mr. Guité has testified that Mr. Dingwall explained his decision to keep him on, notwithstanding similar activities on behalf of the previous Conservative government, with the words: “You won’t rat on them, you won’t rat on us.” We are asked to believe that neither Jean Pelletier, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, nor Alfonso Gagliano, Mr. Guité’s superior as minister of Public Works, though they met regularly with Mr. Guité, and though they admit to having offered “suggestions” as to which projects should receive funding, and though several witnesses and dozens of documents attest to their having closely directed the program in every respect, took no part in deciding how the funds should be allocated, ie through which advertising agencies. We are asked to believe that the politicians responsible for a program that was conceived in secret, that appeared in no budget document, that was never divulged to Parliament and of which even cabinet ministers were unaware, should have been surprised to learn that bureaucrats answering to them were allocating millions of dollars in secret, without invoices or receipts. We are asked to believe, last, that Paul Martin did not know about the existence of the unity reserve until 1996, three years after he had been named Finance Minister; that he did not know what it was used for, ie sponsorships, until some years after that; and that he did not know about the abuses that went on under the program until some years after that. And yet, ignorant as he was as to either the purpose or results of the program, he immediately signed off on the Prime Minister’s request for funds, without question. We are asked to believe that Messrs. Chretien, Pelletier, Gagliano, Carle, Dingwall, and Kinsella acted at all times throughout this affair out of an impartial devotion to the public good; or that if they did not, Mr. Martin had no clue that anything untoward was going on, and no reason to suspect it. That is what we are asked to believe. Do you?