Adscam in 100 words or less

Andrew Stark, professor of management and political science at the University of Toronto, and an authority on conflict of interest in public office (So is Chretien - ed. No, I mean he wrote a book about it.), interviewed in Maclean's:

Q. How does the sponsorship imbroglio differ from the typical Canadian scandal? In the garden-variety cases of graft, you have a private individual who makes a contribution to the governing party, then gets a public contract. The difference here is that the individuals seem to have made their contributions not only by digging into their wallets but by channeling public money to the party as well. You have party workers doing government work by handing out contracts, government members doing bureaucratic work by deciding where projects should go, bureaucrats telling companies whom to hire, and private businesses paying people to do party chores. It's a total breakdown of all the moral, legal and institutional boundaries that we expect to see observed.

Party, government, bureaucracy, business: all merged into one giant blob of corruption. And that's not counting the RCMP. Or the judiciary. IN 1200 WORDS OR LESS: I made my own attempt to sum up the whole mess a few years ago, when we didn't know the half of it -- as I suspect we still don't. PS: In the same vein, you might also enjoy this edition of the National's At Issue panel, from Feb. 26, 2004. PPS: And, what the hell, you might also read this: Why is the RCMP behaving so strangely?. Particularly since the central question has yet to be resolved. UPDATE: I have fixed the broken links chronicling the strange tale of the forged document(s). As I asked in closing last March, "if Beaudoin did not forge any documents, who did?"