Sing, you sinners!

The Prime Minister's televised appeal for a 10-month "time-out" (credit: Polspy) may not have achieved much else, but it did manage to bump several bad-news stories off the front pages -- or at least below the fold. These include: * The Boulays. Both Mr. and Mrs. testified that Mr. Martin had frequent contacts with them all through the 1993 election. As the Globe and Mail reports (Ad man Boulay testifies he met Martin regularly):

While Paul Martin insists he isn't close to Claude Boulay, one of the ad executives embroiled in the sponsorship scandal, Mr. Boulay testified yesterday that he met Mr. Martin at least twice a week when he worked on the politician's election campaign in 1993. Mr. Boulay's wife, Diane Deslauriers, went further. She testified that she saw Mr. Martin daily during that campaign. "At the end, you realize [those campaigning] were a family for 35, 40 days," she said, adding that Mr. Martin went to her home at the end of the campaign for brunch with a dozen volunteers.

* The $75,000 bump. While all the attention was focused on Warren Kinsella, the really dangerous witness as far as Martin is concerned is Allan Cutler, the first civil servant to blow the whistle on what he saw going on. Cutler has testified before the Public Accounts committee about the strange handling of polling contracts where Earnscliffe was involved. At Gomery, the issue yesterday was another contract. As CP reports:

Finance Department officials boosted the value of a contract when Paul Martin was finance minister that landed one of his friends $75,000 for doing little work, documents at the sponsorship inquiry show... Memos from January 1996 indicate the Finance Department approved additional funding for a Canada Savings Bond direct-mail campaign that was co-managed by Boulay's firm, Groupe Everest. The revised contract, unrelated to the sponsorship program, saw Everest take a $75,000 commission after funding was boosted to $2.6 million from $1.7 million in early 1996. Documents show Boulay's ad firm was paid a 17.56-per-cent commission for the campaign, even though the bulk of the work was done by another agency, Pinnacle Advertising.

As CP notes, "it wasn't clear whether Martin knew about the funding increase, or that the expanded deal put money in Boulay's pocket." But it was certainly clear to someone that there was something funny going on:

The funding approval went ahead over the objections of Public Works official Allan Cutler, who later blew the lid off of the sponsorship scandal. Cutler said in a memo to a finance official that Groupe Everest's involvement in the contract was minimal or nil. "Groupe Everest will presumably obtain a commission on the sub-contract without having done any work," said the memo dated Jan. 26, 1996.

* Meetings with Benoit Corbeil. The Toronto Star reports:

A former senior Liberal official who took secret cash payments to pay party bills says he's willing to testify he met with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin during the controversial sponsorship program. Benoît Corbeil, the executive director of the Liberals' Quebec wing in 1999-2000, told the Star he met former prime minister Chrétien in a room on the 33rd floor of Montreal's tony Chateau Champlain hotel in the spring of 2000, where the pair talked for 90 minutes. He also said he will testify to regular discussions with Jean Pelletier, Chrétien's former chief-of-staff, whom he met "at least every three or four months" to talk about various party matters. Reached by phone, Corbeil refused to discuss the substantive details of the conversations, saying those will have to wait until he testifies before the Gomery commission. But he did confirm another 90-minute meeting with Martin in early 2002 at the behest of Lucie Castelli, his riding assistant. "We met after (former industry minister) Brian Tobin's departure on Jan. 14, 2002. I got a call from Lucie Castelli, who asked me if I would meet Paul Martin, which I did," he said. "He was minister of finance. We talked about a lot of things that I will disclose at the commission if I am asked." Corbeil's lawyer, constitutional expert Guy Bertrand, interjected that Martin said "he knew the sponsorship program well," even if he didn't refer to it by name when the pair discussed the party's advertising and visibility programs in post-referendum Quebec.

This is interesting, when you recall:

Bertrand's assertion that Martin knew about the sponsorship program — ostensibly used to promote federalism in the wake of the October, 1995, Quebec referendum that the separatists almost won — is at odds with the Prime Minister's own account of how he became aware of problems in the $250-million sponsorship program, which ran from 1996 to 2002. At the Gomery inquiry in February, Martin testified it wasn't until a few years ago he learned the Liberal government was using the shadowy national unity fund in the 1990s to finance the sponsorship program. But he said he knew years earlier that the federal Liberals were sponsoring community events to increase the federal government's visibility, and were taking steps to increase Ottawa's profile in Quebec. But Martin said he did not know the details of the sponsorship project and was not aware of the problems in its administration until late 2001.

Also worth noting is the involvement of Lucie Castelli, whose name has come up before at the hearings. * And of course there are opposition demands for a separate inquiry into Corbeil's allegations of contra deals for judicial appointments -- which would indeed seem to be outside Gomery's mandate -- and the troubling questions surrounding Jean Lapierre's lobbying activities. But how nice to forget all these for a news cycle or two.