Positively the last fawning note about my own site ever

It's been a quiet weekend around here retooling the site. You may have some questions about what you see. Yes, you at the back: What's that yellow Post-it note thingy to the right? So glad you asked. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my latest invention. I call it the blog-within-the-blog: a list of links to recent news stories and opinion pieces that for one reason or another I found noteworthy, but which didn't warrant a whole entry in the main blog. How is this possible, you ask? I have adapted Blogrolling's technology, which most people use simply to list other bloggers, into a kind of clipping service. With Blogrolling Gold, you can maintain multiple blogrolls. So in addition to my regular blogroll, I've set up one for headlines, one for comment, and so on. This saves enormous amounts of labour: I can post a story with about two clicks of the mouse. Talking of the mouse: I've adapted another Blogrolling feature to a very pleasing end. Roll your mouse over one of the headlines in the blog-within-the-blog, wait a moment, and up pops a line of text -- a sub-hed, a nugget from lower down in the story, a quick comment, or if nothing else, the story's URL. The effect is quite addictive: rather like consulting the old 8-Ball oracle ("Signs point to yes.") And as Blogrolling lets you empty the contents of any blogroll in a single click, it's easy enough to replenish with new content daily (or maybe every two or three days -- I haven't decided). I'd have preferred to put the most recently added links at the top, but there ran into one of Blogrolling's few limitations: it adds links at the bottom. Instead they appear in random order: every time you revisit the page, you get a different permutation. So there is at least the appearance of freshness. (I may add a news ticker if I can find one that fits.) There are still a couple of bugs to work out: For some reason, I can't get the text to wrap properly around it on Internet Explorer, though it works fine in Safari (the house browser at andrewcoyne.com) and Netscape-derived browsers. (At least, on Mac it does: I haven't checked Windows yet.) And I've had to resort (for now) to a crude approximation of the shadow effect around the box, not being able to get the more sophisticated model to work. (I've never had much success with sophisticated models.) My lame attempt at coding is in the Comments, if any of you want to take a crack at steering me right. Did I mention I don't actually know what I'm doing? UPDATE: You can also browse the same headines in the links browser -- read on. What about those ghostly white links in the title-bar, upper-right? I've gathered together links to other pages on this site from various points around the main page (don't worry: I've left the original links, as well) into one convenient, consistent navigation aid. Click on search to be taken to the keyword search page, with a list of saved searches arranged by topic that serves as a kind of table of contents for the site, including not only the blog and its associated archives, but also the million-word catalogue of my published writings going back nearly two decades. There's a good selection of categories there already, and more to come. If you're too impatient to go to another page to start your search, there's always the search box at lower-left. (Now if Google would only finish crawling the site -- I've noticed several pages that don't turn up in the results when they should -- everything will be jake.) Click on browse to browse through the same material by year and publication. The most recent material -- National Post columns from the last five years -- is the most "finished" in appearance, with headlines and dates attached. The columns I wrote for Southam News still need to be dated, and as there were no headlines on the originals, I've had to use the lead paragraphs as links (a la Arts & Letters Daily), which is useful but time-consuming: not yet finished there. Finally, my columns for the Globe and Mail and the old Financial Post, while complete with dates and headlines, have only the most rudimentary index pages for each year, in which the dates are shown arranged, following computer usage, in alphabetical order. This is uniquely unhelpful. Oh yes: My magazine pieces, essays and book reviews are all up on the site, but as yet uncatalogued. I'll get to them. Another new feature: Clink on links to go to a monstrous list of thousands of news, comment and policy-wonk links I've collected over the years, arranged in a way that's actually usable -- as nested directories, rather like Yahoo. It's laid out in the same intuitively appealing way as the search and browse pages, with an index-pane at left for the links, opening into a viewing pane at right. Some of the links need updating, and I'll be adding more later, but it's pretty much up and running. Again, to save precious milliseconds you can click on the links below the loadsalinks bar lower-left and go straight to the category of your choice. Finally, click on archives to go to my patented archive-browsing page, which makes it easy to catch up on previous weeks' worth of blogging. You get the same result by clicking on the index bar at right, which reminds me to tell those who are new to the page that by clicking on any link in the index, a list of the current week's posts, you can jump straight to the item you're interested in, without having to scroll all the way down the page. There you have it: check the latest headlines and opinion columns, search the site, browse through the back catalogue, surf the web, scroll through the archives, all from the comfort and convenience of this site. Indeed, it occurs to me that with all the features I've added, you need never leave this site all day. Oh, and it's a blog, too. POST-SCRIPT: Maybe you'd like to make this your home page. It's easy. Just click here and follow the instructions. Only wherever it says to put "globeandmail.com," put "andrewcoyne.com" instead.

Page incapable of improvement: voters

The results are in, and I guess you could say the people have spoken: By resounding majorities, respondents to my U-Design-It survey have voted in favour of ... the status quo. The Don't Change a Thing party (slogan: The Blog is Strong) has clearly caught the mood of the electorate, in a possible foretaste of the coming federal election. The only close race involved a fresh round of bloodletting in that long-running feud between partisans of the Serif and Sans-serif formats -- validating my decision to allow readers their choice of styles (a respectable number of voters also preferred Large Type, and three confessed to setting their pages on Bizarro). But by majorities of three and four to one, respondents elected to keep links opening in new windows, to keep the page the same width as now, to keep the ads where they are, and even to keep that scary, goggle-eyed photo. Go figure. As for what new features to add, there was no clear winner, the "nudity" vote having split over the question of whether it should be "in character" or not. I'll add some of the others as my technical abilities improve. Thanks to all those who participated.

Offended in India

Oh for heaven's sake. There is no reason to give this story more than about six lines. Leader's office goofs, mistakes Indians for Indians. Probably a computer error. Instead, we get a lot of manufactured outrage at an insignificant and patently unintended slight, and rather than exercise a little editorial judgment, the media goes to town over it. But you know Harper's real error here? It wasn't getting his continents mixed 'round. It was sending out such oily, pandering letters in the first place. Read the text:

[I]t is a privilege for me to extend greetings for the celebration of India's Republic Day. As you partake in cultural festivities and events, which honour your ancestors and celebrate your heritage, I am pleased to pay tribute to the members of the Indian community in Canada. I salute you for your important and long-standing contributions to the economic and cultural vitality of our wonderful country and offer you my best wishes for the year ahead.

It sounds just like every other politician we've ever heard. And Harper's stock-in-trade (no pun intended) is that he doesn't usually sound like every other politician: he generally sounds as if he's thinking as he speaks, rather than just parroting lines by rote. Or out of a database.

Too much caffeine?

Went on The National's "At Issues" panel last night. Was maybe a little wired. (Haven't done the show in a while.) But this is a serious, serious matter: it's unthinkable to hold an election now, with so much up in the air. It's like asking the jury to return a verdict, before you've had the trial. I repeat my main arguments. Six months or a year from now, we will know, or have some idea, whether the Conservatives are ready to form a government: whether they have coherent policies, a competent team, a leader of Prime Ministerial quality. We will also know, or have some idea, whether the "new" Liberal government is as reform-minded as it claims, or whether it's the same old same old. And we will know, or at least have some inkling, who was responsible for Adscam, who knew how much, and what they did or did not do about it. Then and only then will the public be in a position to form a responsible judgment. (Chantal Hebert seemed awfully convinced we'd already found the guilty parties -- a line that fits neatly with the Martinite version of events. How does she know?) To force an election through now, barely three years after the last, without such basic information, is not democracy, but bonapartism: not a genuine exercise in consulting the people on who they wish to govern them, but a tricked-up vote engineered to produce a pre-ordained result. It is, as I said on the program, an assault on our democracy. And what mandate could either party claim, in the event? If the Liberals win, there's a risk we'll discover, too late, that they were all in it up to their eyeballs, in which case they will have won by trickery and have no mandate at all -- that's if they don't just barrack the committee and shut down the judicial inquiry, as they've been known to do before. If the Conservatives win, on the other hand, in an election that turns into a single-issue referendum on corruption, what mandate can they claim for the rest of their platform? No. We need time -- to get to the bottom of Adscam, to take the measure of three new party leaders, to know what and whom we are being asked to choose among. Your thoughts? UPDATE: Here's a transcript of the show. UPPERDATE: And the video is here, at least until the next show.

Vive le Dion libre!

Paul Wells has le scoop.

What new government?

The Prime Minister and his minions continue to justify their desire to race into a quickie election � in the middle of a historic corruption scandal � on the grounds that, as a new government, they need a new "mandate." Please. New governments are sworn in after an election, not before. The replacement of one Prime Minister with another, or a few of the first's friends with a few of the second's, is not a new government. It's just a cabinet shuffle that happened to include the Prime Minister.

Adscam: Official scandal of the Sun newspaper chain

I count 10 references in the morning papers. Developments: • Jean Chretien personally, uh, sponsored several of the more dubious Adscam spending proposals to go before Treasury Board. In a sure sign the Martinites are prepared to hang him out to dry, the current Treasury Board president remarks it is "unusual" for a PM to put his own signature to such a request. Moreover, the Globe reports TB was assured the contracts would be put to competitive tender. • A stunning Star story (that's enough alliteration -- ed.), from previously confidential documents, showing officials in Public Works were frantic over an October 2000 internal audit that would expose "mismanagement of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money" in the sponsorship program. The story says the documents indicate "officials knew of much more serious problems than were publicly revealed more than three years ago." Indeed, "Public Works officials planned answers that would deny systemic problems, political interference or criminal wrongdoing." Eventually, a sanitized version of the audit was posted on the department's web site, shortly before the election was called. • Liberal caucus members, especially in the West, are nervous about a spring election, but Martin seems more determined than ever to floor it and hope they get through before the worst is known. It is 2000 all over again. • And why hasn't more been made of this side of the affair – a little practice known as "drycleaning" that may explain where at least some of the $100 million went. Essentially, it is alleged various government bigwigs (we're not told who) used the ad agencies as a kind of ATM, charging personal expenses – expensive clothes, 'lady friends', bottles of Petrus – to the agencies' accounts. Bingo: Bigwig charges ad agency, agency charges government, government charges taxpayer. Will that be cash, or Adscam? Several Senators are said to be outraged.

Globe buries lede!

But l'affaire Stevie (what did she know and when did she tell the RCMP she knew it?) is just the first course, the amuse bouche. The real meal is buried in about paragraph 14 of the Globe's second story:

Mr. Greenspan said it will eventually emerge that top figures in the Liberal government approved the investigation of Mr. Mulroney, knowing full well it was being launched based on information from an anonymous journalist.

Now the backfill. The said Mr. Greenspan is the eminent and indeed omnipresent Eddie Greenspan, Karlheinz Schreiber's lawyer in the Eurocopter proceedings, which (sigh) went on in secret for months before their existence was revealed. (Secret trials: in how many ways does our system need reform?) It was in those hearings that, as we now learn, Agent Cameron was prepared to emerge from deep cover to testify, but only "for the purpose of the prosecution of Brian Mulroney." And Eurocopter, another case of alleged influence peddling (or attempts at same) in the awarding of Canadian aerospace contracts, leads us inexorably back to the Airbus affair, and the investigation of Mulroney.

"We are at the front end of what will ultimately prove to be an incredible scandal," Mr. Greenspan said yesterday. " . . . I think we have to get to the bottom of it."

Add that one to the pile.

Earth to Stevie: Pull the other one

Response from the police and intelligence community to Stevie Cameron's claim that the RCMP made her into a confidential informant without her knowledge was, to use the Globe's word, skeptical. Or as Stevie herself might say, "horseshit." But I rather like the reaction from one not disinterested observer, international businessman of mystery Karlheinz Schreiber: "I was born ugly, not stupid."

Linkers alert!

I have moved my archives into a subdirectory called Archives (as in http://andrewcoyne.com/Archives). I'm afraid this means breaking links to specific posts � they can be repaired by inserting "/Archives" (no quotes) between the domain name (http://andrewcoyne.com) and the permalink (eg /2004_02_22_andrewcoyne_archive.html#107775355351508274). Sorry, but there's no way around this. Otherwise I'd have dozens of stray archive files cluttering up my top directory. Better to do it now than later.

Pick of the Comments pages

Selections from the past week (!)... Scott Ingram: Dammit, if we're going to emulate Central American countries, I wish we'd get the climate to go with it. Tim: Can we please just replace the Canadian national anthem with the theme from "The Smurfs"? "La, La, La-La, La-La ..." mgl: You're shocked by the corruption -- I'm trying to recover from this notion: David Anderson actually did something for his constituents. Elderly Victorians should be sheltered from this news, for fear of inducing a fatal shock. No Dissent: My life seems so different now that I know the government is not God. Tony: Even though Albertans keep coming back to save the country from its excesses, no one ever thanks them for it. Rob: We are a nation of envious sucks. Colby Cosh: It's as concise a statement about Canadian politics as I've ever seen. The Conservatives have to prove positively that they are capable of governing; the Liberals can stay in until it's demonstrated to the last scintilla that they aren't. keith: In some countries, the constitution puts remedies in place that hold the thieves in check, or that at least make them wary. In Canada, we have none (don't speak to me of our pitiful elections process). Here in Ottawa, I know hard working, well educated couples with children who cannot afford a decent house. I also know of public servants who routinely, and, apparently without fear or hesitation, find summer jobs for their kids, and even permanent jobs for their ex-wives, in the public service. Corruption in this city is not a question of rogue bureaucrats, it is simply the normal operation. Jeff: Central Canada views the West as an older brother views his younger brother -- as long as they both live, the younger brother's opinions and ideas will always be unworthy of serious consideration. ld: Crazy suggestion here, but if Paul Martin is as innocent in this mess as he says, why doesn't he offer to take a lie detector test? alvis: Some of us on the East coast don't give a rat's ass about transfer payments, corporate welfare programs or any other nasty Liberal vote buying nuggets. Harper will have more support out here than you think. There is indeed a culture of defeat and it's time someone punctured it with a blast of reason. CJ: As for Professor Potter's exposition, it's time to check back in to Earth. In Canada today virtually every service that is immediately important to the citizenry is managed and delivered by the provinces and municipalities. Health care, education, welfare, police-judges-jails, highways, electricity -- the provinces. Streets, water, sewers, police, parks, school boards -- the municipalities. So, what do the feds do? They appoint ambassadors that serve no one but themselves, run television networks nobody watches, mismanage a postal system that is a relic of another age, pass criminal and civil laws that the provinces are supposed to enforce, waste money on advertising campaigns that don't sell anything and registries that don't register anything, prevent the provinces from finding realistic solutions to health care delivery, send entourages on multimillion-dollar tours of other countries, and scores more useless pursuits. Now, the professor seems to be saying that the trouble with this "system" is that its framers wanted Ottawa to be boss. Today's bigger issue is that Ottawa is 24 square miles surrounded by reality.

Boy, if only Stevie Cameron were around to expose this scandal

Stevie Cameron, author of On the Take and other obsessive-compulsive disorders, has confessed to being an RCMP informant. Well, no: she has, says the Globe, "admitted [to] being the confidential informant whose identity was protected by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Eurocopter helicopter-procurement case." How are those different statements? According to Cameron, while the RCMP considered her a confidential informant � to the extent of blacking out her name in court documents � she did not consider herself to be. "You think you're off the record � but when somebody decides for whatever reason to put you down as a confidential informant, you don't know about it." Or maybe it depends on what the meaning of "informant" is:

Ms. Cameron said that until a few weeks ago, she was unaware of the exact definition of a confidential informant. "What I have done is told the police I am not a confidential informant, and they shouldn't be acting as if I am," she said. "I wasn't coded, and I wasn't paid.

Still, we're a long way from "horseshit," aren't we? This is serious stuff. It goes without saying that journalists should not be in the business of spying for the police: it compromises their independence, and exposes other journalists to suspicion. But whether or not she was an informant, Cameron clearly crossed some sort of line, so consumed had she become by her story, even flying to Germany at one point to deliver evidence to prosecutors in a related proceeding. According to RCMP affidavits, the informant whose name they were protecting refused to testify "unless it was for the purpose of the prosecution of Brian Mulroney." But it's worse than that. Much of the "evidence" the police had to suspect Mulroney of taking kickbacks in the Airbus affair was, as we later discovered, furnished by journalists. And the RCMP officer in charge of the investigation, Sgt. Fiegenwald, was forced to step down for leaking confidential information to a journalist � Stevie Cameron. The picture emerges of a recombinant loop of conspiracy theorizing, journalist to policeman and back, each feeding off the other and, it appears, little else. That would be bad enough � but in a case accusing the former Prime Minister of Canada of taking bribes? (Mulroney, it must be said, has not helped his case, admitting recently that he did business with Karlheinz Schreiber, the man alleged to have offered the kickbacks, after he stepped down as PM � a fact he neglected to acknowledge at the time he was suing the government.) I'd say Cameron's career was over, except this is Canada, and her kind of stuff always has a market. She'll probably write a book about her experiences. They could call it On the Sly.

Tick ... tick ... tick ...

Tom Walkom reminds us of Martin's very own scandal, just waiting to explode:

Even if Prime Minister Paul Martin is able to persuade most Canadians that he had nothing to do with the Quebec sponsorship affair, the controversy may remind voters about other matters the Liberals would prefer forgotten. One such matter is simmering away in British Columbia, sparked by post-Christmas police raids on the homes and offices of key Martin organizers... [A]s Liberals here admit privately, the B.C. business is a time bomb for the Prime Minister. Unlike the Quebec sponsorship scandal, it speaks to something for which Martin cannot escape responsibility ? the ruthless, and at times dubious, tactics he used to oust Jean Chr�tien, take over the Liberal party, and become prime minister.

And what dubious tactics would those be? Read on:

To join the Liberals and vote for the party leader, a prospective member must sign a form and pay $10. Under party rules, that fee is not supposed to be paid by someone else. It sounds simple. But in practice, as Liberals themselves admit, various factions end-run the rules by engaging in massive sign-ups in which organizers, rather than the prospective members, pay the $10 fees. That means that the faction with the most blank membership forms and the most money can win. Indeed, one of the keys to Martin's success over Chr�tien was his ability to change the party rules in key provinces so that � up until last February � Martinites had access to the largest number of blank forms. All that was needed then was money for the $10 fees. In B.C., where Liberal membership skyrocketed from 3,000 to about 40,000, that meant about $370,000. Some of this undoubtedly came from the new members themselves. But clearly, some did not...

So where did they get the money? Read the piece. Walkom gives you all the dots, and leaves you to connect them... Indeed, until Adscam broke, this was considered the monster scandal threatening to deep-six the government. Maybe it still is.

Tech help?

It's like watching baby take his first steps, isn't it? I want to set up a pop-up menu to handle the various format options at left (saves space over listing them on the page). I can generate the menu easily enough, but I don't know how to make the selection actually execute. Can somebody fill me in? andrewcoyne.com: the open source website you design. UPDATE: Got it. Or very nearly. It works, at any rate.

Heads will loll!

OTTAWA (CP) - The heads of three Crown corporations have been suspended in connection with the federal sponsorship scandal and another case, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced Tuesday. Via Rail President Marc Lefrancois is suspended without pay until Monday when he will have to "explain why further action should not be taken" in respect to the scandal. Canada Post President Andre Ouellet is suspended with pay pending an interim report on management practices and the sponsorship program. Michel Vennat, president of the Business Development Bank, is suspended until Monday in relation to the firing of the bank's former president. He will also have to explain why he should not be disciplined further.

Suspended? "Disciplined"? After the Beaudoin affair, why hasn't Vennat been charged with something?

Martin Must Account for Minister�s Knowledge of AdScam

� Press release from Stephen Harper's campaign

Dear Ms. Stewart-Olsen: Please be advised that your spelling of Adscam^TM is in violation of the federal Copyright Act. All uses of the Adscam^TM wordmark must incorporate the correct spelling, size, typeface and placement, as set out in the trademark filings registered to our client. Copies of these are available at the Copyright Office. Please feel free to consult us in future for all your Adscam^TM needs. Sincerely, Dewey Cheatham & Howe LLB Barristers at law cc. andrewcoyne.com

The 28th Amendment: No gays allowed

Say one thing for George Bush and his fellow American conservatives: at least they're calling for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage – not, as in this country, for the constitution to be effectively overturned. (I know, I know: the notwithstanding clause is part of the constitution. So is disallowance. The question is not whether it's legal, but whether it's legitimate – and whether it's right.) Still, it's distressing to see the President hit the hot button so explicitly. His campaign must be in worse trouble than I thought. For more on my views of gay marriage – I'm for it, is the short form – click here. And on the need for tolerance on both sides, look here and here.

Spare a coupla billion, pal?

What a shaming, depressing life it must be to be a premier. Your whole job is to beg: and not just on any street corner, where the possibility of running into someone you know is fairly remote, but loudly, angrily, on national TV. I imagine it's only because they're so good at it that they can keep it up. Of course, the premiers are hardly alone. Across large sections of Canadian society, the corporate sector in particular, leaders are schooled and selected for one talent in particular: their ability to demand, without evident sense of shame, a wad of other people's money.

It's much, much worse than we realized

The documents are starting to come to the surface, as scores are settled, warnings are conveyed, and officials scramble to save their careers. ITEM: Chantal Hebert reports ('I got 50k from Liberal 'slush fund') that the sponsorship program, far from a well-intentioned program that was exploited by a few unscrupulous individuals, "was basically run as a political slush fund for the Jean Chr�tien Liberals."

Ministers and political aides rather than civil servants had the real run of the program. Contrary to the impression conveyed by Prime Minister Paul Martin since the release of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's damning indictment of the program, the ministerial levels of the government were familiar with the special features of the program. Cabinet members as well as their staffers were aware of the very political status of the program, starting with the fact that it was exempt from normal government operating procedures.

Indeed, it wasn't even restricted to Quebec. "While it was primarily aimed at post-referendum Quebec, other ministers from outside the province also occasionally dipped into it to reward Liberal friends whose pet projects needed extra government funding." Among them: David Anderson, Environment Minister and � oh dear � "key ally of Paul Martin." ITEM: Bob Fife reports (Ottawa was warned in '96 of ad abuses):

The Liberal government was warned as early as 1996 of serious ethical and management abuses in the awarding of advertising contracts at Public Works and an independent internal audit in June, 1997, drew similar conclusions that were ignored at the highest levels, senior officials say. A senior Public Works official rang the alarm bells in 1996 that Liberal-friendly advertising firms in Quebec were billing for work that was not done and had won lucrative contracts without competition and that documents were backdated to hide the abuses. The Chretien government did commission an internal audit, but its findings were largely disregarded and the official who complained about the abuses was later threatened and almost fired, senior government sources say.

Networks of party officials doling out public cash? Threats against civil servants who know too much? That doesn't sound like the Chretien modus operandi.... THEN THERE'S THIS extraordinary outburst from the CTV's Mike Duffy, transcribed by Don of All Things Canadian and posted here:

The allegation is that senior political figures used the ad agencies to launder money and so, for example, the wife of a senior politician goes shopping in downtown Montreal, buying very expensive clothes, and a person from the ad agency goes along with a Visa card and goes 'click' 'click' and it gets charged back to the advertising agency and gets charged back to the Government of Canada..... As more and more of this comes out it's not just about some esoteric plan to buy sponsorships in Quebec. Its about senior people using these ad agencies as what they say is a 'dry cleaning' operation so that, for example, if a senior official, very close to the top of the previous administration, wanted to have a condo in Montreal so he could go down and meet his 'lady friends,' the ad agencies would provide that � bill it back to the government as if it's advertising. This is the most corrupt thing I've ever heard of in all my years on Parliament Hill and it's getting worse by the day... It is so serious and so sickening, and goes so high and involves so much money that it makes anything that was ever said about Brian Mulroney and his administration pale by comparison. This is very serious stuff. The royal commission will bring out the hearsay because that's a lower standard of proof than you need for criminal charges but the police are on this in a very big way. Trust me, store clerks who saw the little person with the Visa card buying it for the wife of famous people and those who went on trips simply to pick up gifts on behalf of senior politicians and put them on the ad agency card and get back on the plane to bring them back home where they were given as a gift to these senior politicians - this will all come out. It may take a while but it will all come out and it's going to blow this town wide open.

Then again, Bill Thorsell says it's time to move on.

Grit or Tory, same old story

But let us not dwell too long on the fleshpots of Ottawa, city of sin. Let us return to provincial politics, to Toronto, Toronto the Good, and a simpler, more decent time: a time when Tories, not Liberals, were in power, and life was good and pure and true. You remember the Mike Harris Tories: "We're not the government," they told us, "we're the people who came here to fix the government." Some of us bought it, for a time. But what's this? "Top Tories got fat Hydro deals?" $5.6-million in untendered contracts to four top Conservative operatives: Tom Long, Leslie Noble, Paul Rhodes, and Michael Gourley?

One of the contracts showed that Egon Zehnder International, a headhunting firm where Mr. Long is a senior official, received $83,000 to recruit Debbie Hutton, an adviser to Mr. Harris, as the utility's vice-president of corporate relations.

That must have been a long hunt, since "Ms. Hutton and Mr. Long worked closely together for years on behalf of Mr. Harris and were in his inner circle of advisers for the 1995 election campaign." But then, she was clearly the right person for the job:

Other documents released previously have shown that Ms. Hutton used her position at Hydro One to take Mr. Harris out to lavish dinners.

Still, thank goodness that nice Dalton McGuinty is premier now, with a Liberal government quite unlike the Tories, and integrity and honesty and, er ... oh, never mind. ADDENDUM: Writing in the Globe, Murray Campbell notes the scandal is an example of "how some Tories used the privatization of the old Ontario Hydro as a cover for some awfully expensive scratching of each others' backs." Murray, can I let you in on a little secret? There was no privatization of Ontario Hydro. That's the point. Had it been privatized, they would never have been able to stuff it with Tory hacks. SECOND THOUGHT: Well, that's not quite right. Given the Tory reluctance to go to an open, deregulated market, there would still have been abundant opportunities to game the regulators, requiring the services of lobbyists and senior executives with impeccable Tory connections. But at least they would have been paying Egon Zehnder out of their own pockets.

More great new features

By a bit of skullduggery I have been able to kick the Google search engine into gear. The entire million-word archive of Coyne columns going back to 1985 is now at your disposal. The search box is at the bottom-left of the top screen of this page. Type in "Stephen Harper," for example to see what I've said about him (hello, Stephen), and you'll find 21 columns. Thanks to the miracle of Google technology, you have your choice: you can view the columns in pristine Rich Text Format, or in HTML, with the keywords highlighted. In time I'll be adding my magazine pieces, speeches, the works: a monument to the ego on a truly Ozymandian scale. Other site improvements: I'll be adding a directory of favourite policy-wonkish links, nested in Yahoo-style sub-directories off the main page, at the lower-left, just below the search box. Click on the "Loadsalinks" tab to bring it to the top of the page. Also, to get to the "Archives" button quickly, click on the "Index" tab at right. andrewcoyne.com: Trying to get up to speed with HTML since 2004. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL: It will take me a while � maybe forever � to organize the material by subject. But in the meantime, I'll be putting up an index of sample searches as a rough proxy for overt categorization. You can get an idea of what it will look like here or by clicking on the "By Keywords" link under "The Works" tab at left.

Five ads-a-scamming...

The Montreal Gazette has a good roundup on the five ad scammers (alleged! - ed.) at the centre of the story: Claude Boulay, Jean Lafleur, Jean Brault, Gilles-Andr� Gosselin and Paul Coffin. Between them, the advertising firms they control gave a total of $279,000 to the Liberal Party of Canada from 1997 to 2001, or about as much as Deloitte & Touche contributed all on its own.

Memories....

CHECK OUT the unspeakably cool new archive, for fast, nostalgic scrolling through previous weeks' posts. Just click on the button in the column at right, below the index. And yes, it's available in Bizarro. WARNING: There are frames involved. If your browser is inadequate to the task ("you can't handle the frames!") click here for a slightly less cosmic experience.

Uneasy lies the Crown that wears the head

PM to punish 3 Crown heads

OTTAWA - Paul Martin is to announce tomorrow that he will either fire outright or suspend with pay the heads of at least three Crown corporations implicated in the $100-million sponsorship scandal, CanWest News has learned. The Prime Minister spent the weekend talking to the Treasury Board president, Reg Alcock, and senior advisors about the future of senior Crown corporation executives identified in the Auditor-General's damning report on the government's sponsorship program. Among those discussed were VIA Rail chairman Jean Pelletier, Canada Post chairman Andre Ouellet and Michel Vennat, president of the Business Development Bank of Canada.

The "$100-million sponsorship scandal"? That's a mouthful. The Ottawa Sun cuts to the chase: NAMING KEY PLAYERS: ALCOCK'S ADSCAM REPORT ON THE WAY

Independent, external Liberals

Perhaps feeling that the commissioning, to great fanfare, of an independent audit of the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada had not been sufficiently persuasive of its newfound integrity � something about the auditors being a firm of well-connected Liberal contributors � the Liberal Party of Canada has now called for an independent forensic audit of all donations to the national party. The independent, outside auditors in this case: PricewaterhouseCoopers, auditors of record for the Liberal Party of Canada and, as it turns out, one of its largest contributors. The tally, culled from Elections Canada figures:

PricewaterhouseCoopers

Contribution, 2002: $32,105 Contribution, 2001: $14,507 Contribution, 2000: $58,518 Contribution, 1999: $26,938 Contribution, 1998: $15,980

Rank among all contributors: 16 Rank among all contributors: 18

Pre-merger: Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand

Contributions, 1997: $ 71,928 Contributions, 1996: $ 67,589 Contributions, 1995: $ 28,445 Contributions, 1994: $ 58,946 Contributions, 1993: $146,525

Rank: 16 (combined) / 30 (C&L) Rank: 1 (combined) / 2 (C&L)

All told, that's more than half a million dollars in contributions ($521,481 if you're scoring) over ten years. Indeed, PWC's donations to the cause generally outstripped those of the firms whose contributions it is presumably investigating, and by a wide margin, even in the late-1990s heyday of the sponsorship program. Take Groupaction, for example:

Year 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993

PWC $ 32,105 $ 14,507 $ 58,518 $ 26,938 $ 15,980 $ 71,928 $ 67,589 $ 28,445 $ 58,946 $146,525

Groupaction n/a $ 4,496 $ 6,967 $51,919 $11,997 $48,727 $ 8,701 $ 7,537 $ 4,399 $ 455

In sum, to conduct an external, independent audit of contributions to the Liberal Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada hired one of the biggest contributors to the Liberal Party of Canada. Twice.

All the Prime Minister's Men

Sponsorship scandal threatens to reach highest levels, senior Liberal says

OTTAWA (CP) - The hunt for culpable parties in the federal sponsorship scandal will extend to the uppermost reaches of the public service, says a highly placed Liberal official. It is the latest - and perhaps strongest - sign that the trail of the sponsorship fiasco, which has already shaken the new administration of Paul Martin, could ultimately lead to officials who worked in the Privy Council Office. It is "widely expected" within Martin's government that officials who served in the PCO, the senior bureaucracy that serves the prime minister, helped set the stage for the abuses - from rule-bending to possible fraud - that flowed from the sponsorship program, said the Liberal source, who requested anonymity. "I think it goes into PCO."

Guest post

Prof. Andrew Potter on constitutional revisionism: It would seem that if you are as rich as and photogenic as Belinda Stronach, ignorance of your country�s constitution is not a serious obstacle to being taken seriously as a candidate for Prime Minister. In a speech last weekend at the St. James Club in Montreal that confirmed her status as this electoral season�s Stockwell Day, Stronach called on the federal government to leave the provinces alone and to stick to its own constitutional responsibilities. �I believe in federalism, but by this I mean federalism as it was intended by our Constitution,� said Ms. Stronach. ����������� She went on to argue that �Under our Constitution, the federal and provincial levels of government are equal. Neither one is subordinate to the other. Each level is sovereign within its own area of jurisdiction.� Ms. Stronach�s views on the Constitution are remarkably similar to those advanced by Mr. Day during the last Federal election. As a means of promoting the Alliance�s provincialist agenda, he repeatedly called for a return to an understanding of the Constitution as it was originally written. ����������� It is bizarre to see advocates of provincial rights adopting an �original intent� or textual fundamentalism approach to Constitutional interpretation, and it makes one wonder what country these people think they are living in. Whatever Jefferson, Madison and the others may have intended about the relationship between Washington and the States, it is clear that our Fathers of Confederation intended the provinces to be subordinate to the central government. ����������� Not only were all residual powers given to Ottawa (in deliberate contrast with the American federal model), but Ottawa was also given the power to set aside or disallow provincial legislation as it saw fit. Furthermore, the central government was given the right to appoint the provincial lieutenant governors, without whose approval no bill could become law.� As Sir John A. Macdonald said, �We have given the central government all the great subjects of legislation.� ����������� If there is a phrase that describes both the text of our Constitution and the intentions of those who wrote it, it is that Canada would be a country characterized by �ever closer union.� It was widely expected that as the constituent parts of the far-flung Dominion were gradually knitted together into a single political entity, the provinces would wither and die, or at best remain minor, municipal entities. The fact that for better or for worse this has manifestly not come to pass, and that the provinces are now stronger than ever, is beside the point. ����������� �There is a tendency to think that the country would be better off if the elements of Confederation were separated by watertight compartments. Good firewalls make for good federal/provincial relations, to use a metaphor Stephen Harper might like. Belinda Stronach�s preferred phrase is �disentanglement,� as in, �As Prime Minister, my government would sit down with the Council of the Federation to disentangle overlap and duplication between the federal and provincial levels of government.� In Montreal, Ms. Stronach suggested that disentanglement could be accomplished within her first twelve months of government. ����������� Is she kidding? Does Ms. Stronach really believe that she could resolve 137 years of federal/provincial �entanglement� by just sitting down with the Premiers for a chat? ����������� Well, actually she doesn�t. Toward the end of her speech, she pledged that the Federal government must provide adequate funding for health care. One deep breath later, she promised to support higher education by allowing parents and students to deduct tuition fees from their income tax. So much for disentanglement. ����������� �There is no question that Ottawa is an imperial sort of place, and there are certainly good arguments for keeping Ottawa out of certain areas of provincial jurisdiction (funding for cities, for example). At the same time, it is clear that Canada would be a better place if the provinces were to surrender certain powers to a single national authority (such as securities regulation). In between, there is a huge grey area of overlapping jurisdiction and shared responsibility. Some of it is endorsed by the constitution, some of it is not, but a great deal of it is necessary, as even Ms. Stronach tacitly acknowledges. ���������� Despite what Belinda Stronach seems to think, political inexperience and constitutional ignorance are not virtues. Like Stockwell Day before her, she�s asking to be dismissed as just another pretty face. Andrew Potter teaches philosophy at Trent University.

How loathsome is John Kerry?

This loathsome. The man's whole campaign amounts to "I was a Vietnam vet." He has surrogates feverishly denouncing George W. Bush at every turn for allegedly going "AWOL" during his Texas National Guard service, thirty years ago. But now Bush has taken the "low road," "reopened the wounds" of Vietnam, even questioned "my commitment to the defense of our nation." How? By attacking his voting record in the Senate. Owww!

Adscam: the geopolitical implications

David Warren:

The question from abroad is thus most frequently expressed this way: 'Has the basic political situation in Canada been altered by the Adscam scandal?' And supposing it has, 'What effect will it have on Canada's role in the world?'

In other news: Groupthink at the core of AdScam (Winnipeg Free Press) First headline reference.

Petrus-Canada

Greg Weston has the whole sordid tale.

"Jokes in Canada are not illegal. They're just federally regulated."

Mark Steyn has advice for travelling Americans.

With the Liberals on the ropes, Conservatives once again aim for their own gonads

Stronach says she'd consider allowing two-tier health care (Globe) Klein issues medicare threat (Globe) Klein warns Alberta may break Canada Health Act (CP) And don't think Paul Martin isn't extremely grateful: Martin warns Klein on health care (National Post) Martin vows to uphold Health Act (Globe) PM lashes out against two-tier health (CBC)

I hear Deloitte & Touche might soon be available...

Troubling as it was to discover that the RCMP had been part of the Adscam money-laundering scheme, funneling public funds to Liberal friends by means of secret bank accounts and destroying evidence afterwards, there was no reason to fear that this would hinder whatever criminal investigations the scandal might require. After all, if the RCMP had a problem investigating itself, it could call in the S�ret� du Qu�bec. (Two... three... four...) Not so fast. It turns out a number of SQ officers were themselves beneficiaries of the sponsorship program, having applied and received funding for the Police and Firefighter Games. Oh well. They could always bring in the Toronto police to investigate the SQ. And then the Victoria police could investigate them. And then...

Suivez l'argent

Okay, maybe it's true that every last one of Paul Martin's hand-picked Quebec cabinet ministers was opposed to holding a public inquiry into Adscam (this has been reported before, but apparently it didn't have the desired impact, so it's been leaked again). But don't they understand? There's a new sherriff in town. Why, his hand-picked Quebec lieutenant, Jean Lapierre, has even commissioned an external audit of the federal Liberal Party of Quebec's finances, just to show there's been no funny business. Whoops: the auditors who will be looking into the affairs of certain well-connected contributors to the party, Deloitte & Touche, are themselves well-connected contributors to the party. The firm has given the Liberals $218,000 over the last five years, plus a further $52,000 to Paul Martin's "leadership campaign." (Some day somebody is going to look into why a candidate who had already won the leadership needed to raise $12 million.) In addition, Pierre Pettigrew, Minister of Health, was a VP at the firm for many years. But it's not like they were going to find anything anyway. After all, if the party were on the receiving end of even a sliver of the missing $100 million, it wouldn't be $3.5 million in the red, would it? But there's a mystery in itself. How could the Liberal party, with all the advantages of office and its massive fund-raising machine, be in debt? Well, partly because, as Lapierre tells it, some $1.5 million that the party thought it had on hand has gone missing:

What is even more troubling, according to Mr. Lapierre, is that $1.5-million of riding trust funds � set up to help local riding associations in the next election � has disappeared. No one knows where the money went, he said. "Not only was the party $3.5-million in the red, but even the trust accounts for the ridings, they were emptied," he said... "Those trust funds were emptied and we don't know why."

This would never have happened while Andr� Ouellet was alive. POST-SCRIPT: These trust funds, on the other hand, are chock-full.

Connected. Canadian. But trusted?

Hard on the news that the CBC is conducting polls on whether Don Cherry is a racist (they called Deborah Grey. Oops.), Trudeaupia is conducting his own poll. Question 4: "Do you agree the Liberal Party of Canada deliberately stuffs the CBC with terrorist sympathizers?"

This is no time for an election

Colby Cosh takes issue with my latest column's call for the election to be put off for six months to a year, arguing that tradition demands Paul Martin seek a mandate as the new Prime Minister. This puts him in agreement with the Toronto Star. I'm tempted to end the argument right there, except the same point has also been made by m'learned friend Michael Bliss in the National Post, given extra force in his case by the Adscam mess. ("A government of honourable men and women would realize that its only recourse now is to go to the people in a general election to see if it can regain their confidence." Well, see, there's your problem right there....) This seems to me to have it exactly backwards. An election now, in advance of a full public inquiry, would leave the public completely in the dark as to how far Liberal complicity in the scandal extends. I hate to disagree with Michael, but we don't already know everything we need to know about Liberal corruption: we know a great deal, but there's every possibility that we haven't begun to guess how bad it is. Do we know enough, at least, to condemn them to the opposition benches right now? Maybe. But if the Cosh/Star "mandate" argument has any weight, it rests upon the supposition that this is in fact a "new" government, needing a "new" mandate, just three years and a tick into its existing one. But if it is a new government, then it arguably deserves a chance to show it, and Adscam is just the place to start. If the election were to be held today, we would have no way of knowing. Certainly Martin's performance to date gives us little reason to hope, and having been so tendentious about his own knowledge of the affair, he could not reasonably ask the public to "trust me" to fix things after the election. Indeed, the rush to a quickie election � the fourth in a little over 10 years � would be the surest sign that he should not be trusted. Not only would it leave a great many important questions hanging (Ted Byfield anticipates Stephen Harper's attack lines already: "What is Martin saying? Elect me first, and then we'll find out whether I'm a crook?") but it would make a mockery of his many professions of love for democratic reform. We all know that if the election is called in the spring, the one and only principle that will guide the ruling party is partisan political advantage: namely, a new opposition leader, at the helm of a shaky contraption of a party, whom they can define in their preferred image before he has a chance to define himself. It's an exact replica of the 2000 election, right down to the scorching Auditor General's report. On the other hand, if he were to wait, and if he were to back his fine words of remorse with real, vast, comprehensive reform, then and only then might he deserve his mandate. Put it this way: which is the more grotesque affront to democracy -- for a new Prime Minister to govern an extra six months past the first available opportunity for an election, or for a gang of crooks (as the case may be) to sneak back into power for another five years, calling the election in advance of a public inquiry and, for all we know, shutting it down afterwards? One last point. However badly the Liberals may have behaved, they cannot be judged in isolation. When we're choosing a government, we always have to weigh one choice against another. I've said we need time to assess whether Martin is a genuine reformer (he deserves a chance to prove he is, but the onus is on him). We also need time to figure out what the Conservatives are, whether they're capable of governing, whether there is any unifying principle that binds them together, what their new leader is made of, and so on. For that matter, Jack Layton is showing signs of wanting to take the NDP in a new direction. I doubt he'll be able to sell me, but wouldn't we all be much more informed about all these matters in a year's time than we are today?

Memewatch

From the Toronto Star: "And the more Martin has attempted damage control by insisting he didn't know about the mess, says he shares Canadians' anger over it and vows to get to the bottom of it, the more his credibility has fallen in the eyes of already skeptical voters out West. "I see nothing!! I know nothing!!" a Martin caricature, eyes covered, shouts as men slip away with suitcases of cash in an editorial cartoon in the Calgary Herald this week that depicts him as the bumbling Sgt. Schultz from the 1960s TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes."

Some men find religion with the approach of death. Richard Lubbock has joined the Immortality Institute.