This post is critical

I look forward to the playoffs every year, when hockey suddenly turns into a real sport again. There's nothing like it anywhere: two solid months of unrelieved national hysteria. Nor is there any championship that is as gruelling. Football? You win three games -- in three weeks -- and you're in. Basketball? Notice any playoff beards on those pampered prima donas? Baseball? Don't make me laugh. The marathon? Sure, it's tough, but it's over in two and a half hours. Now go out and do it again 27 times. The one thing I don't look forward to is the moronic hockey commentary. Hockey commentary is always moronic, but it reaches a special intensity of moronitude at playoff time. You know what I'm talking about: the "this game is critical" analysis, sometimes phrased as a question ("Pat, how critical is it to win this game?"). Fellas, can I let you in on a secret? In a seven-game series, every game is critical. Lose that first game, and you're down 0-1: you're behind the eight-ball right off the top. Then there's the critical second game: win it, and the series is all tied up, the momentum is all yours; lose, and you're facing a 2-0 deficit, and as we know, only 35 teams in 962 series have come back from 2-0 to win (gosh: you mean teams that lose games usually lose series?). But now we come to the critical -- I mean critical -- third game. Maybe the teams are tied going in: so whoever wins gets the all-important edge. Or one team's up 2-0: they win, and they're up 3-0, and you might as well just go home; they lose, and suddenly they're vulnerable, the momentum has shifted etc. Oh, but that's just the prelude to the critical fourth game: the clincher, or maybe the last stand, or possibly the one that ties it all up, or sometimes the one that breaks a tight series wide open. Of course, the fifth game, now the fifth game's critical...

Merciless Wells

Never one to miss a chance to stick a shiv in the Martinites, Paul Wells shows no pity on the Pettigrew pirouette, and rightly so. It's not really a pirouette, of course: there is no practical distinction between saying you wouldn't prevent private provision of health care (Tuesday) and saying you wouldn't encourage it (Wednesday). But it's one of those non-distinction distinctions that the media seems to find endlessly confusing. The whole Romanow report was based on this: every report had him saying the government should ban private care, but in fact it said nothing of the kind, as the great man was finally forced to admit. It just said that his personal preference was for public care. But as there is no law against private providers -- the Canada Health Act does not prohibit it, contrary to another popular impression -- you'd have to amend the Act to prohibit them. That, and nationalize all the doctors, private for-profit providers every one of them, which not even the NDP is contemplating (I think). But if disliking private providers is not the same as banning them, allowing them is not the same as preferring them, always and everywhere. This is the distinction that eludes those countless experts who pop up at times like these to announced that "studies prove" that private care is more costly, kills people, etc. "Studies prove" nothing of the kind, of course, but in any case that would only be relevant if we were deciding whether to shift the whole system over to private providers, en masse. But we're not: the only issue is whether to allow the privates to compete with existing providers. If they can't offer better service at lower cost, they won't get the contract. That in most cases they can, even allowing for the necessity of earning a profit margin, shows what you can do with those studies. So why was Pettigrew so anxious to correct the "impression" he had left the previous day? Because the media had misunderstood his position in precisely the way the Liberals had hoped they would misunderstand the Conservative position: namely, that because the Conservatives would allow the provinces to experiment with private care -- as the Canada Health Act does in law, as the Liberals do in practice, and as Pettigrew had just declared was the Liberal position in principle -- this somehow made them a threat to public health care; indeed, that this was somehow a change in policy. It's not: it's simply an acknowledgment of what the policy has always been. Why is this charge -- "you're in favour of private care (because you would not prevent it)" -- so potent? Why were the Liberals so anxious to use it against the Conservatives, and why was Pettigrew so deathly pale at having thrown it away? Because of yet another distinction that no one seems to be able to keep straight in their head: between private provision and private finance. The public-sector health care unions and their proxies on the left have thrived on the false suggestion that private care equals user fees equals "two-tier" care. For that matter, too many people on the right have been all too willing to fall into that trap, thinking that the only way to reform the system is to charge consumers directly. But there's no necessary connection between the two, and certainly there is no logical equivalence between them: you can have private providers operating within a wholly publicly-financed system. As in fact we do. As in fact we have always done. And this is where Wells is so devastating. Pettigrew is the Health minister. He is a senior minister in a government preparing to run on a pledge to "fix" health care as its main, if not only platform plank. He has had weeks to prepare for this moment, culminating in a speech, a press conference, and an appearance before a Commons committee. And he -- they -- still can't get it right, or deliver a consistent message from one day to the next. Gosh, do you think this means they won't be able to demagogue this issue, after all? What a shame.

Shadowy Martin advisers speak!

If Chuck Guité's testimony achieved nothing else, it forced Paul Martin's cabal of off-the-record briefers to come out into the open and for once comment under their own names. The use of unattributed quotations from "senior officials" and "party insiders" is one of the great plagues of journalism. It's one thing to protect the identity of a whistleblower who is afraid of losing his job, or any source where the information divulged is important, factual, and can be checked against other sources. But in most cases it is little more than a vehicle for partisan political operatives to launch attacks on their opponents without having to take responsibility for them. And without having to buy an ad, which is what these stories usually are.

Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no virtue

There's a lesson in the Clark tantrum, however, for Conservative sufferers of the nobody-here-but-us-moderates neurosis: You can do as much as you like to show off how unextreme you are, how unencumbered you are by serious policy differences with the Liberals, how desperate you are to curry favour with the CBC/Globe/Star nexus, and you will still be labelled as far-right religious wackos -- sometimes by fellow Conservatives. You do not make an accusation disappear by conceding its validity. UPDATE: In the last few years, through various makeovers on the way from Reform through the Alliance to the "new" Conservatives (to quote the English, though strangely not the French version of the Harper ads), the right has more or less adopted the Progressive Conservative position, which is to say the Liberal position, on a host of issues: immigration, bilingualism, multiculturalism, abortion, etc. Lately it has ceased talking about referendums, serious spending cuts, or privatization. Harper now says he would not have sent troops to Iraq, but would only have offered "moral" support. Meanwhile, the Liberals are now saying they are open to the use of private providers within the public health care system, and will not enforce the Canada Health Act upon recalcitrant provinces -- positions they had earlier denied, and had even earlier pilloried the Alliance for suggesting. Question: What distinguishes the "new" Conservatives from the Liberals? Will the Conservative platform amount to a pledge of cleaner government (trust us) and lower taxes (paid for out of the "hidden" surpluses the Liberals aren't telling us about)? To be clear: I'm sympathetic to the Liberal consensus on a lot of these issues. In some cases I'm even to the left of them. But I don't view the conservative position as shameful, or something to be hidden from sight, and I want to see voters who hold these opinions properly represented. Quite frankly, I'd like to have to agonize before voting Conservative. If I can't have a party that embodies all of my views, I'd like the choice to be between, on the one hand, a strongly federalist, socially liberal and fiscally cautious (if not conservative) Liberal party, and on the other hand a decentralist, socially cautious (if not conservative) and strongly free-market Conservative party, with democratic reform as the wild card. Instead, it looks increasingly like a choice between a Liberal party that, because it is divided, stands on all sides of every issue, and a Conservative party that is united on precisely the same basis.

Joe Who?

It is a mystery why the media have given so much play to Joe Clark's declaration in favour of the Liberals, given that a) he has said much the same thing before, and b) he is entirely irrelevant. Mr. Clark led the Progressive Conservatives to their worst-ever popular vote showing in 2000, just barely over 10%, where they remained, more or less, ever since. When the time came he was repudiated by 90% of his party in the vote to merge with the Canadian Alliance. So Clarkism represents, at a rough estimate, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the population. His decision is revealing enough of the man, however. Everyone else in the two parties has had to put a large amount of water in his wine -- everyone, that is, except Mr. Clark and his followers, such as Sen. Lowell Murray, those loud exponents of compromise and tolerance who are utterly incapable of compromise and supremely intolerant of anyone's views but their own. If the party will not follow them, they will do their level best to destroy the party. Hence Clark's taxonomy: David Orchard is a great Conservative, but Stephen Harper is "dangerous." Messrs Clark and Murray are examples of that uniquely Canadian type, the fanatical moderate (Robert Fulford's term, I believe), for whom the answer to every question is to take the middle path, regardless of whether a) there is a middle path, b) there is anything to recommend the middle path as policy, or c) today's middle path is likely to remain in the middle for long. In their vanity and illusions, their bitterness and vivid self-importance, they are the direct descendants of the Bourbons, who famously had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." The Liberals at least make no bones about the opportunism that underlies their lack of principle. But only the Red Tories could make lack of principle into a principle. UPDATE: Now he's endorsing Ed Broadbent. Question: How was this man allowed to pass himself off as a Conservative all these years? Should we now conclude he was in fact a double agent?

The Adscam hearings have had what one must imagine was their desired effect: It is no longer news when Liberal cabinet ministers are caught lying or otherwise implicated in the scandal. Not even if the minister in question is the Prime Minister. Item: Yet another senior civil servant in charge of the sponsorship program, Isabelle Roy, tells the committee that Alfonso Gagliano, contrary to his own testimony, was intimately involved in the running of the program, deciding which projects should get funding in regular meetings with Chuck Guit�, the program's director. The Star runs the story page 6; the Post, page 10. The Globe runs the story off front, but leads with the RCMP telling the committee not to call certain witnesses because it might interfere with their investigation. Item: Another memo surfaces accusing officials in Paul Martin's office at Finance of rigging the bidding on communications contracts to favour Earnscliffe Strategy group, where many of his senior advisers were -- and are -- employed. To compound the embarrassment, the scolding is at the hands of Warren Kinsella -- the conscience of the Liberal party, then executive assistant to Dave "Stonewall" Dingwall at Public Works -- in a memo to that crusader against misspending, Chuck Guit�. "I require an immediate explanation as to how the department in question was permitted to breach the guidelines in this way," Kinsella writes, listing seven contracts worth $525,900 awarded to Earnscliffe and an affiliated company. "This is simply unacceptable." Guit� agrees, writing back that the situation "could become embarrassing to the government and certainly our minister." Coverage: Globe, page 4; Post, page 10, Star, page 6. How those memos came to light is an interesting question in itself. Kinsella staunchly denies he leaked them, even feigning unfamiliarity with the one above his signature ("The memo sounds genuine, although I still haven't seen it yet. It certainly sounds like something I would say..."). Actually, I believe him. My theory is that the Martin people leaked it, in anticipation of Guit�'s appearance before the committee tomorrow. The theory is buttressed by Monday's Globe piece ("Guit� expected to bare old feud with Finance"), which heavily quotes Martinites. The strategy is signalled by the headline: make everything Guit� says seem like part of an "old feud," an obscure bit of bureaucratic rivalry mixed with partisan infighting, where everyone says things they regret later. And rely on the fact that the story has already been leaked -- twice -- to make Guit�'s testimony seem stale by the time it is delivered.

Passing for progress

Here's the Star's account of that "historic" meeting summit between the Prime Minister, 20 cabinet ministers and about 70 Indian native aboriginal First Nations leaders.

Martin said the government will now: Write a report on the summit; Convene a meeting between the Cabinet Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and native leaders to devise a course of action; Arrange roundtable discussions among individual ministers and aboriginal experts, provincial and territorial leaders and the private sector about developing goals. Annually release a government report card "to tell us and all Canadians how we're doing, what progress we're making and where we simply have to do better if we are to deliver our objective of closing the gap of living conditions for aboriginal Canadians."

That's the Prime Minister's "four-point plan" for rescuing natives from the morass of dependency and bureaucracy that governments have trapped them in for many decades -- Reports, meetings, reports about meetings and meetings about reports. Oh, and several more steps in the direction of dividing Canadian society irrevocably by race: possible participation by native leaders at meetings of the premiers First Ministers Council of the Federation (the Justice minister has mused about reserving seats for aboriginals on the Supreme Court); aboriginal school boards; "the creation of an Inuit Secretariat within Indian and Northern Affairs Canada," etc. etc. That, and a pledge to "reconsider" Louis Riel's place in Canadian history. (There's a bill before Parliament -- has it passed? -- to make him a Father of Confederation, declare a national day in his honour, etc.) Apparently, having twice raised an army against the government of Canada isn't enough to count as treason in this country, or not any more. You have to do it three times. All of this treading water and symbolic diversions, yet at least one native leader complained that the meeting was too substantive.

Russell Diabo, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, Que., applauded Martin's willingness to talk, in contrast with his predecessor Jean Chretien, but said Martin was focusing too much on programs and services and not enough on rights. "Maybe there will be some more houses built, maybe there will be some more money to build some schools, maybe some curriculum development, but ... without lands and resources and some clear recognition of inherent authority or sovereignty -- some degree of sovereignty internally within aboriginal groups, the freedom to make decisions and mistakes -- you're not going to see those changes to solve those other problems."

This is what passes for radical thinking within what Tom Flanagan calls the "aboriginal orthodoxy": replacing overgovernment by remote bureaucrats with overgovernment by local despots. There's your problem.

Smart column by Tom Walkom on the Khadrs says everything I would have said. No one doubts the family's loathsomeness, not to say their gall. Maybe they should never have been given citizenship in the first place: certainly the father should not have. But having been granted it, you can't take it away purely on the basis of their views. Neither can they be denied access to what is supposed to be a universal health care system: the government cannot, in a free society, be in the business of punishing people whose opinions it doesn't like. (And yes, I would repeal existing legislation to that effect, including the hate laws. The ban on incitement to violence is quite sufficient to keep the peace.) If they've committed a crime, charge them. Otherwise, we're just going to have to grit our teeth. Part of the price of freedom.

Since the subject seems to be of such interest, a quick update on developments in Svendscam since I last posted (or, for that matter, saw a Canadian news source -- I was in upstate New York, but I might as well have been in Uganda). For those as out of touch as me, we have since learned: 1) That the auction house reported the stolen ring to the RCMP, naming Robinson as the thief, on Easter Sunday, two days before Svend came round. 2) That Svend spoke at a public event that Saturday, where he showed no signs of the "agonizing" he said he had endured. His topic: personal ethics. 3) That Svend was shopping for a ring the previous Wednesday. To recap: Wednesday Svend shops for an expensive diamond ring. Friday he steals one. Saturday he appears in public. Sunday the theft is reported to the police. Tuesday he turns himself in. Thursday he holds a teary press conference. Make of it what you will. It appears Svend's riding association has. Commentary from Colby Cosh, Ezra Levant, Roy McGregor, and Charles Adler.

Back

I moved, or rather was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to Toronto over the weekend (hence the radio silence). Here's a loving long last look at NYC. Sniffle.

Svend of story

The auction house from whose premises Svend Robinson "pocketed" That Ring has said it accepts his apology and won't press charges. I realize this has been exhaustively discussed in the previous post on the subject, so I'll just close with a couple of thoughts. It seems inconceivable to me that a person in Robinson's position would have formed a coherent plan to shoplift a ring, and scarcely more conceivable that he would have done so on impulse unless he were completely out of his head. It's not like padding your expense account or similar offences, where you could reasonably expect to avoid being caught, and if caught to justify the expense in some fashion or other. In particular, it is not something one could easily rationalize to oneself, which I think is the critical factor in many people's willingness to commit a crime. Many of the comments on the previous post have scorned his invocation of his mental state as an "excuse." I'm assuming he's telling the truth when he says he turned himself in to the police voluntarily. (It would seem an odd thing to lie about, on national TV. Though it is worth noting that the auction house reported the theft to the RCMP last Saturday, three days before Robinson did.) This, too, seems telling to me. It's not as if he were caught after a six-week manhunt, and then showed up all teary-eyed. Granted, there are many gaps in his story. But given everything we know about Svend, the notion that he might not have been entirely in possession of his faculties doesn't seem that much of a stretch. The question is what penalty he should pay. Theft, followed by confession and return of the stolen property, is still theft: his offence is mitigated by his subsequent behaviour, but there should still be some penalty attached. Otherwise you give an out to real thieves, who could surrender if it looked likely they would be caught, or elect to remain on the lam, and escape punishment either way. Should he be permitted to remain an MP? He can't very well serve the public if he's serving time; remain a member of the House while a resident of the Big House. And there's a question whether, if he is as unhinged as he claims, he can properly represent his constituents (although this is BC, after all....) But on the assumption that his legal difficulties are behind him by the time of the next election, and if the good people of Burnaby-Douglas should decide, in their wisdom, to elect the tiresome self-promoter (that's tireless - ed.) yet again, that is their privilege, and his good luck. UPDATE: Colby Cosh offers his own characteristically shrewd take on the latest affaire Svend.

More free stuff

For those of you too cheap to buy a paper, or visiting from out of town, here's a link to my Wednesday column. Gratis.

Thankyou, Svend, you have delighted us long enough

In honour of Svend Robinson's impending retirement after 25 years as an MP -- and in the hope that it is not for reasons of ill health -- a column from the archives... UPDATE: Apparently, it is for reasons of ill health: he suffers from a rare and debilitating form of kleptomania. UPPERDATE: On second thought, maybe we should cut the guy some slack. He did go to the cops himself, which suggests the theft probably was indicative of a disordered state of mind. An ill-judged post on my part.

Today's ultracool website: For those of you who still prefer vinyl.

This blog madness has got to stop

First the faceless drones on the National Post editorial board get a blog. Now Tory eminence grise Norman "Looming" Spector has gone electric. And to think I remember when this whole blog thing was just me and Colby Cosh goofing around in our parents' garage. Okay, I wasn't there -- actually, I just got into it a couple of months ago -- but Colby remembers.

Your punchline here!

"MP Carolyn Parrish says she'd be happy to sit in the Commons all summer 'to flush (Harper) out - `what do you believe in?' - because he's a fairly brutal character.'" (Conservatives content to work quietly on election)

Bulletin: Liberals uninterested in politics, polls, elections

Improbable assertions: 1.

Thibault insisted Liberal MPs on the committee are not being driven by electoral considerations. "I have never felt any pressure by anybody other than to get at the bottom of this matter."

Improbable assertions: 2.

Prime minister denies he is electioneering during Day 1 of Atlantic tour ...Martin has been criss-crossing the country in recent weeks, spending much of his time in Liberal-held ridings that could be vulnerable in the next federal election. But the prime minister has insisted he's not on a pre-election vote hunt. "Until such time that an election is called, I'm going to govern," Martin said later, following a speech to soldiers gathered at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown. "That is my priority."

Improbable assertions: 3.

Prime Minister Paul Martin's strategists told Liberal MPs yesterday to ignore disappointing public-opinion polls and that they are eager for a "head-to-head contest" with the Conservatives and their "radical, far-right agenda that is consistently out-of-sync with Canadians."... "Over the next few weeks, the Prime Minister will be expanding on his vision for the country and going to work on issues of concern to Canadians, like striking a new health-care agreement with the provinces to secure medicare for a generation," the PMO missive says. "The Prime Minister will have to decide soon when to call an election. He will be basing his decision on the progress he and the government have made on the issues, not what he reads in newspaper polls."

They are laughing at us

It's possible that André Ouellet thinks he is dealing with fools. It's possible, with regard to the Public Accounts committee, he is. But there should be no doubt that his appearance before the committee was every bit as much of a charade as those that preceded him. All the elements were there. There was the wounded victim routine: his life had been "a living hell" in the weeks since the Auditor General's report appeared, he told the committee. (Although Greg Weston tells a different story.) There were the usual astonishing gaps in knowledge: he was unaware of Jean Lafleur's Liberal connections, he declared, straightfaced, at the time he was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds his way. If so, he was the only man in Quebec who was. But perhaps in twenty-odd years of running the Liberal party machine in Quebec he had never run into him. No, that can't be right: he's reported to have dined at his cottage, a lavish affair attended by such notables as Marc (Via Rail) LeFrancois, Jean (Francois Beaudoin) Carle... and Jean (strutting bantam in epaulets) Lapierre! And there were the cagey non-denial denials. The Auditor General, Ouellet humphed, had got her facts wrong. "Some of her conclusions are incorrect." Canada Post was not part of the sponsorship program. "I want to say unequivocally that Canada Post never spent any money for that purpose." "The auditor general report is not accurate," he told the committee. "I'm telling you, the auditor general could make mistakes and misinterpret what's taking place and . . . when I read this document, it's not the way it happened. Except he never actually names a single instance of where she got it wrong. For example, he is at pains to point out that the Crown corporation's $1.6-million contribution to a film bio of Maurice Richard had nothing to do with the sponsorship program, but was simply intended to raise the Crown corporation's profile, there being apparently a few Maurice Richard fans in Quebec who have never heard of the post office. But the Auditor General never said it was, or at any rate accepted Canada Post's explanation. It was the total absence of any supporting documentation -- though that was certainly consistent with everything that went on in the sponsorship program -- that worried her. Here is what her report says about the transaction:

We are concerned about a lack of documentation to support payments made by Canada Post for the Maurice Richard series. Canada Post paid L'Information essentielle $1,625,000 (plus taxes) with no signed contract. There was no signed proposal or written business case to support the decision to spend $1,625,000. Canada Post informed us that it had received a proposal from L'Information essentielle listing costs and benefits, but we found that the proposal was neither signed by L'Information essentielle nor accepted in writing by Canada Post. Canada Post also informed us that it had done a cost-benefit analysis, but it provided us with no evidence of this. Canada Post's sponsorship policy requires that it document the objectives and budget for sponsoring an event and the results it expects to achieve for its investment. Canada Post has agreed that written documentation to support its decision to be a main advertiser on the series would have been desirable. However, Canada Post informed us that it entered into this transaction in order to achieve marketing and not sponsorship objectives. Given that Canada Post was identified as a sponsor on the series and invoices indicate that it was sponsoring the production of the series, we believe that Canada Post should have followed its sponsorship policy and maintained appropriate documentation.

Of course, the Auditor General was obliged to take Canada Post's word for a lot of things, since she was unable to conduct a full audit of the corporation's books: it was all she could do to pry them open even a crack, given the corporation's -- the Crown corporation's -- jealously-guarded immunity from public scrutiny.

Through an order-in-council, we were able to audit selected sponsorship transactions at Canada Post Corporation. However, our Office did not audit the sponsorship/marketing program of Canada Post Corporation in its entirety.

On the other major transaction involving Canada Post, a competition to design a new series of stamps, Ouellet offered even less defense, conceding that it "does not look good." Indeed it does. Here's how it worked. Canada Post received $600,000 from Public Works, ie from the sponsorship program that Ouellet insists the corporation was not a part of. Lafleur Communications took the now familiar rakeoff for transferring the cheque from one arm of the government to another. Canada Post then turned around and handed the remaining $516,000 back to Lafleur, ostensibly to run the program, without competitive tender, without a contract, indeed without supporting documentation of any kind -- in common with the corporation's original decision to enter the competition, and of Public Works to fund it. Ouellet insists that "all of the money was well spent," a and that Lafleur "worked hard for the money," but in fact he has no way of knowing. Indeed, the Auditor General found that "both Canada Post and CCSB purchased similar goods from Lafleur," ie the agency billed them twice for the same services. (Ouellet says he was unaware of the government's involvement in the transaction. Yet he told the committee it was at the government's instructions that he hired Lafleur. The firm of whose Liberal connections he was also unaware.) And in any case, Canada Post was not eligible to receive any of the money in the first place. As a Crown corporation it was obliged to carry the Canada wordmark, without having to be paid to do so. And if, as Ouellet insists, the money was actually used to raise Canada Post's profile ("In [Canada Post's] view," the Auditor General carefully notes, "the stamp contest was not a sponsorship transaction but rather a marketing activity, a strictly commercial operation"), it was doubly ineligible for funding, since Treasury Board rules expressly forbid the use of transfer payments to support a Crown corporation's commercial operations. Confronted with this by the committee, Ouellet blithely offered to give the money back, all the while insisting he has been ill-used by the Auditor General! I should have said it was impossible that anyone could be taken in by this tripe -- not after Alfonso Gagliano, after Dave Stonewall, after Marc LeFrancois (How could he not have known that Via was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Lafleur, with whom he travelled to Europe? "I don't ask questions of people"), after Jean Pelletier, and after Reg Half-cocked's intervention. But then I read this column by John Ibbitson, and I'm not so sure.

We now return you to regularly scheduled column-writing

If I have learned one thing in a half a lifetime of reading the papers, it is that you should not waste your time reading the papers. There's nothing in them most days, and what there is is always the same. The business section is the worst for this: Stocks may go up, but then again they may go down. Analysts are divided. But the politics pages are no better. Six months ago when I decamped for New York Paul Martin was plotting to take over from Jean Chretien. He's still at it....

Read the rest in tomorrow's National Post.

Thirty-five per cent

Forget all about a spring election. Tonight's CTV-Ipsos Reid poll is about the worst news the Liberals could have anticipated -- though their own polling would already have told them much the same. It isn't just the overall numbers -- 35% Liberal, 28% Conservative, 18% NDP. It's when you dig into the results that the full horror of it emerges. On a net favourable-unfavourable basis, for example, the Grits come out minus 23. That's just as cold as it sounds: 40% of the public have a negative view of the party, compared to just 17% who have a positive view. The Conservatives are at plus 16 per cent. If you compare party leaders, you get the same result. Paul Martin, whose personal popularity was going to carry "Team Martin" to victory even as the Liberal brand grew toxic, is at plus 1% -- to 9% for that cold fish, Stephen Harper. Regionally, the Liberals are down to 41% in Ontario, just 9 points ahead of the Conservatives. In Quebec, they trail the Bloc by 15 points. In fact, outside Quebec, where the Liberals still outpoll the Conservatives three to one, the Liberal lead is now just three percentage points. That story in the Globe over the weekend was not just spin. Even so, Ipsos projects the Liberals would win 144 to 148 seats based on these numbers, enough for a minority government. But we're a long way from the 200-plus seats most of the gallery were predicting. And things could still get worse: Twice as many people now say they will vote for the party as have a favourable view of it. That tells you there's still a certain amount of parking going on.

Leafs Suck

Actually I like the Leafs, but Senators diehard Andrew Potter has already dropped his gloves, so... Post your witty ripostes here.

What's Interesting Is That This Thing Is Getting Smaller

The Beckhams, David and the Missus, have denied reports that the soccer superstar has been having multiple affairs with other women. A spokesman: "It turns out it wasn't 100 women he slept with. I'm told it was only 13." Hee hee.

Backpedalling

Paul Wells reports the Liberals are already running away from Reg Alcock's ill-advised sortie ("it's only $13-million") over the weekend. The opposition smells a major blunder, the news organizations are salivating, and Alcock -- well, he now says he doesn't know how much money was funnelled into Liberal hands. "Is $13 (million) the right number on this? I don't know. The [Public Accounts] committee doesn't know. My point to them is they've got to stop playing politics, focus on the numbers, focus on the facts." Wells closes in for the kill: "Does that include the facts you don't know ��and the number you appear to have made up?" UPDATE: Here's the CTV story. It's ugly. Vic Toews puts the knife in, and twists:

Toews, who sits on the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said Alcock's claim illustrates the government's ongoing inability to get a handle on the program. "Mr. Alcock's attempt to downplay this scandal shows that this is a Liberal government that simply can't get its story straight," Toews said. "The Auditor General wasn't able to determine value-for-money for this $100 million because there was no paper trail." "Now, magically, as the prime minister prepares for an election, his cabinet begins appearing on TV to tell Canadians that an outside agency has found the paper trail, and there's nothing to worry about."

And Reg, Reg just twists, as in "slowly, in the wind":

Later in the day, Alcock clarified that he had no new numbers; he was simply interpreting figures already released. He admitted the numbers were not in fact based on an independent follow-up audit, as he initially believed. Instead, they came from documents compiled by the Public Works Department, which has been under fire for its management of the program. He said the $13 million figure was "an illustration, not a definitive fact.''

The numbers came from Public Works! Did Groupaction get a cut for passing them on to him? UPPERDATE: No, it appears the middleman was... Dennis Mills! Who got them from a purple spotted elephant at the bottom of his garden... UPPESTDATE: As for Public Works, they're trying to clean up their act, in their own befuddled, bureaucratic way. An internal memo says the department recognizes "we must become more accountable and provide greater benefits to the government." Well, to the public, actually, but it's a start. "Our accountability structure needs to be strengthened. Our audit and ethics function needs to be strengthened," it goes on. "We need to be more rigorous in our management practices. We also need much better information, and information management, and a special focus on our financial management." Second that. Especially the bit about the ethics function. But department officials are looking on the bright side.

Yvette Aloisi, the department's assistant deputy minister for corporate services, human resources and communications, bluntly sums up the looming hurdles: "They're huge." But Aloisi is optimistic about the future of Public Works... "I thought it was a boring department, but it isn't," she said in an interview. "The things that this department does are quite amazing."

Yes, yes they are.

Technology imitates broadsheet

I know this has been all over the 'net, but it's too cool to let pass without note: newsmap takes the Google news page and arranges it in a way that clues you into the significance of each item. The more space an item is given, the greater the number of stories listed under it; the colour indicates the category (news, sports etc), while the shade tells you how recent it is. The placement on the page may also be of significance, but if so I haven't figured out what it is yet. One sobering note for Canadians, anxious about their significance in the world: that thin, unreadable sliver of orange is us, I'm afraid.

Backblogging

POSSIBLY THIS study of Conservative election prospects was compiled by the same people who put together that "shocking" memo to the President with its "revelations" that Osama bin Laden was fixing to attack, somewhere in the United States (gosh: you mean like LAX airport? Or the 1993 World Trade Center bombing?). The Federal Bureau of the Incredibly Obvious, perhaps? Actually, the study was put together by Alan Hall Electoral Engineering. It "reveals" that if all the Alliance voters and all the Tory voters from the last election were combined, the Conservatives would win some more seats, and if you include the new seats west of Ontario on the latest electoral map, they'd win a few more. The study carries the appropriate caveat that some Tory votes might bleed to the Liberals. But there's no mention of Liberal voters bleeding to the Conservatives: apparently that's unthinkable. But you don't need a high-priced consultant to tell you that. Just use the UBC Election Stock Market's swing-o-matic trendicator.... MEANTIME THE Liberals' determined effort to "get to the bottom" of Adscam continues. The Prime Minister is jetting across the country at taxpayers' expense on what his guru, hirsute svengali David Herle, admits is a pre-election poll-booster -- notwithstanding the PM's own wide-eyed denials last week that it had anything to do with the election. But Herle says the PM will be guided by many things in deciding when to call the election:

One of the most important, he emphasized, would be when Martin feels voters are "comfortable that they know enough about the sponsorship program that they can vote in good conscience..."

Got that? The Prime Minister will call the election when he feels the voters have enough information. That's gracious of him. Not that they'll get it from the Commons Public Accounts committee (Paul Martin, prop.), whose Liberal members have bogged it down in procedural wrangling . But the Montreal Gazette is on to them, as is the National Post and Doug Fisher. That's not the only barracking that's going on. The Sun's Maria McClintock reports that Public Works "is refusing to release any documents linked to Adscam unless the RCMP gives the okay." And then there's this classic piece of misdirection from Reg Alcock, the president of Treasury Board. Appearing on CTV's Question Period over the weekend, Alcock said he'd "been told" a special audit being carried out by Ernst and Young (that would be the third major Liberal contributor to be hired to do audits into a scandal involving other major Liberal contributors) had found only $13-million had been "lost," though it had yet to complete its work. (Or is it $15-million, as the Star reports?) "This number of $100-million is beginning to shrink rather substantially," he chortled. I wasn't aware that any money had been "lost," so it's a bit shocking to hear that they can't find $13-million. The Auditor General's report didn't say that $100 million had been "lost," but that it had been handed out to Liberal-supporting advertising firms for next-to-nothing in the way of services, or about 40% of a $250-million program that was of dubious value to begin with. As they are taught in political school, Alcock is denying a charge that had not been made. But this just raises more questions. How was he "told" of the audit's findings, when they have not yet been completed? Why has no one else been privy to this half-finished report, notably the Public Accounts committee? What was the methodology, the criteria, and how did it differ from that of the Auditor General? And of course: Where's that $15-million? Hint: Alain Richard may know. Richard, the former VP at Groupaction, told the Public Accounts committee behind closed doors last week what everyone has long suspected: that the firms worked for "free" on Liberal election campaigns in return for a share of lucrative contracts after the Grits were returned to office. In other words, they would be paid out of public funds, rather than by the party. Of course, now that Jean Chretien, in one of his final acts, has put election campaigns almost wholly on the public tab, the Liberals will not have to engage in such chicanery in future: What was formerly illegal and wrong is now perfectly legal and right. It's possible that Richard, who fears death threats and wanted to have his dogs with him when he appeared before the committee, is a bit nuts. On the other hand, he apparently has "a thick file of documents to back up his claims," so we'll see. One suggestive piece of evidence has already emerged: news that Jean Brault, Groupaction's owner, was invited to sit in at a secret cabinet meeting in July of 1998. The chair of the meeting: Alfonso Gagliano, whom the Star's Les Whittington reports pitched the ministers present to cough up more money for government advertising in community newspapers. But we leave the last word to Herle. Appearing on the same program as Alcock, Herle commented that media pundits are analyzing the scandal almost entirely in terms of the government's strategy for handling it:

"I actually don't hear much comment about, frankly, the morality of it," he said. "For Paul Martin, this is not a strategy."

Of course, if it were a strategy, it would be part of the strategy to deny that it was a strategy, would it not?

Sheesh. Can't a guy take a couple of days off without people breaking into hives? "Days off," as in working on other things. But amongst them... Rethinking the design of the site, in a fairly fundamental way. I have two, seemingly contradictory aims in mind. One, to make the page cleaner, easier to comprehend and nicer to look at -- and, importantly, faster to load. Much faster. Two, to integrate the site's various functions more tightly, allowing faster access to more information: ideally, by bringing it all onto the same page. How to reduce clutter and yet increase content? By intelligent site architecture. By ingenious use of sophisticated navigational devices. By hiring someone else to do it. I've got a long-suffering web-wizard working on it as we speak: someone who knows java and perl and PHP, whoever they are. Oh, and Movable Type: the Mercedes of blogging engines (which makes Blogger, I don't know, the Honda Civic?), with its elegant layout, plug-ins and endless ability to shuffle and reshuffle blog entries according to various criteria: by day, by week, by category, by number of comments, etc. So big changes in the works. To give you an idea of what I have in mind, have a look at this. Now don't worry: it's not going to look anything like that when we're done. This is just a dressmakers' dummy, a crude working model intended only to illustrate the schematics of the thing. And no, we're not going to use frames, where we can avoid it. I told you: this guy knows about this stuff. It begins by analyzing the site into its three core functions: a blog, complete with archives and reader comments ("the blog"); a searchable, browsable compendium of my published works ("the works"); and a usable list of external links ("the links"), presented in such a way that the reader can browse through them -- or just look up a reference -- without having to leave the site. So each gets a page -- or rather a tab, opening into the same page. If we do it right, it will be instantaneous and seamless. We're going to move a lot of the links that are currently sprayed all over the main page a) to a single place on the page (probably the left sidebar), though b) not necessarily on the same page. Some will be tucked away on the "works" or "links" pages: just one (or maybe two) clicks away. And we're going to make liberal use of collapsible headings, which you can open or close at your leisure, to tidy these up further (again, not in the crude way I've used to mimic it in the illustrative model, but in some mysterious way using java, or PHP, or whatever it is). Anyway, poke around, tell me what you think. And to let you know what I'd like the finished product to look like, here's a bunch of pages whose design I like, whether for logistical elegance or clean look or both: http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/ http://www.andybudd.com/ http://stopdesign.com/ http://veen.com/jeff/ http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/ http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/styles/sample.php?wpstyle=rubric http://telerana.f2o.org/index.html http://www.whatdoiknow.org/ http://www.simplebits.com/ http://kottke.org/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/ http://superfluousbanter.org/ http://www.airbag.ca/ http://www.zeldman.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/ http://www.1976design.com/blog/ http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw/ http://www.happycog.com/ http://photomatt.net/ http://www.electablog.com/ http://www.wonkette.com/ There you are. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back to blogging shortly.

Rush to non-judgment

So it has come full circle. First he was mad as hell, then he denied all personal knowledge, then it was all a sophisticated group of civil service "mechanics," then there had to be political direction, then maybe there wasn't, and now this: Martin defends Liberal referendum tactics What's next? Is he going to hire back Pelletier, Vennat and LeFrancois?

I think perhaps I was too hasty in decrying others' haste in forming a judgment about Mr. Martin...

Shocked! Shocked!

Fired/suing Via Rail chief Marc LeFrancois is the latest to testify. You know the rest:

LeFrancois said he was as shocked as anyone by [the Auditor General's] report, which made allegations of wrongdoing that he was not aware of in his time as president.

Red sky in the Star, election is far

The Star's Chantal Hebert, who had earlier dismissed the possibility of putting off a spring election ("the answer is no"), now says it must be.

Ultimately, the real winners of a decision to put a spring vote on the backburner would be Canadians. To expect voters to sign a new lease with the Liberals on the basis of what they have seen of Martin to date amounts to asking them to pick a place to live on the basis of a newspaper ad. But to support the untested Conservatives without having had a real measure of where Harper wants to take the new party would be like buying a yet-to-be-built house on the basis of a mere drawing.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Perp walks

Reaction to Pelletier's testimony before the Adscam committee: Don Martin says it was "amateur hour," the old pro Pelletier toying with the bickering showboats on the committee. John Ivison says the Liberal members of the committee are deliberately sandbagging the hearings with endless points of order. John Ibbitson says Pelletier, like other Liberals who have appeared before the committee, showed not the slightest remorse nor took the least bit of responsibility for the colossal misappropriation of funds that occurred on their watch, if not with their collusion. Yet the committee "never laid a glove on him." (This, as I have pointed out, even as he acknowledged giving "recommendations" on how the loot should be divvied up in regular meetings with the program's director.) Susan Riley rolls her eyes in a column headlined "yet another blameless insider feigns ignorance." She ledes: "It is Holy Week, of course, an appropriate backdrop for the continuing parade of innocent lambs appearing before the Commons public accounts committee." Finally, Lorne Gunter suspects the fix is in: Martin has agreed to absolve his predecessors in the Prime Minister's Office of any blame in the scandal (hence his sudden doubts about whether there was any "political direction" to the affair after all, notwithstanding the parade of witnesses who have testified that there was) in return for the Chretienites keeping shut about what he knew. SPINWATCH: If nothing else, Pelletier certainly succeeded in confusing the press on what he actually said. The Globe swallows the spin whole, reporting that Pelletier "denied that he interfered in the management of the program," though it allows lower down that he was "consulted," made "recommendations" etc. The Star lede is 180 degrees different: "Senior officials around Jean Chrétien were directly involved in the now-disgraced sponsorship project, regularly discussing who should be awarded grants, his former chief of staff revealed yesterday." Then it folds in his denials that this amounted to "political pressure." But it says he "admitted he personally intervened" to steer funds to particular projects, and that he "regularly discussed the workings of the program with [Chuck] Guité, his successor Pierre Tremblay and former cabinet minister Alfonso Gagliano." It sums up:

Pelletier's testimony was the first time a top figure in the Chrétien government has acknowledged high-level input in sponsorship decision-making. It appeared in sharp contradiction to earlier statements by Gagliano, who told MPs there was no political input in the operation of the project.

Advantage: Star!

andrewcoyne.com ads get results!

Having retained surprisingly affordable legal counsel, Marc LeFrancois becomes the third former Crown corporation head to sue the federal government.

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.

Whereas this is a deep, meaningful relationship

More on the Separatist Seven recruited by Jean Lapierre (that makes eight, doesn't it? - ed.) to run as Martinistes -- I mean Liberals -- sorry, federalists in the next election. Apparently, they were never separatists. Not even former Parti Qu�b�cois MNA L�vis Brien. According to the Prime Minister, that was just a "flirtation."

"Some of them had a brief flirtation. Others had a slightly longer flirtation, but I can tell you that every single one of those people is a strong Canadian."

Strong Canadians. Every one. Still, a lot of Liberals are said (off the record, deep background, for God's sake don't quote me) to be very nervous about what the strutting bantam in epaulets is up to, seeing echoes of Brian Mulroney's recruitment of people like former federal cabinet minister Monique ("I was never a federalist") V�zina. (And by Liberals, I don't mean Warren Kinsella). On the other hand, St�phane Dion is reported to have endorsed the strategy. Sort of. Here's the quote:

"For someone who believes [in Canada], I have no problem, even if it is a discovery that is more recent than for some others. My problem would be someone who only supports Canada conditionally. "We must not have in our ranks someone who would leave to join the Bloc at the first difficulty." [Hmm. Now who do you suppose fits that description?]

Well, then, there's no problem. For as the PM assures us:

The fact is that none of those people are separatists. Every single one of them is a Canadian federalist. They're nationalists but they are not separatists and they have committed themselves very, very strongly to the unity of our country.

How strongly? "Very, very strongly." How strongly? Let's listen, again, to M. Brien, who had earlier told us he had joined the Martin team because Mr. Martin was "un winner" and because "my political experience taught me that being in the Opposition means watching 'cheques passing by' to go elsewhere." He tells the Globe and Mail:

"I believe that in the long term, Quebec loses by being in opposition," he said. "Let's be part of a team of winners, and go and get the maximum for Quebec." When asked whether he meets Mr. Dion's test of unconditional "adherence" to Canada, Mr. Brien said, "After two referendums, I think that there is a way to be in Canada, and to work in co-operation and collaboration, particularly with Paul Martin's team." He also said, "I am for Canada, yes, a Canada that works well."

True patriot love, innit? I'm all choked up. POST-SCRIPT: Of course, it was Harper who in 2000 advised Albertans that "it is time to seek a new relationship with Can