The mindset he betrays

Naturally Jean Chretien was as unenlightening as possible in his appearance before the Gomery inquiry yesterday: He never answered the question in forty years of Question Period, so why start now? Yet the story he’s sticking to -- we were saving the country, mistakes can happen, governing is a messy business, the “context” his advisers promised he would provide -- is revealing enough in its own way. Indeed, his very insouciance, when discussing a massive corruption scandal that occurred on his watch, is part of the story. Strictly as a matter of logic, Mr. Chretien’s main argument, that the sponsorship program was a crucial part of the government’s post-referendum unity strategy, is sublimely irrelevant to the matter at hand. The former prime minister may believe, as he famously declared on another occasion, that the theft of a few million dollars is a small price to pay to prevent the breakup the country. But the issue before the inquiry is not the merits of the sponsorship program, as such, but how and to what extent it was used as a vehicle for personal and partisan gain. Yet consider that rationale, and the mindset it betrays. Mr. Chretien takes it as self-evident, and trusts his listeners will as well, that the government of Canada should spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a continuing effort to persuade Quebecers not to destroy the country; that a major industrial democracy, a member of the G-7, should be forced, in effect, to beg for its life. An observer from another country would find this bizarre, not to say humiliating. Yet that is what we did, for the better part of four decades. A country that can accommodate itself to that kind of sustained self-abasement can accommodate itself to a lot of things. Integrity, whether in countries or individuals, depends not only on the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, but on the conviction that right and wrong matter, that it matters whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing. And the sine qua non for that conviction is self-respect: for it to matter what you do, you must matter. Destroy that, habituate a people to the idea that their very existence is a mere contingency, perpetually at the mercy of others to decide, and it should not be surprising if a certain ethical lassitude takes hold as well. That is one part of the “context” in which the sponsorship scandal should be set. The other, not unrelated, is one-party rule. I don’t just mean the arrogance, the complacency, the invincible sense of entitlement that accrues over many years in office, all of which has been richly in evidence throughout the inquiry’s hearings. I mean the tendency to equate the party with the country, or at least to assume that the interests of the one are consonant with the other’s. Mr. Chretien was quite explicit, as his ministers had been before him, that we should not look upon the advertising firms that profited so handsomely from their coziness with the ruling party as “Liberal-friendly,” but rather as federalists. Yes, the program was political, Alfonso Gagliano insisted. "Not political in the sense (of) partisan, but political in the sense of being federalism against separatism.” Political, but not in a partisan sense. It’s possible they’re just having us on. But the darker possibility is that they mean it. All politicians fall into the trap of thinking themselves at war. It is how they steel themselves to the petty acts of dishonesty that are the everyday business of the profession: it is just so essential that we win -- not for our sakes, but for the good of the country -- that we cannot be restrained by peacetime standards of integrity. If that is how they approach most federal elections -- hell, elections to city council -- imagine what they could persuade themselves of in post-referendum Quebec. In time, as we have seen, some other important lines became blurred as well -- not only between party and country (not for nothing does Mr. Chretien refer to the handful of Liberal shibboleths in which he haphazardly believes as “the Canadian way”), but between the politicians and the bureaucracy, and between the public sector and the private. That, too, is part of the “context” of this affair. It isn’t just the sponsorship scandal, after all. It’s sponsorships and HRDC and Shawinigate and the Business Development Bank and a half-dozen other similar messes. In all, there is a consistent pattern, of political interference in the civil service (where the civil service had not itself become politicized); of public money being funneled to friends of the government, personal or political; and of private money finding its way back to the party. And, whenever anyone dared to lift a voice against them, of crude attacks and smears, whether in the determined attempt to destroy Francois Beaudoin, the president of the BDC, or the vile little whisper campaign against the Auditor General, or the current all-out assault on the Gomery inquiry. Mr. Chretien’s smirking appearance, with its calculated displays of contempt for the judge, was of a piece.