We all looked the other way

It's not true, it turns out, that those Quebec-based advertising agencies did no work in return for the millions of federal dollars they received. After Jean Brault's testimony before the Gomery inquiry, we now know they performed a valuable service laundering stolen funds for the Liberal Party of Canada. Indeed, it would be truer to say that Mr. Brault’s firm, Groupaction, was not really in the business of advertising at all. He was in the money-laundering business, but for his best customers was willing to throw in an advertising campaign in the bargain. Some of the money he received was allegedly kicked back directly into Liberal party coffers, some went to maintain Liberal party operatives and members of ministers’ families on his payroll, some to provide lavish meals and entertainment for senior Liberals and their associates. And some went to well-connected middlemen to keep the whole circular flow of funds in motion. Of course, we only have Mr. Brault’s word for it: his word, supported by the testimony of several previous witnesses and reams and reams of incriminating documents. Perhaps in time we will find it was not high-level Liberal thugs who leaned on Mr. Brault to pay up or lose the federal contracts that had made him such a wealthy man, but rather Mr. Brault who first tempted them. Either way, Mr. Brault has testified in meticulous detail that the operation was directed by senior members of the Liberal Party, including close associates of Jean Chretien; that it was known of and used by a wide cross-section of the party’s Quebec wing; and that this included aides to members of Paul Martin’s cabinet. This last allegation is particularly damning. Mr. Martin and his government scraped through the last election, barely, on the strength of the claim that they were not just Mr. Chretien’s government plus a cabinet shuffle, but rather a wholly new government, who would clean up the mess left by the last. But now the cordon sanitaire has been breached, and there are more witnesses to come. The question, indeed, is how much further the rot extends. Throughout this affair, the polite fiction has been maintained on all sides that this had nothing to do with the state of political ethics in Quebec. Even yesterday, Peter Mackay was repeating the mantra that this was not a Quebec scandal, it was a Liberal Party scandal. Except, annoyingly, for all those examples to the contrary. According to Mr. Brault, Groupaction and associated firms made illicit contributions not just to the Liberal Party of Canada, but to the Quebec Liberal Party, and the Parti Quebecois. And are we to believe this behaviour was restricted to Groupaction? Or to the advertising industry? Or to the sponsorship program? It was seven years ago this month that Pierre Corbeil, a longtime Liberal organizer, quietly pleaded guilty to four counts of influence-peddling: that is, of soliciting contributions to the Liberal party in exchange for federal job-creation grants. The story was given minimal coverage, and soon forgotten. Apparently, Mr. Corbeil, who had responsibility for 15 ridings included Mr. Chretien’s, was acting alone, without anyone’s knowledge or approval. This continued, even after the scandal erupted over the Human Resources Department’s Transitional Jobs Fund, which revealed close correlations between grants made to particular firms and contributions received, the whole overseen by a secret network of Quebec Liberal party officials. Federal bureaucrats reported receiving a sheaf of complaints from applicants for funding under the program who had been targeted by Liberal fundraisers. Yet, strangely, no one detected a pattern. What’s shocking about Mr. Brault’s testimony, in fact, is just how unshocking it is. The details are amusing enough, in a Sopranos kind of way -- the envelopes full of cash left on restaurant tables, Mr. Brault’s frantic efforts to discern whether an aide to Alfonso Gagliano was wearing a wire, the hoodlike language employed throughout (“$100,000 cash and your problem is solved”) -- but the overall picture that emerges is crushingly familiar. What Mr. Brault describes, one suspects, is not an exception to the way business is done in Ottawa, but the norm: if not in the particulars, then in the cynical culture it reveals. It is the culture of the shrug, of people too lazy to question how things are done, because everybody does it, and because everybody has always done it. The cabinet ministers who used Mr. Brault's services to put their political staff on the public payroll, after all, must have thought this the most natural thing in the world: isn’t that what the Senate has always been used for? The advertising executives who were careful to let everyone know they were “good Liberals”: did that idea just come to them out of nowhere? It is difficult, come to that, to take seriously the opposition parties’ outrage at discovering the Liberals were using public funds to pay for their election campaigns, since that’s exactly what all parties are now doing -- legally, to be sure, but on the public take all the same. To draw the line at criminality is to excuse everything short of that. I don’t want to absolve those involved in this particular scandal of their special culpability. But we are all complicit in this, to the extent that all of us, with rare exceptions, chose to look the other way, rather than acknowledge what was staring us in the face. If Mr. Chretien and his cronies thought they could get away with it, they had a bloody good reason to think so.