A public inquiry? Heaven forbid.
Why, no less an authority than Jean Chretien has weighed in against it. “It's not the best way to solve problems,” Chretien told reporters at a Montreal book signing last week. “We have police for these things.” Well of course we do. For example, after the president of the federal Business Development Bank sought to foreclose on a loan Chretien had personally demanded for a friend and former business partner in his riding -- something about a hotel, I believe -- the Mounties were called in to investigate the banker. Several times.
Strangely, the force showed markedly less zeal in pursuit of the author of a purportedly forged document showing Chretien was owed money by the same dodgy hotelier on whose behalf he had been lobbying. Unable to decipher, after many months of effort, whether the document was a forgery or not, the RCMP shrugged and gave up. Which is more or less what they did for most of Chretien’s time in office, through scandal after scandal: Shawinigate, HRDC, Adscam and beyond.
The idea that messy political scandals are “best left to the police,” even competent police, is rooted in what one might call the Chretien standard of public ethics: that as long as no crimes were committed, all is well; that the most we should expect of the people who make our laws is that they do not actually break them. But regardless of whether anyone did anything illegal in the Airbus affair, it certainly raises a host of questions it is in the public interest to have answered.
Why did Airbus agree to pay $20 million in secret commissions to Karlheinz Schreiber, if the Air Canada contract was decided on strictly commercial terms? What legitimate contribution could he possibly have made? Why did they, and he, deny there was such an agreement, even after it had been revealed? Why, likewise, did the late Frank Moores deny lobbying for Airbus to his dying day, though we know he was paid by Schreiber? Who else did Schreiber pay, and what services did they perform? And of course, what did Brian Mulroney do for his share?
That the press gallery should show so little curiosity about any of these is, shall we say, in character. But that they should be so hostile, even now, to a public inquiry -- that the notion that the public would be scandalized by what it might reveal should be raised as an argument against it -- shows how much the gallery has become part of the problem. If there is a culture of impunity in this country, the media can take its share of the blame.
I can’t actually recall many instances of good people being dragged through the mud by a public inquiry, though I can think of a number of bad people who should have been and weren’t. Like the complaints about cost and time, it’s essentially a placeholder argument, a token nod to the public interest, when what they really mean is that holding a public inquiry would not be clever. Politically, I mean.
It has become a commonplace around Ottawa that calling the Gomery inquiry was a dumb move on Paul Martin’s part. Sorry, did I say “dumb”? I meant unspeakably stupid, egregiously dim, the worst self-inflicted wound since Oedipus discovered his paternity. That Liberals should say this is understandable, if arguable: no prime minister, not even Chretien himself, could have ridden out the storm that was set off by that Auditor General’s report. (Headline in the Toronto Star: “Your money, their friends.” The Toronto Star.) But that journalists should collude in the same winking assessment shows how thoroughly the press have absorbed not only the language, but the morals of political strategists. As far as the public interest was concerned, Gomery was a triumph, exposing a sleazy political subculture we would never have learned about had the matter been “left to the police.” Calling the inquiry was about the only thing Martin did right in the whole affair. And the same applies to Stephen Harper this time around.
Will it make the public more cynical about politics? Gosh I hope so. Watching Mulroney bask in his umpteenth standing ovation last week, or the worshippers lining up for Chretien to sign their copies of his book, I’d say we could use a lot more public cynicism about politics. Though often accused of it, the press in fact has a vested interest in pretending politics is a more ennobling enterprise than it really is, which is why it tends to rally protectively around politicians at such times. It is simply too much to bear to think that the occupation we write about, the subject to which we have devoted our professional lives, is such a perpetually squalid business. Perhaps we need to have our noses rubbed in it, but I doubt we’ll wise up even then.
11/22/2007
