Because, it is now clear, of the Auditor-General's report. The Prime Minister must have known how damning it would be. Everything else -- the government's legislative agenda, the fall economic statement, his own party's campaign readiness -- would therefore have to be subordinated to the one overriding objective of dropping the writ before the report was due.

The Prime Minister was like the driver of a car, trying to beat a train across a railway crossing. The closer he got, and the nearer it looked, the harder he pressed down on the pedal. Stopping was impossible; even to slow down invited disaster. He would bet all on calling an election before the Auditor-General's report arrived: with Parliament dissolved, he would have no one to report to.

Even after it became clear this was not going to work -- suppressing the report would do more political damage than the report itself -- there was no turning back.

He had but one hope. If he pressed ahead firmly, on as many fronts as possible, he might distract attention from the report, and so dull its impact. He may, yet. But it may also be that he has just engineered the most spectacular train wreck in Canadian political history.

The Auditor-General's report is not only damaging for what it contains: confirmation, in every essential, of all that had been alleged in several months of opposition pounding over the seemingly haphazard way in which bureaucrats at Human Resources Development Canada had shovelled "job creation" grants to businesses across the country. Worse, the report will tie the scandal irreparably to the Prime Minister himself -- if only because he went to such lengths to conceal it.

Now we are into an election, in the shadow of a report detailing waste and abuse of public funds on a truly monumental scale. And a scandal that seemed to have flared out, blazes just as fiercely as before. (We can only give thanks that the Auditor-General's office is better protected in law than that of the Information Commissioner, whose inquiries have been systematically blocked by high officials in the civil service, to the point of threatening the careers of some of his agents.)

Be clear on one thing. The willingness of HRDC officials to hand out wads of public money under programs such as the Transitional Jobs Fund, virtually no questions asked, is not evidence that the program was "out of control." It was in fact operating precisely as intended. The TJF was expressly designed to be political, its every contribution requiring the approval not merely of the Minister, but of the local MP. Had the program been governed by strict performance guidelines -- requiring, say, that recipients have a business plan, or show evidence of having met their commitments -- and had these been followed, its political objectives would necessarily have been compromised.

Whether the remarkable proportion of the fund that was disbursed in the weeks immediately before the last election, or the equally striking number of recipients who happened to be located in Liberal ridings, proves a pattern of political interference is not for me, or even the AuditorGeneral, to say. But in one particular case, the evidence seems irrefutable. Alas, that case is in the Prime Minister's own riding.

There are simply too many signs of his involvement -- whether in grants, loans or contracts, to personal friends, political contributors or business partners, but all ending up within his St. Maurice riding -- to be dismissed: In one case, an official in his constituency office sat in on a meeting where a grant was discussed, in another the Prime Minister announced a grant even before it had been approved.

Whether the Prime Minister benefited from any of these in a personal financial sense is less clear, but it is also immaterial: What is certain is that he was in a conflict of interest, even so far as there was the potential for such gain. And, quite apart from any financial gains, are the personal political benefits to be had from being seen to dispense such largesse in the riding, on the eve of a closely fought election.

Old news? Perhaps. But the revival of the grants scandal, just before the election, with the Prime Minister right in the thick of it, plays right into opposition hands. For this one issue ties together a number of concerns about this government: about the careless use of public funds, the decline of public ethics, the lack of public accountability. Even taxes can be filtered through this lens: Why won't the Liberals cut your taxes? Because they need the money to hand out to their friends.

And now all these will be reinforced by the timing of the election, and so back to the Prime Minister himself. This is not going to fade away.