The decision was made without the approval of Cabinet, over the objections of senior officials in three departments, and rushed through Public Works in a single day. It was announced on a Friday, just before the Easter long weekend, leaving Parliament and the media out of the loop as well. No public tender was issued. The government appears to have paid far too much for the jets, which may not have been necessary at all. The money went to Bombardier, the Quebec-based aerospace firm, a frequent recipient of public funds and a regular and generous donor to the Liberal Party of Canada.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Forces are still flying around in 40-year-old Sea Kings, eight years after the Liberals cancelled the previous government's order of new helicopters and nine years after the expenditure of $2.5-million to refurbish a Conservative prime minister's Airbus caused such histrionics on the then-Opposition Liberal benches. That jet, by the way, is still in the government's possession, but sits idle, owing to Mr. Chretien's unwillingness to be associated with such extravagance.

So let's see: That's abuse of process, contempt of Parliament, grievous waste, pork- barreling, multiple counts of aggravated policy failure, and rank hypocrisy, all driven by the Prime Minister's droit de seigneur philosophy of public finance and carried off with utter unconcern for public appearances -- or rather, a deliberate flouting of these, the better to undercut any suggestion that we might expect better of those we put in public office. In other words, precisely the pattern observed in every previous Liberal scandal, from APEC to Somalia to the Krever blood inquiry, from Pearson airport to Canada Lands to the Export Development Corp., from HRDC to TJF to CIDA, from Jane Stewart to Alfonso Gagliano, from here to Shawinigan.

The mistake is to see each of these as separate events, or to understand the many ways in which this government has abused the public trust and plundered the public treasury as distinct phenomena. They are not. They are all one, each an extrusion from the same gaseous ball of imperiousness. In three words, it is Liberal power politics. In one word, it is bossism: as my encyclopedia defines it, a "system of political control centring about a single powerful figure and a complex organization of lesser figures, bound together by reciprocity in promoting financial and social self-interest." Parliament, the bureaucracy, even the police, the whole apparatus of government is subordinated to the single objective of preserving the party and its leader in power.

Previously separate spheres -- executive and legislature, party and state, public interest and private interest -- become indistinguishable from each other, the lines between them blurring and faded. Think PRI. Think LDP. Think Saudi royals. Think Jean Chretien, as an Opposition critic has immortalized him: the pasha of pork, the Sultan of Shawinigan.

But think then that this will outlive him, that it is imprinted in the Liberals' genetic code, that whatever may be thought to be peculiar to Mr. Chretien's style of governing will be reproduced in time in his successor.

None of these many scandals, none of these separate issues -- the gargantuan mismanagement of public funds (of which the Auditor General's latest report provides only the most shocking examples), the grotesque accumulation of powers in the Prime Minister's Office, the anaesthetization of Parliament, the politicization of the bureaucracy, the careful cultivation of dependent client groups, the endless, almost daily stories of shady campaign donations and handouts to favoured corporations and well- connected lobbyists taking a cut each way, and the drift and decline so everywhere apparent, while this merry ring of favour-seekers disport themselves, oblivious -- none has been enough, on its own, to detach the Liberals from their grip on power. Nor will they in combination, unless someone or something can succeed in fusing them in the public mind, until it becomes apparent that they are in fact not several things, but one thing.

You can point out that subsidies to giant corporations are a waste of public funds, a distortion of private investment, a misplacement of social priorities. Or you can denounce them as the misuse of public funds for partisan ends, as the exchange of the private gain of the recipient for the political gain of the patron, and all on the taxpayer's tab. But you will not move the public to do something about it until it is made clear that these are merely two ways of saying the same thing -- that Liberal ethics is Liberal economics. No: that Liberal ethics is Liberal economics is Liberal politics is Liberal ethics. It is all of a piece, a perfect synthesis of means and ends, motive and action -- an infinite circle of self-advancement, a wheel of political fortune.

Each piece of the wheel reinforces the other. Why is the Prime Minister not called to account for misspending billions of dollars in public funds? Because, other than the Auditor General and certain other officers of Parliament -- each of whom the Prime Minister's Office has attempted to silence or intimidate at various times -- there is no one to hold him to account. He appoints the Ethics Counsellor, of course. But he also appoints the chairs of all the Parliamentary committees, he appoints the Senators, he appoints the ministers and their deputy ministers, he appoints the presidents of every Crown corporation, and much else besides.

Why doesn't Parliament demand changes to this state of affairs? Because he controls Parliament, as well. His signature is on every Liberal MP's nomination papers. No piece of legislation can pass without his say-so -- even private member's bills he can kill with a nod. (See Bill C-344, Keith Martin's bill to decriminalize possession of marijuana, scheduled to die today, notwithstanding the support it enjoys in every party.) He even decides how long each bill will be debated. Once elected leader, he is secure against all challenges from within, and once elected Prime Minister, he is all but impregnable from without.

But how did he get in such a position? In part, by his ability to raise campaign funds from private donors, the better to pay for the spin doctors and attack ads that are the indispensible elements of every modern campaign, but in which the Liberals are the acknowledged masters. And in part, by his willingness to shower public money on special interests and strategic ridings, directly or indirectly, sometimes to the benefit of those same donors. In other words, the very misspending for which we originally sought to hold him to account is ultimately the means by which he insulates himself from all accountability. The circle is unbroken. The synthesis is complete. Bossism rules.

You cannot pull one piece out at a time. You have to smash it, whole.