The Prime Minister has plainly drawn a line in the sand. For the ethically perplexed Cabinet minister, the boundaries are now a little clearer: You can give government contracts to people with whom you've slept over, but not to people you've slept with. If you've paid to sleep in someone's bed, that's okay, but not if you've slept there gratis. If Mr. Eggleton had slept with a prostitute, then hired her to write a report on, say, venereal diseases among enlisted men, perhaps he would still be employed, assuming he kept his receipts. But as the Prime Minister reminded reporters yesterday, federal ethics guidelines clearly state that, as a Cabinet minister, "you cannot give favourable treatment to a friend or family member." Apparently Mr. Eggleton had been given the wrong impression.

It is all very disorienting. It used to take 18 months of hard slogging to get the Prime Minister to drop an errant minister overboard. It now takes about 18 hours. Somebody's spider-sense is obviously tingling.

Perhaps the focus groups are beginning to report the public's tolerance for Liberal sleaze has reached its limits. Maybe it's the media, suddenly interested in stories of ministerial malfeasance that had lain dormant for months. But for whatever reason, the Prime Minister has decided to abandon the strategy he has employed to such good effect in every previous scandal: Do not be seen to feel guilt, and you will not be found guilty.

Deny the allegation as long as you can, but when the truth finally comes out, dismiss the whole thing as insignificant, "the usual operation." And under no circumstances should any minister, certainly not in an important portfolio like Defence, be forced to resign.

Pass them off as ambassadors, shuffle them into junior minister's jobs, anything, but never admit they did anything wrong.

The irony is that it was Mr. Eggleton who, under pressure from the media, had stuck to the Chretien script, and Mr. Boudria who had broken. Perhaps encouraged by the Prime Minister's "hey, nobody's perfect" defence of his government's record of ethical lapses earlier in the week, Mr. Eggleton had responded to the revelation of his own misconduct with a shrug. "Much ado is being made about nothing here," he suggested in one interview, after it was reported that Maggie Maier, with whom Mr. Eggleton had had a lengthy affair in the late 1990s, had been given the contract to study the effects of post- traumatic stress disorder on Canadian Forces personnel. Ms. Maier, for her part, unencumbered though she was by professional medical training, insisted she was well qualified to write about trauma, "at least from the sense of my personal experiences" -- perhaps a reference to her long personal experience of an "environment-related illness," perhaps to her long personal experience of Mr. Eggleton.

Besides, as Mr. Eggleton was at pains to point out, the contract was not funded out his departmental budget; rather, "this came out of my own budget for political staffers and researchers." He hadn't paid her out of the taxpayer's left pocket, but his right. What on earth was all the fuss about?

Mr. Boudria, by contrast, fairly blubbered with shame and mortification, at least by the standards of the Chretien cabinet. While insisting he had done nothing wrong by staying at the now famous "chalet by the lake," he allowed that, had he the chance to revisit the recent past, he would not have done the same thing again. This is hardly a defence: I know I robbed that bank, Your Honour, but I promise not to do it again. But it did seem to acknowledge some degree of personal responsibility, beyond the Prime Minister's "mistakes were made" formula.

What, then, are we to make of the differing treatments accorded the two ministers? On one hand, it is tempting to point out that Mr. Boudria was accused of ordinary, run-of- the-mill cronyism, of the kind that has never seemed to trouble Mr. Chretien before. A government in which ministers, political staff, senior bureaucrats, consultants, pollsters, plus an odd assortment of party members, flunkies and business partners, all mingled and merged as promiscuously as bacteria in a petri dish, moving effortlessly from public sector to private and back, exchanging favours, hiring each other's kids: all that we have grown used to. But ex-girlfriends? The Prime Minister has his standards.

But I think there's something else going on here. If it is the end of the Chretien stonewall, it can only be because the wall has already been breached. And so it has: the leaks are coming fast and furious these days, a side benefit, perhaps, of the Liberal leadership battles. It cannot have escaped notice that the victims of this seemingly endless series of revelations have, in the main, been Chretien loyalists: Gagliano, Boudria, Coderre. Mr.

Eggleton, a Martinite, is the exception that proves the rule.