Except here: The Prime Minister, supported by his Solicitor General and his Justice Minister, frankly argues that this is part of his job. As Mr. Chretien put it the other day, "why else be a minister?" So the problem is deeply entrenched. It isn't as simple, as I mentioned last time, as outright corruption. It is the whole system of clientage -- the institutions, practices and assumptions that allow ministers absolute discretion to spend public funds to cement the loyalties of dependent client groups -- that will have to be pulled up by the roots. This will require not just more transparency or closer policing, but fundamental reforms to the structure of government: to disentangle the politicians from the bureaucracy, and the state sector from the private sector; to ensure that each acts according to a predictable set of rules and within certain well-defined boundaries, that the one might be prevented from improperly influencing the other.

The simplest way of limiting ministerial discretion is just to take the toys away from the boys: to move assets and resources as far as possible out of the grasping hands of politicians, by privatizing as much as possible. It is rather harder to stack the board of a Crown corporation or to lean on its president for a loan once it is no longer part of the government.

But of course politicians have shown a great capacity for meddling in the private sector, which in turn invites the private sector to try to influence politicians. A second batch of reforms, then, should be directed to cutting the flow of funds between them -- in either direction. The economic case for ending subsidies to business has long been established.

It is the political case that is now the more compelling. Whatever subsidies do to our economy, they have thoroughly corrupted our political culture. The same applies to the thousands upon thousands of arts groups, activist organizations, and other receptacles of public funds that everywhere dot the landscape: the moolah archipelago.

Likewise, it is long past time to ban donations to political campaigns from corporations, unions and other organizations. Again, the scandals of recent years have refocused the argument: We can debate whether money buys elections, but it quite clearly buys politicians. At the least, it opens them to the suspicion of being bought. After all, any chief executive who contributes corporate funds without expecting some sort of return is in dereliction of his duty to shareholders.

All of these are straightforward enough. The trickier issue is what to do about the political-bureaucratic nexus. Even if you close the subsidy spigot, there are still vast opportunities for improper political influence over direct government spending. So let me suggest a possible model for reform. As is so often the case, this radical-sounding scheme finds its origins in New Zealand, where it may be said the economists have taken over the asylum.

What New Zealand did was, in effect, to turn every government department into a Crown corporation. The deputy minister became the chief executive officer, with all of the managerial responsibility that implies. The minister, rather than simply issuing orders as before, became an arm's-length purchaser of services from the bureaucracy, on terms laid out in a formal contract. The minister remained responsible for framing the overall policy objectives of the department; but the details of implementation, or "outputs," became the responsibility of the CEO.

What effect did this have? First, it clarified the often murky relationship between minister and deputy minister, so memorably portrayed in the Yes, Minister TV series. There was no longer any ambiguity about what role each was expected to play, or who was responsible for what.

Second, it kept political fingers out of the cookie jar. Ministers were formally precluded from interfering with the bureaucracy. Rather than messing about with such micro-details as who gets which contract, they were freed to concentrate on their real job, making policy. The Minister of Transport, for example, would still set the broad transportation outlines. But he would have no hand in which road was built through whose riding.

That hardly exhausts the list of needed reforms. We need to reform the process by which senior appointments are made, whether by subjecting the Prime Minister's choices to parliamentary review, or by setting up an independent public appointments commission, as in Britain. We need to buttress the authority of Parliament, and of parliamentary officers -- including the independent ethics commissioner we were promised -- to hold government accountable.

But without formal institutional restraints on ministerial discretion, these will surely fail.