Sorry, did I say nothing was done? That's incorrect. By Major Armstrong's account, strenuous efforts were made to cover up the crime, starting hours after the event and extending, if his and other witnesses' testimony is to be believed, to the very highest political levels. But we did not hear his account until four years later, when he testified at the Somalia inquiry: the last witness to do so, before the Chretien government ordered the inquiry shut down.

That the inquiry's work had been impeded by months of departmental stonewalling, document-tampering and witnesses, most notoriously Gen. Jean Boyle, the chief of defence staff, afflicted with that strange malady, SSML (sudden severe memory loss), did not deter the government. Nor did it appear to matter that the inquiry was prevented from calling several other high-ranking defence officials, just as the evidence was beginning to point to them. The inquiry was abruptly terminated, without further consequence for any of those involved in the alleged coverup.

I recall this unpleasant episode for the purpose of comparison with two more recent inquiries. On the one hand, you have hearings convened by committees of both houses of Congress into similar mistreatment of prisoners at the hands of American soldiers in Iraq -- mistreatment that only came to light scant days ago. Yet there was the Secretary of Defense appearing before them, along with several top military brass. The questioning was intense and penetrating, from representatives of both parties. The witnesses were contrite, gave detailed answers, took full responsibility. All of which would be contrast enough -- but try to imagine the President ordering the hearings to be shut down.

On the other hand, you have the Commons committee investigating the Adscam affair. Here, the resemblance with the Somalia inquiry is almost exact: the same missing documents, the same parade of forgetful witnesses, the same long list of those yet to testify. And, just as it did in the Somalia inquiry, the government is getting ready to shut it down. For there's an election about to be called -- as there was then.

Of course, there's one difference: The Somalia inquiry was a judicial inquiry, presided over by Judge Louis Letourneau, rather than a parliamentary committee. But although a judicial inquiry has also been called, it has only just got under way: Serious hearings do not begin until the fall, with a report not expected until December -- of 2005. Never mind that the election will have come and gone by then. The more troubling question is whether the inquiry will even be allowed to complete its work.

It isn't only the Somalia inquiry, after all, that might furnish a precedent. The Chretien government did much the same, without actually going so far as to put a bullet in its brain, to the Krever tainted-blood inquiry. As it did to the APEC inquiry. And those are just the cases in which an inquiry was even called. In numerous other examples that ought to have prompted investigations of some kind, political or judicial, the Prime Minister simply refused. We are only just starting to uncover the strange connections at work in the Airbus affair, for example, more than eight years after the fact, and then only because the proceedings of a secret trial in a related matter were at last unsealed. The vendetta carried out by Liberals against Francois Beaudoin, the former president of the Business Development Bank, was likewise only exposed because of a civil proceeding.

The HRDC scandal, including the secret "parallel government" of Liberal party officials handing out grants in Quebec, has never fully been investigated. Nor, God knows, has the Shawinigan affair: The ethics counsellor's benedictions hardly count. The reason in every case is the same. In our system, it is up to the government, that is to say the PM, to decide whether it should submit itself to investigation. Most of the time, upon reflection, it declines.

That might not be such a problem in a different political culture: one in which those in high office are required by custom to make themselves accountable to the relevant authorities, Parliament included, including the obligation of ministers to resign in the event of a catastrophic failure in their departments. It is impossible to describe our system in these terms. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility, in particular, has become a dead letter. The ethos our politicians have adopted, rather, is that of the "professional foul": Whatever you can get away with. Whatever wins. Whatever.