The ads, needless to say, are widely regarded as a disaster. But then, what else is new? The past few weeks have been a nonstop cavalcade of disasters for the Liberals, from a series of bitter nomination fights to the Pettigrew pirouette over private health care to a rogues' gallery of Liberal hacks lying through their teeth to the Commons Public Accounts committee. And just when the furor over Adscam seemed to be subsiding, two of the main players, Chuck Guité and Jean Brault, are hauled off in cuffs to face criminal charges, a week before the election call.

All in all, it would be hard to pick a worse time to call an election, as far as the Liberals are concerned: divided internally, stalled in the polls, in the midst of the biggest scandal in modern Canadian political history. All of which raises a troubling question: Why are they calling an election? How much worse are they expecting things to get? If, as bad as things are for them at the moment, they would still rather go now than wait until fall or even next year -- if this is the best-case scenario -- what on earth do they fear is waiting down the road?

Martin advisers are quite candid about this, in the sense that they refuse to be quoted by name: They are afraid of what the judicial inquiry will unearth. In other words, the reason they are calling an election now, before the inquiry, is that if they waited until after the inquiry people might not vote for them. I don't know which is more remarkable -- that they would say such a thing out loud, or that our electoral laws allow them to time the election on that basis.

But it's actually much worse than that. If it were just a matter of Adscam, per se, the Martinites might have put it behind them by now, even used it to their advantage, as a means of differentiating themselves from their predecessors. That appears to have been their initial thought: that the battery of measures announced on the day the scandal broke would be sufficient to contain public outrage. When these proved as effective as screen doors in a hurricane, they flailed about for a time, then reverted to an all-too-familiar pattern of denial. Though the Prime Minister vowed early on to "get to the bottom" of the whole mess, it soon became clear how unlikely this was, even if he had ever meant it: witness the strangulation and eventual death of the parliamentary inquiry (to be followed by the judicial inquiry?).

Because it isn't just about the $100 million, nor is it restricted to a few rogue bureaucrats and their sleazy advertising-industry friends. It isn't even about corruption, at least as defined in the Criminal Code. Adscam, rather, is woven into the very fabric of Liberal Party dominance, a web of personal, political and even familial ties built up over the party's many years in power and connected at every point with public money. It is of a piece with the HRDC scandal, the gun registry fiasco, the regional development slush funds, the lot. That is why the Liberals, whether Martinite or Chretienite, are so deathly afraid of the whole business. Whatever its virtues as a scandal in its own right, Adscam is more significant as the entry point, the single loose strand from which one can begin to unravel the rest. I do not mean this only in an investigative sense. It is rather the opportunity it provides to focus public attention, adjust public expectations, and through them alter the structure of Canadian politics.

For what is striking about the whole Adscam affair is how unsurprising it was, any of it, to anyone. Everyone knew what the Liberals were up to, and everyone knows there is much worse to come. And yet -- perhaps the Liberals' greatest achievement -- we had all grown accustomed to looking the other way, and having looked away the once, to congratulating ourselves on our sophistication. It was deeply shaming, and like all humiliated people, we learned to drown our shame in cynicism. After all, it wasn't as if there was anything we could do to change it. The Liberals were fixed in power, immovably, eternally.

But the Martin coup kindled hope of change, and the Auditor General's report provided the spark for public anger, and the rapid drop in Liberal support made politics possible again, and suddenly we have all ceased looking the other way. The time is ripe for reform, not merely to correct the specific abuses identified by the Auditor General, but to pull up the whole corrupt system by the roots.

So the scandal provides an obvious opportunity for the Conservatives -- opportunity, and temptation. The temptation will be to run on the scandal, and only the scandal: a risk-free, content-lite campaign on traditional "throw the bums out" lines. If that is what Conservative strategists have planned they will have not only yielded to temptation: they will have squandered the opportunity. After two successive regimes, Mulroney and Chretien, who came to power on a promise to clean up the mess left by their predecessors -- three, if you count Martin -- voters are understandably feeling burned. Asking them to, in effect, "trust us," without offering any surety in policy, plays into the public's enduring belief that "politicians are all alike." In which case the way is clear for the Liberals to parry opposition attacks with another time-tested theme: that the opposition is obsessed with scandal, that it is trying to distract attention from "the real issues," that it's time to "move on," etc.

And, in a sense, they will be right. The Liberals are anxious to shift the debate from "what has the government done" to "what should government do" -- ground on which their opponents seem decidedly uncomfortable. But if Conservatives want to talk about the former, they have to be ready to talk about the latter. The Liberals will say: the scandals happened because of some bad guys in the bureaucracy, but we've fired the bad guys and put in place some administrative controls to prevent them from doing it again. The Conservatives have to say: No, the scandals were systemic. They were an inevitable outgrowth of the Liberal philosophy of government, which is to say of Liberal power politics, and they will persist so long as that philosophy and that system remains in place. But that implies offering an alternative philosophy: Conservatives have to stop running away, in their apparently morbid fear of being labelled "extreme," from any suggestion that they intend to change much of anything.

What, then, is the system that needs to be reformed? In its essentials, it boils down to three elements: discretion, preference, and money. Or to recombine them, it is the use of discretionary power on a preferential basis to distribute public funds (or other favours). The beneficiaries of preference are many -- region, industry, riding, ethnic group -- but together they make up the universe of Liberal client groups, and the foundations of Liberal power. Adscam, in this light, is not a perversion of the system. It is the system. It is merely the extension of the general principle of preference to a particularly venal end. It differs, to the extent that laws may actually have been broken. But in Michael Kinsley's immortal words, the scandal is not what's illegal: the scandal's what's legal.

How to reform the system? The treatment follows the diagnosis. By restricting ministerial discretion, first, subjecting it to certain well-known rules. (This is sometimes known as the "rule of law.") By outlawing preference, second, forbidding the government from favouring particular regions, industries, ridings, or ethnicities, but requiring it instead to deal with every citizen on the basis of equality, or in economic terms, neutrality. And by cutting off the flow of funds, "snipping the wires" through which preference is transmitted. The previous government, oddly enough, went part of the way, outlawing (most) corporate contributions to politicians. The remaining task is to outlaw political contributions to corporations, or any similar special interest.

My purpose here isn't to sketch out the Conservatives' platform for them. It is merely an approach, a way of understanding Adscam: not only as a question of politics, but of policy, and of the intersection between the two.