At the Gomery inquiry.. less money stolen than this commission will cost?

Feb 10th, 2005 | By | Category: Ottawa Scene

Canadian history may ultimately judge that the sharpest point former prime minister Jean Chretien made in his aggressive February 8, 2005 testimony at the Gomery inquiry into the so-called Quebec sponsorship scandal was “I have the impression that there was less money stolen than this commission will cost.”

Whatever the history books finally do say, the appearances of both Chretien and current prime minister Paul Martin before the inquiry – the first such appearance by a Canadian first minister since John A. Macdonald in the 19th century – do seem to have seminally crystallized the question of just what it is all the high-priced legal talent is still supposed to be looking for.

By now the general picture of what went on, as Ottawa struggled to reassert its image in Quebec after the second sovereignty referendum in 1995, seems clear enough, even to those of us who have been trying hard not to pay more attention than the subject deserves.

It also seems clear enough that, while a certain amount of hanky-panky which ought not to have happened probably did seep through certain cracks in the floor, the concept of some widespread cancer of systemic financial corruption at the heart of the executive branch of the federal government is equally probably quite far-fetched.

Both the new Conservative Party of Canada and the Bloc Quebecois have clear electoral interests in continuing to promote the thought that there was in fact enough wider corruption of this sort to warrant throwing the present minority-governing Liberal rascals out of office, whenever the people of Canada are next called to the polls. And, Ottawa being the kind of politically sordid capital city it inevitably is, this is understandable enough too.

Presumably, however, the whole serious point of the Gomery inquiry is to guard against rampant waste of hard-earned taxpayer dollars – which is always a crucial objective of all public policy.

Unless someone can come up with some hard and unambiguous evidence of such truly rampant waste soon, it just may be that we are approaching the point at which the mounting cost of continuing to probe the operation of the sponsorship program, in such monumentally dull and often palpably trivial bureaucratic detail, actually is starting to exceed the amount of money wasted (and especially criminally “stolen”) in the first place.

Since the time of John A. Macdonald, and the start of the present Canadian confederation in 1867, very few political or other actors in Ottawa have qualified for sainthood. And there can be no doubt at all that there is much room for improvement in Canadian public life today.

But when you look at the governments which actually exist around the world, even the federal regimes we have had in Canada over the more recent past have not been quite as sordid as we sometimes seem to want to believe. Or, so far at least, after considerable effort by quite a few eminent, able, and well-paid investigators, the ongoing in-depth exploration of the sponsorship scandal has yet to show otherwise.

On grounds of prudent business management, if nothing else, it is getting harder and harder to see much of a case for prolonging the mounting costs of the Gomery inquiry into any kind of indefinite future. If there are serious crimes to be prosecuted, the Mounties can look after that. And Ottawa can get back to the many real challenges facing the country in the year 2005 (or on the recently celebrated anniversary of the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Rooster, 4702).



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