What do we know now that we wouldn’t have known if the Gomery Commission hadn’t been appointed? How much have we learned from Gomery that we haven’t already learned from the auditor general’s report on the sponsorship scandal? And is it worth the expense?<\/p>\n
Appointed by the Martin government on February 10, 2004, the very day of the release of Fraser’s report, the Gomery Commission will publish its findings on November 1 of this year and issue its final recommendations on December 15. Even before Justice John Gomery began the Ottawa phase of his hearings last September, the commission had accumulated 28 million pieces of paper. In 128 days of public hearings in Ottawa and Montreal to the end of May, the transcripts ran to 25,000 pages of testimony. Closing arguments were to be heard in June, followed by Gomery’s retreat from the cameras to write his report.<\/p>\n
On any given day, as many as two dozen parties had standing or representation before the commission, with more clamouring for the right to be heard with each devastating disclosure during the Montreal hearings.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave a place, if you can find one,\u201d Gomery told a lawyer seeking standing for his client as the hearings drew to a close in May. Since his ill-advised media interviews over the holidays, in which he referred to Jean Chr\u00e9tien’s signature golf balls as \u201csmall-town cheap,\u201d Gomery has studiously avoided the media. But he’s been unable to suppress his cracker barrel sense of humour, and has enlivened the proceedings with his propensity for cutting to the chase. When Daniel Dezainde, a former director-general of the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec, testified he was worried that his car might be blown up in a garage, Gomery leaned over and asked if he didn’t have a set of car keys with a remote starter.<\/p>\n
Previously an obscure judge of the Quebec Superior Court and chair of the equally obscure Copyright Board of Canada, Gomery has become a household name across the country. It isn’t every commission of inquiry that almost triggers the downfall of the government.<\/p>\n
What do we know now that we didn’t know then? What have we learned since Gomery overtook Auditor General Sheila Fraser? Plenty.<\/p>\n
As explosive as her report was, Fraser was limited in both mandate and scope. As she said on releasing it, \u201cWe could not look at these funds once they left the government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Therein lies the tale\u2014 and the money trail\u2014 laid out before Gomery. Fraser uncovered a breakdown of the bureaucracy, while Gomery has discovered where the money went after that, and some of it was right out of Goodfellas. <\/em><\/p>\n Fraser was shocked by \u201cthe widespread non-compliance with contracting rules.\u201d Those rules, she concluded \u201cwere broken at every stage of the process for more than four years and there was little evidence of value received for money spent.\u201d During that time, she noted, \u201cthe sponsorship program consumed $250 million of taxpayers’ money, and $100 million of that went to agencies in fees and commissions.\u201d\u00a0She concluded: \u201cOur findings on the government’s sponsorship program from 1997 to 2001 are deeply disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n Disturbing as her findings were, they were essentially a story of bureaucrats bending and breaking the rules to do the bidding of their political masters. But even as they broke the rules, the bureaucrats’ instinct for selfpreservation prevailed, and they created a paper trail of faxes, e-mails, memos and requisitions. It led first to the office of Chuck Guit\u00e9, manager of the sponsorship program and government advertising, and from there to the offices of successive ministers of Public Works, and finally to the Prime Minister’s Office. As the trail led to the highest elective office in the land, the scandal emerged as a saga of the misappropriation of public funds by politicians and misadministration by the public servants who cut corners to please them. In Ottawa, when the word is passed that \u201cthe PMO wants this,\u201d everybody gets it, and nobody gets in the way.<\/p>\n The prime minister himself, Jean Chr\u00e9tien, personally signed off on the initial $17 million requisition creating the program in 1996, the purpose being to increase federal visibility in Quebec after the close-run thing of the October 1995 Quebec referendum, in which his No forces barely prevailed with 50.56 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n If the object of the program was to make the Liberal Party synonymous with federalism in Quebec, then it has been a complete success\u2014 in entirely the wrong way.<\/p>\n The Liberals are indelibly identified with the sponsorship program, with no distinction made between administrations. Even though Prime Minister Paul Martin cancelled the program on his first day in office, even though he appointed Gomery and supported him unequivocally when Chr\u00e9tien tried to have him removed in February, Martin is set to pay a heavy price at the polls, nowhere more so than in Quebec.<\/p>\n Where the Liberals had been modestly rebounding in Quebec polls before Christmas, their numbers have plummeted since the Gomery hearings moved to Montreal. With the Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois polling above 50 percent, and the Liberals below 20 percent in a succession of polls in April and May, the Bloc appeared poised to win at least 60 Quebec seats. If the trend holds, this would reduce the Liberals to 15 seats or less, their worst showing since the 1988 free trade election in which Brian Mulroney won 63 Quebec seats with 53 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n Martin must rue the day he ever appointed Gomery. Had he simply asked the RCMP to follow up on the AG’s report, the prime minister could have declined to comment on an ongoing police investigation. That police investigation wouldn’t have been led by a squad of special prosecutors known as commission counsel, and it wouldn’t have been aided by a crack firm of forensic accountants. Most of all, it wouldn’t have been on television day after day, corroding public faith in government and politicians in general and the Liberal Party in particular.<\/p>\n Ironically, the explosive nature of the Gomery revelations is the most persuasive evidence that Martin, as he claimed all along, was not involved in the sponsorship program. No politician in his right mind, if he had been involved, would have appointed a commission of inquiry to, as Martin has said, \u201cget to the bottom of it.\u201d<\/p>\n What wouldn’t we know now if Gomery hadn’t followed Fraser?<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know that Jean Lafleur of Lafleur Communications had $65 million of sponsorship billings and his entire family on the government payroll to the tune of $12 million. That he earned $100,000 from his company the year the program was launched and $2 million five years later. That down the hall from his office, his son, Eric, was billing the government, by way of his father, nearly $6.5 million to produce sponsorship gadgets, from those famous signature golf balls to a $25,000 souvenir album for Rideau Hall. That Jean Lafleur bought season tickets to the Montreal Canadiens\u2014 two in the reds\u2014 and charged them back to the government as an expense. None of this ever showed on the government’s books. The Lafleurs have been compared in the popular culture to Les Bougon, <\/em>a wildly popular RadioCanada comedy series about a family of welfare cheats who beat the system at every turn.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know that Lafleur, through his son’s company, hired Chr\u00e9tien’s close friend and senior Quebec campaign operative, Jacques Corriveau, on retainer at $60,000 a year in 1998. Corriveau has a company called Pluri Design, which did all out the outdoor signage, posters and printing for the Liberal Party in Quebec in the three election campaigns of the Chr\u00e9tien era. He was also the beneficiary of nearly $8 million in sponsorship contracts, which he collected as a sub-contractor to third parties, making him notably absent from the government’s books.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know about Paul Coffin of Coffin Communications, one of the smaller fish in this sea, sending fake invoices to Public Works at the request, according to his testimony, of the man who received them, Chuck Guit\u00e9.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know that the advertising industry, whose relationships of convenience with the party in power have long been considered business as usual, could use a briefing on lobbying laws. That Vickers and Benson of Toronto, when it was being sold in 2000 to the New York office of the French multinational Havas, hired Chuck Guit\u00e9 only six months after he had left the government to lobby his former minister, Alfonso Gagliano, for assurance, as a condition of closing the sale to a foreign company, so they wouldn’t lose their two biggest government clients: Tourism Canada and Canada Savings Bonds. A Canadian subsidiary was created that met the 100 percent Canadian ownership requirement for receiving government advertising contracts. Guit\u00e9 lobbied Gagliano over dinner in violation of the government’s post-employment lobbying rules. The sale closed uneventfully and Guit\u00e9 was paid $100,000 commission.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know, without former Groupaction president Jean Brault’s testimony, that there was a system of donations and kickbacks to the Liberal Party from the Montreal agencies implicated in the scandal, all\u00a0of whom donated generously to the Liberal Party\u2014 legally in most instances, but illegally in others. That $50,000 in donations to Liberal organizers was funnelled illegally through third parties later reimbursed by Brault. That Brault donated another $50,000 cash at the start of the 2000 campaign\u2014 at the request of Liberal Party director-general Benoit Corbeil\u2014 that was never reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know that Brault agreed to kick back $100,000 cash for the promise from Gagliano bagman Joe Morselli of continued ad work on the government’s gun registry. Or that $25,000 of it was delivered at a Christmas party hosted by Gagliano. Only $50,000 was ever paid, and it’s not clear whether any of it actually got to the Liberal Party, which was perpetually broke despite being in government, despite all the donations flowing to it from suppliers, and which by 2001 was $3 million in debt.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know about Joe Morselli, a survivor of the rough-andtumble world of school-board politics in the Montreal suburb of St-Leonard, where\u2014 by persons who remain unknown\u2014 his car was blown up in his driveway one night in 1989. His catering company, Buffet Trio, has contracts with the Revenue Canada GST centre in Shawinigan and RCMP headquarters in Montreal. When Benoit Corbeil was handing over as director-general of the party’s Quebec wing in 2001, he told his successor, Daniel Dezainde, that Morselli was \u201cthe real boss\u201d of the party in Quebec and would decide which bills got paid and which didn’t. Though the party had no vice-president of its finance commission, Morselli had business cards, printed by Corriveau’s firm, bearing the non-existent title, presumably to enhance his fundraising abilities.<\/p>\n We certainly wouldn’t know about the illegal and quite possibly decisive cash injection in the 1997 campaign; as much as $300,000, according to Michel B\u00e9liveau, then director-general of the Liberal Party in Quebec and organizer of Chr\u00e9tien’s campaigns in St-Maurice since 1965. Jacques Corriveau handed him $75,000 to $100,000 of that cash in, B\u00e9liveau said, \u201ca rather thick envelope.\u201d<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know about the $120,000 in cash handed over in three instalments to Marc-Yvan Co\u00cc\u201at\u00e9, a legendary provincial Liberal organizer\u2014 of both election and referendum campaigns\u2014 and former health minister under Robert Bourassa. Hired out to the federal Liberals in the 1997 campaign, Co\u00cc\u201at\u00e9 never reported the cash, though he certainly knew the law. In the 1997 election, the Liberals were returned to office with 155 seats in a 301-seat House, four more than a bare majority. Twenty-six of those seats were in Quebec, seven more than the Liberals won in 1993. Their improved score, partly thanks to that illegal cash, was the margin of their slim majority.<\/p>\n We wouldn’t know that the operation was being run not by a rogue element\u2014 as suggested by Martin’s Quebec lieutenant, Transport Minister Jean Lapierre\u2014 but by les hommes de confiance, <\/em>all the prime minister’s men. In terms of political organizers in Quebec, no one was closer to Chr\u00e9tien than B\u00e9liveau and Corriveau and no one was more respected than Co\u00cc\u201at\u00e9. Far from being rogues, they were the party establishment.<\/p>\n And we wouldn’t know where all that cash went. What we still don’t know is where much of it came from, although we do know a bank won’t give you more than $10,000 cash at once, not without asking why, and perhaps not without calling the cops.<\/p>\n Critics of Gomery cite its cost\u2014 as much as $72 million when all the lawyers, forensic accountants, consultants, advisers and staff are paid, as well as the time-on-the-job cost of public servants answering \u00a0Gomery’s questions.<\/p>\n Above all, we know that Gomery, \u00a0because of what we know now that we didn’t know then, has earned his keep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do we know now that we wouldn’t have known if the Gomery Commission hadn’t been appointed? How much have we learned from Gomery that we haven’t already learned from the auditor general’s report on the sponsorship scandal? And is it worth the expense? 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