Andrew Coyne is reporting that the earlier reports that were denied by the Liberals were true after all. Well, that fits a pattern, doesn’t it?

And yes, it does appear that the Liberals have put off passing the budget implementation bill until then, notwithstanding earlier denials. Wonderful: a government that is too afraid to put any bills before the House, for fear they might come to a vote. They’ve more or less barricaded themselves in their offices.

Be sure to go from there to the main page – Coyne has lots of juicy stuff today, including the identity of Kinsella’s “mystery caller”.

David Frum, in the New York Times;

Luckily for the Liberals, the Conservative Party split into warring factions in 1993. Consequently, the Liberals were able to return to power that year even though they won only 37 percent of the vote.
Almost everything that Jean Chr�tien did as prime minister over the next decade can be understood as an effort to reverse his party’s long-term problems. He edged to the right on economic issues in the hope of appealing to middle-income voters alienated by Mr. Trudeau’s economic mismanagement. He veered leftward on social issues in the hope of finding a new constituency among wealthier Ontarians and Quebecers. After 9/11, he struck anti-American and anti-Israel attitudes that he hoped would resonate in isolationist Quebec and among certain immigrant communities.
And it was presumably for these same reasons that Mr. Chr�tien set in motion his kickback scheme. As Liberal strength in Quebec has decayed, the Liberals have found it more and more difficult to hold together an effective political organization in the province. How do you sustain a political party without principles or vision? Sometimes you do it with graft.
[…]
Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain’s Labor Party, Canada’s Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India’s Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.
As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It’s an exchange that is long past due.

(The column requires free registration.)
(* – I first spotted this at London Fog, but have since learned it was coined by Paul Jan�)
Bananadian update – “Fred” and Andrew Coyne have informed me that the first known appearance of “Bananada” was on March 18, 2004, at Andrew’s blog.

Captains Quarters has several posts on the testimony coming out of both Gomery and the Commons accounts committee. I’d suggest you just head over and start at the top, though I’ll provide a few key exerpts as appetizer;

The Sponsorship Program bought advertising at ten hunting and fishing shows from Gaetan Mondou for $100,000, who discovered yesterday that the man who bought them, Luc Lemay, told the government that they had cost over $1.8 million. The difference disappeared into the pockets of Jacques Corriveau, longtime pal of Jean Chr�tien and a man who doesn’t even fish.
[…]
…the two inquiries now have started to air testimony that demonstrates Martin may well have participated in the same schemes as his former boss as well as parallel corruption supporting his chief of staff’s boyfriend.
It’s these developments that pushed the Liberals into the desperate move of blocking Harper from controlling Parliamentary business on Opposition Days as scheduled yesterday in order to gain time to recover …

And this, which should the opposition members should start trying to hammer home; that Martin’s delays have engineered the perpetrators a free “Get Out Of Jail Free” card by pushing the investigation past the absurdly brief 18 month statute of limitations.

Weston believes that much more promise may come from an independent financial audit from the same forensic accounting team that plumbed the depths of the Enron scandal. Insiders have told Weston that after going through the financial records of everyone involved in Adscam, including the front businesses and the subcontractors, the bagmen and the recipients of their cash, and of course the Liberal Party, they have a good idea who wound up with the lion’s share of the money.
They promise that the audit contains “pure political dynamite” — and that report will come to the Gomery Inquiry in the next few weeks. Canadians might even see some of the money returned, if it still exists in liquid form, but more likely will be tax-fraud charges that might survive the statute of limitations that prevent Adscammers from facing the consequences of their graft.

Well, they’ve been treating our money as though it was paper in their own political board game. I suppose we should have known there’d be a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card in the rules – after all, they wrote them.

I was very hard up at one time – when I was living in Friar-street – and I used to frequent a house kept by a betting-man, near the St George’s Surrey Riding-school. A man I knew used to supply this betting-man with rats. I waw at this public-house one night when this rat-man comes up to me, and says he, “Hallo! my pippin; here, I want you: I want you to make a match. Will you kill thirty rats against my dog?” So I said, “Let me see the dog first;” and I looked at his mouth, and he was an old dog; so I says, “No, I won’t go in for thirty; but I don’t mind trying at twenty.” He wanted to make it twenty-four, but I wouldn’t. They put the twenty in the rat-pit and the dog went in first and killed his, and he took a quarter of an hour and two minutes. Then a fresh lot were put in the pit, and I began; my hands were tied behind me. They always make an allowance for a man, so the pit was made closer, for you see a man can’t turn round like a dog; I had half the space of the dog. The rats lay in a cluster, and then I picked them off where I wanted ’em and bit ’em between the shoulders. It was when they came to one or two that I had the work, for they cut about. The last one made me remember him, for he gave me a bite, of which I’ve got the scar now. It festered, and I was obliged to have it cut out. I took Dutch drops for it, and poulticed it by day, and I was bad for three weeks. They made a subscription in the room of fifteen shillings for killing these rats. I won the match, and beat the dog by four minutes. This wager was five shillings, which I had. I was at the time so hard up, I’d do anything for some money; though as far as that’s concerned, I’d go into a pit now, if anybody would make it worth my while. *

A spectator’s version.
Update – CTV has video links and a Mike Duffy interview.

As I was just saying the other day, people send me the coolest stuff.

Yup
PDF
UPDATE A reader has a translation up

..that causes their ministers to do weird stuff with money

The cabinet minister who has mounted the vigorous defence of the Liberal government over Adscam is himself snared in a nasty money dispute with his old Conservative riding association that prompted a complaint to the RCMP, Sun Media has learned. For more than a year, Public Works Minister Scott Brison has been asked to provide receipts or invoices to the King-Hants Conservative riding association to account for a $4,400 cheque given to him in 2003, while he was a Tory MP.
“It’s still not properly accounted for,” said Debbie Janzen, who sat on the board of Brison’s old Progressive Conservative Party riding association.
The cheque, which Brison assistant Dale Palmeter says was used to help pay down debts from his failed bid for the PC leadership in 2003, was made out to Brison on July 31 that year.
But it wasn’t cashed until Dec. 11 – the day after he defected to Paul Martin’s Liberals.
The money was deposited into Brison’s personal bank account in Wolfville, N.S., and the contribution does not show up on the list of contributors to his campaign.

I just happen to have a copy of that check. (click on it to enlarge)


People send me such cool stuff.

Continue reading →

This is one great idea:

Because we all know how much the Liberal party likes envelopes stuffed with money, so we might as well help them out and all send one. But don’t forget to put a note in the envelope too, because you have to request something from them in return for your envelope stuffed with cash. From what we have been hearing, that’s how things work inside of the Liberal machine.

Help spread the word!
update: sorry! link fixed

“I have never had a lunch with Claude Boulay or anybody else to discuss the direction of contracts, directing contracts, intervening in contracts, that’s just simply not my style of politics,” he said, referring to the Montreal ad executive.
Asked if he had lunch with Boulay to discuss something else, Martin told reporters Thursday: “I can’t recall having had lunch with him since we formed the government.”

A long time was spent on crafting this answer…. and it shows.
Too many qualifiers. The safety valve: “recall”. “since”.
Paul Martin has just broadcast that there are skeletons in his closet.
This was not a man who had a question thrown to him from the blue. The details and personalities involved in this scandal have been on the public record for many months.
Paul Martin works closely with a team (teams?) of advisors. His people will have scoured every agenda book, every office record, every telephone log, to ensure that they are aware of any and every figure that Martin may have had contact with who is implicated.
When the question about Paul Martin’s lunch with Claude Bouley were asked in the House, he would have known instantly if there was truth in the accusation. A man who was completely out of the loop, who had no knowledge, would have known that his team had confirmed that. And he would have been able to state as much, without qualifiers.
He waited three days to answer, and then parsed his words extremely carefully. He waited because he couldn’t be sure if they had missed something. He stalled for a reason – they were checking their records.
He’s lying. He knew.

The Black Rod has been collecting federal sponsorship trivia – in Manitoba.

Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival was given $30,000 in 2001. However an access-to-information request showed that the festival had actually been awarded $34,500 by Public Works Canada.
Festival organizers were told that the other $4,500 was a commission to Compass Communications in Halifax. They were told to send a bill to Compass, but to make the bill out to Media/IDA in Montreal. The letter to the Ukrainian Festival was written by Pierre Tremblay, a very familiar name in the Adscam investigation.
Conservative MP Bill Casey asked the obvious question in the House of Commons:
“Does the minister have any idea at all why Public Works would tell a Manitoba organization to send this bill through one Liberal advertising agency in Nova Scotia and have it funnelled through another one in Montreal for an event in Manitoba to be paid for by Ottawa?
Did the government pay commissions to Media/IDA Vision in Montreal or did it pay commissions to Compass Communications in Halifax, or did it pay commissions to both of these Liberal advertising firms?”
He never got a straight answer. Nor has anyone.
Compass is owned by Tony Blom, a Liberal strategist who is also related to former Nova Scotia Liberal party president Gerald Blom.
Government records show it received $463,365 in commissions and more than $4.6 million for production costs related to events between 1998 and 2001.
The names Compass and Tremblay showed up again in documents surrounding sponsorship of the Pan Am Games in Winnipeg in 1999. Compass Communications billed $1.6 million in fees and commissions.
Objections were raised as to whether the sponsorship project met the government’s own rules. “Pay it,” said Tremblay, who overruled the naysayers.
NDP MP Pat Martin has invoices showing the Pan Am Games Society received $634,000. A letter dated May 1, 1999, from Games president Don MacKenzie to Blom indicates the group was expecting another $300,000 from Compass. He’s still wondering where that money went.
“I believe this sponsorship program blew way out of control,” said Pat Martin. “It appears to have turned into a cash cow. The abuse began immediately and the abuse extended it seems beyond Quebec’s borders at least to Halifax and now to Winnipeg.”

You can obtain a full copy of the article by email: Black Rod.

Ordinarily, I would scarcely be interested in an obscure, failed Liberal Party candidate from the west (where using words “failed” and “obscure” when describing Liberals place one in jeopardy of literary redundancy). Different strokes for different folks, though. Don at All Things Canadian seems to think Jim Travers take is worth reading today.

If paying party workers with taxpayer dollars worked in Quebec, then why not elsewhere? In fact, way back in 2002 The Toronto Star reported that similar tactics were allegedly used coast-to-coast.
In Atlantic Canada, a fantasy federal contract is said to have paid a provincial Liberal campaign organizer. Out West, a prospective candidate’s salary was allegedly reimbursed through inflated advertising payments.
Neither case has been tested in court or heard by Gomery, who is narrowly focused on Quebec. And it’s also true there is little incentive to break what until now has been a circle of silence protected with all the ferocity of junkyard dogs.
Will Brault’s surprisingly candid revelations finally expose all that noise as just the yapping of those with much to hide?

Unfortunately, Travers is factually incorrect.
Unlike most people who write about dogs or use them as colourful metaphors, I have actually trained a few – including, once upon a time, a personal protection dog.
Good junkyard dogs don’t bark. They don’t act ferociously. A professionally trained junkyard dog remains sleeping in the sun while you approach his compound. He snaps at a buzzing fly in response to that stick you’re running against the fence. When the wirecutters come out, he sits up, sends you a direct gaze …. and scratches an itchy ear with hind leg.
Until you’ve breached the wire and crossed that invisible boundary into the region of No Possible Escape (also know as the World Of Hurt) there will be no indication whatsoever that you’ve awakened anything more dangerous than someone’s geriatric pet.
No, Mr Travers – junkyard dogs don’t yap.
Poodles do.

MKBratten:

The Montreal firm that conducted the review (or audit if you talk to a Liberal MP) on the Quebec wing of the Liberal party’s finances, *Samson Blair Deloitte & Touche*, the same firm that has donated over $100,000 to the party, has previously employed MP Pierre Pettigrew, Minister of Foreign Affairs, as vice president.

It’s confirmed on his website.
Update: Sean just dumped a boatload of links in the comments on this. If they’re all as good as the first one…

The way things are going, Justice Gomery is going to have to start checking for Smoking Firearms Acquisition Certificates.

(Former Groupaction Marketing employee) Renaud testified that Guite often said contracts would be approved only after getting the green light from the country’s highest political office.
“He (Guite) said, ‘We’ll look at the project, present this to the (public works) minister and it has to go through the prime minister’s office’ and that’s how it worked,” Renaud said during his second day on the stand.

Another four Liberal MP’s are reported considering crossing the floor. In my opinion, I think it’s the only way honourable Liberal members can preserve their personal reputations at the moment. This is not a new scandal – the odor has been permeating this government for years. Same sex marriage opposition is also a factor – it is not supported by the majority of Canadians, polls reveal, and it decidedly less popular in rural ridings.
Related – Captain’s Quarters is as attentive as ever to developments, providing a valuable linking point between his strong US and new Canadian readership.
Worthington says this weeks testimony has the Liberals “bracing for a bomb”.

Politics Watch has an exclusive report that the Commons public accounts committee is looking for a few good men.
Unfortunately, Mr. Warren Kinsella and Ms. Terrie O’Leary will have to do.
Even more unfortunately, they may have to be subpeonaed. There are a few matters about the firm known as Earnscliffe that the committee would like to have straightened out, and they’re not answering their calls.
Update The subpeonas have been issued.

A new Eskos poll out has the Liberals slipping to 25%, with the Conservatives at 36%. We’ll be seeing a flurry of these in the next few days and weeks, with or without an election call.
Paul Martin remains undeterred! He’s taking the initiative and asking Justice Gomery to “follow the money”.

The Liberal Party will call on Mr. Justice John Gomery today to investigate whether large sums of money allegedly paid to well- connected members for government sponsorship contracts ever made it to the party coffers.

Well, I suppose that make sense in a way… during his years as Finance Minister his job was only to shovel it out.
Poll (PDF) here.

Manitoba Liberals meeting in Winnipeg this weekend are looking for ways to distance themselves from their federal colleagues.
There’s been talk of changing the party’s name …

Well, they better get moving before the best ones are all snapped up. The Alberta (fillintheblank) Party has a big head start.

MK Braaten watched Scott Brison on Question Period this morning. So did I. Unlike me, though, he actually took him up on his offer to look at the Liberal Party audits posted on their website. Here’s just a teaser;

I have analyzed the so called ‘audits’ that the firms have recently performed on the Liberals books. The Liberals hired public accounting firms PriceWaterHouseCooopers and Deloitte to conduct these engagements. As a result of analyzing these statements what I found is quite interesting. The engagements focused on the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party’s finances and also the Federal Liberals finances. Deloitte was in charge of the Quebec wing and PWC conducted the engagement on the federal Liberal party’s finances. In fact, these engagements are not audits but simply an analysis of parts of the Liberals finances that they asked the firm to analyze.
[…]
The nature of this engagement is so the Liberal party of Canada can tell Canadians that it has had its books ‘audited’ by an external auditor. The recent sponsorship scandal has been linked to the Liberal party and its finances. However, in this engagement report, Deloitte writes that the report only analyses encashed contributions from – and disbursements made to advertising and communications agencies. More specifically, this engagement is only analyzing the parts of the Liberals finances that the Liberals asked them to analyze at the discretion of the party,and nothing more. By using the accounting data provided by the Liberals, Deloitte only compared the payments made and received in the books to the amounts deposited and removed from the bank accounts that they were given access to by the Liberal party. Likewise, the report only analyzes the information of four bank accounts, at a single bank, which were provided at the discretion of the Quebec wing.

He’s been kind enough to flesh out the piece with with the donation figures to registered political parties by the Samson Belair/ Deloitte & Touche folks.
A must read, and a fabulous tip if you’re a hungry journalist.

Months ago Canadian bloggers began digging through the Elections Canada database and discovered that a numbered company was the largest contributor to the party. Jay Currie asked; “Who is 55555 Inc.? Why did it/they give the Liberal Party $2,974,341.20? What did they get in return.?”

Mike Brock produced a chart.

MK Braaten;

Previously, Chuck Guite testified that he recalled that he had a telephone conversation with Terrie O’Leary who told him that “Paul would prefer (Earnscliffe)” for advertising contracts. Earnscliffe is an advertising/consulting firm which has very close ties with Paul Martin and was a large supporter in his leadership bid. In return, Earnscliffe’s owners David Herle and John Webster, who are also the national Liberal Co-chairs, donated nearly 3 million dollars to the Liberal party through a container company #55555 Inc. In total, Earnscliffe has earned over $6 Million dollars in government contracts under Martin’s watch. The question remains is whether Martin deliberately diverted contracts toward Earnscliffe, which is operated by Liberal party members, who then diverted money through #55555 Inc and back to the Liberal party. A phantom company with no previous history turned out to be the largest contributor towards the Liberal party in 2003; this definitely seems odd. Why else would a container company, whose financial statements are not public, donate millions of dollars to the Liberals? Similarly, Groupaction was given millions of dollars in contracts and was used as a container company. Government contract money would be ‘washed’ through Groupaction before it was illegally returned to the Liberal party disguised as donations. When Martin was running for leadership, Shelia Copps dared Martin to reveal who donated to his leadership campaign. Mr. Martin responded that the money was in a ‘blind trust’ and he did not know who contributed. Why the secrecy?

Discussion of this numbered company has arisen previously – without doing a lot of surfing around, it seems to me that the explanation given was that it represented the surplus from Paul Martin’s leadership campaign.
Now, here’s a question I can’t answer – perhaps readers can. What are the reporting procedures on donations to party leadership campaigns? Someone have Sheila Copps’ phone number?

Monte Solbert says Scott Brison is showing off his Paul Martin cufflinks.
He should have asked to see his Jean Chretien bracelets.