Politics Watch is reporting on the Corbeil testimony, and the Paul Martin camp makes another appearance.

The former director of the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party testified at the Gomery inquiry Monday that he paid nine party staff members and officials $50,000 in cash stuffed in envelopes shortly before the 2000 federal election.
[…]
Also shortly before the election, Corbeil testified that he made two additional trips to Brault’s office where he picked up two separate large yellow postal envelopes containing $35,000 and $15,000 in $100 bills.�
On both visits, Corbeil said he counted the cash before leaving Brault’s office.� He later returned back to the Liberal Party headquarters.�
“I came to my office and I divided it up,” he testified.�
Corbeil said he put the cash in nine separate envelopes for various party workers.
At that point in his testimony, Corbeil grabbed a piece of paper with the names of those he handed envelopes to and hesitated.�
Justice John Gomery asked Corbeil to provide the names of the recipients.�
“Commissioner, you know I lost my job,” Corbeil said to Gomery.
“Mr. Corbeil, you’re not the only one,” Gomery said. “You’re one of a group of people who have dealt with the very negative consequences because of having to tell the truth and we are making a request of you.”
Corbeil then testified that he gave Daniel Dezainde, who was an official in the office of then prime minister Jean Chretien, two envelopes – one with $3,000 for Dezainde and another with $2,000 for a woman who was a friend of Dezainde.�
He also said he gave Richard Mimeau, a known supporter of Paul Martin, an envelope containing $6,000 to reimburse him for travel expenses.�

Corbeil is naming names. Among them is Liberal MP Denis Coderre – and it’s not the first time.

Brault said that Gagliano crony Joe Morselli told him he could “solve potential problems” and “talk to Denis” – meaning Liberal cabinet minister Denis Coderre, who also served under Martin.”

I presume the Prime MInister will be before the press by sundown, to turf Coderre from the party to uphold that “moral authority to govern” he informed us of a few weeks ago.
update – Ed Morrissey has relevant exerpts from a Globe and Mail report.

Paul Martin is in bed with the Separatists.

Well, congratulations to Ralph Goodale. In his few short months as finance minister, the innovation he has brought to the fiscal management of the Canadian treasury signal that, like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Federal Budget is a “living document”.
After breaking new ground with the introduction of the Buzz Hargrove Paper Napkin Motel Room Amending Process, and giving the green light for nearly 6 billion in seed money for the new Department of Buying Off Ontario*, Ralph Goodale has created, with the approval of his Prime Minister, the “Government Of Canada Perpetual Liberal Re-Election Slush Fund.
Terence Corcoran in the National Post, explains;

Never Before has a Canadian government given itself such freewheeling fiscal elbow room. Certainly Don Drummond, former finance official and now chief economist at TD Financial, has never seen anything like it — a $4.5-billion slush fund that government can dip into at will. “For years government has wanted an instrument that would allow it to allocate spending without having to say what it’s for. This act will do it.”
Readers can check out this blank-cheque spending legislation below. Here’s how it works. Sometime in August, 2007, the federal government will check the final numbers from fiscal year 2005-6. If there’s more than a $2-billion surplus, that extra money above $2-billion can be spent. For example, if the surplus is $5-billion, the first $2-billion will be used to pay down debt, but the remaining $3-billion must be spent on the grab bag of unspecified areas. Same thing the following year.
As Don Drummond put it yesterday, this is the first time Ottawa has been able to “define the money before it defines the program.” The Layton list, sprawling over a dozen broad issues — environment, housing, transit, training programs, foreign aid, energy, education, aboriginal, tuition fees — is an open field. Not only are there no programs, Ottawa doesn’t even have a jurisdictional outlet for tuition fees, for example. (Oddly missing from the list is a $100-million union pension fund bailout, mentioned in earlier news leaks.)
Just to be doubly safe that the government’s ability to spend freely without parliamentary approval will be protected in future, Mr. Goodale threw in a clause giving the Cabinet power to “specify the particular purposes for which payments referred to in subsection (1) may be made and the amounts of those payments for the relevant fiscal year.”
In a brief news release, Mr. Goodale called all this “new investments” that build on the “fiscally responsible manner” Ottawa is spending money. Here’s how it works: Ottawa spends what it gets, when and how it wants, without parliamentary approval.

Librano Ralphie just taken the “lessons learned” through the experience gained in Sponsorship, and applied it to the federal budget. Simple? Simple.
Bruce Gottfred has more.

Beryl Wajsmann left a lengthy comment at Captain Ed’s and he’s republished it. Wajsmann is scheduled to appear before Gomery and is president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal. It provides some insight into the relationship between the federal and Quebec wings of the party, and divisions within.

I specifically want to share some comments with you on Michel Beliveau’s testimony Friday at the Gomery Commission about a certain PMO meeting that occurred in 2001, and give you a heads-up on some of my upcoming testimony. Some news stories have reported that the meeting concerned “hidden” fundraising. That is not what Beliveau said. He testified that the meeting was held because the new LPC (Q) director-general Daniel Dezainde complained that I was not respecting his authority and freezing him out. The chain of command if you like. This is all in the record.
Just to set the matter straight, this was an incident I have spoken about many times. It is not new, and I addressed it in a Le Devoir article. But some reports still got the facts wrong.
Dezainde�s claims were utter nonsense. I briefed him regularly on all the work of our cultural communities� sectoral financing project. He simply wanted it shut down. Part of the reason was due to the fact that Gagliano had opposed his nomination as director-general in Quebec and Dezainde was doing everything to take complete control of the LPC (Q) headquarters.
It is always frustrating having to sit on evidence and wait to testify. I’ve been waiting to tell this story for four years. We knew about the PMO meeting in 2001. Percy Downe was new to his job as Chief of Staff to Chr�tien. Dezainde had just come in. The whole power structure had changed in two months and no one in the PMO or the party had the basic decency to call me, Benoit Corbeil or Joe Morselli to hear what we had to say. It was a set up. When I demanded from Gagliano that he set up a meeting for me with Chr�tien – that my 25 years of public involvement warranted that minimum courtesy – he refused and asked me to just keep working and be patient and let him handle Dezainde. I told him then his fecklessness would be his undoing. I still cannot forgive him that lack of courage.

Read the rest.

A couple of days ago Ezra Levant kindly emailed me a copy of some of the published reaction to the “Libranos contraversy”. It’s relatively long, so I’ve put it in the extended entry for those of you like me, who don’t subscribe to half the newspapers in the country.

Continue reading →

Paul Martin signaled Thursday that Canadians will pay whatever price necessary to keep his corrupt Liberal government in power. With pre-election bribery of the cities and other useful fools at over $8 billion and rising, Martin is now promising to send the Canadian Armed Forces into harms way to corral David Kilgour’s vote. CBC:

The head of Canada’s military returned recently from meeting with leaders of the African Union peacekeeping force that Canadian units would support.
“This is a complex and relatively dangerous environment,” Gen. Rick Hillier told CBC News. Hillier said he has more than 30 officers working on the project but was mum on the specifics until he presents several options this week to Defence Minister Bill Graham. The minister wants military intervention to be only one part of an overall plan for the northeastern African country.
“We cannot invade Sudan. It requires United Nations action … it requires political as well as military and aid matters,” Graham told CBC.

“We cannot invade Sudan”.
I’ll allow the Monty Pythonesque absurdity of that disclaimer sink in for a moment…

The two-year-old Darfur conflict, stemming from the fallout of a peace deal to end the country’s decades-old civil war, has driven about two million people from their villages to live in camps and killed 300,000 others.

“Stemming from the fallout of a peace deal”. Well, that’s putting a shine on things. Let’s take a closer look at Sudan, courtesy of the BBC; Sudanese demand death for editor:

Angry crowds have demanded the death penalty for a Sudanese newspaper editor over an article allegedly questioning the parentage of the Prophet Muhammad. Hundreds of people waving banners and chanting “God is great” protested outside a court as Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed was charged over the article.
[…]
Ali Shumi, the head of Sudan’s Press Council, said the article insulted the Prophet Muhammad. He denied the charges were an assault on press freedom.
“Freedom of the press stops when it comes to respect for religions. Not just for Islam – if you said the same things about Jesus there would be the same punishment,” he said.

Renouncing Islam in the Sudan carries the death penalty. I don’t know what the consequences are for painting over a concrete stain bearing the image of the Virgin Mary .

Khartoum has been governed by strict Islamic Sharia law since 1983 – but our correspondent says that in recent years courts have shown a degree of flexibility in their interpretations of Islamic law.
The introduction of Sharia exacerbated a rebellion that had begun in the south earlier that year. The war officially ended with a peace agreement in December.

Martin won’t allow Canadian troops into Iraq to support a post-war fledgling democracy, but he’ll send them into Sudan to prop up a post-democratic dictatorship in Canada.
So, get out your scorecards. Now that Buzz Hargrove is Finance Motel Minister, and Kilgour is in charge of Foreign Affairs, Chuck Cadman should step up and take aim at the Defense portfolio.
If the independant MP from British Columbia is a clever scamp, he’ll announce to waiting reporters that he can support the Paul Martin Liberals – if he reverses the government’s position on Canadian participation in Ballistic Missile Defense.

Benoit Corbeil is the next batter up. What he is expected to testify to may explain the desperation of the Libranos to prevent an immediate election call.
Via Greg Staples