Coming soon to Captain’s Quarters, transcripts of an interview with a Gomery witness who looks to be ready to go down swinging.

However, as he made plain during our interview, he sees the Gomery Inquiry as a red herring — a machination that allows Prime Minister Paul Martin to deflect attention from his own peccadilloes. According to Beryl, the structure of the Gomery Inquiry makes it almost impossible for any evidence given to it to be used to prosecute criminal or civil cases afterwards. Beryl speaks about Martin’s scandals in some detail during our interview, as well as his connections to the Power Corporation, Total Group, the Desmarais family, and Saddam Hussein. He told me that the Canadian media has focused on Gomery instead of Martin’s much more extensive (and expensive) financial manipulations simply because Gomery stories write themselves, and the media doesn’t have to lift a finger to get the updates.
If you expect to get inside scoop on Adscam corruption, you won’t find it in this interview. Beryl didn’t do any work for the Sponsorship Program, and as his upcoming testimony will show, he burnt his bridges at the Liberal Party well before Jean Brault alleges that Wajsmann was present at a cash drop (which reporters mistakenly attributes as an accusation that he took a payoff, which isn’t what Brault said at all, according to Beryl). He does give an insider’s look at some of the players involved in the scandal, though, including Martin, Alfonse Gagliano, and Daniel Dezainde, who he called a “racist f**k”. He also gives his own unique analysis of Canadian politics and talks about his plans for the future.

Wajsmann first came to the attention of Captain’s Quarters when he left a comment at the site, that Morrissey then extracted and featured as a post.
update – a commentor mentioned this essay by Mr. Wajsman. This is a man who has significant observations about the ��r�seau Lib�ral ��

Via reader email – Canada Free Press has “never-seen-before film footage taking you back to January 3, 2005 when Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and his entourage made an official visit to tsunami-ravaged Sir Lanka.”

Included in the Jan. 3 entourage were Martin’s wife, Sheila, PMO staff, Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s fourth party, the New Democrat Party, RCMP, and a handful of Canadian journalists, including the CBC.
The film footage was shot by award-winning Canadian documentary journalist, Garth Pritchard, who was on the scene prior to Martin’s visit at the invitation of Canada’s mercy mission DART team.
You will hear how an RCMP officer tried to relieve Pritchard of his camera. Pritchard’s voice can easily be picked up when he tells the officer that, “This is not Canada, this is Sri Lanka.”
[…]
See for yourself how the film footage shows the padre being pushed aside and how overzealous members of the Martin entourage physically knock a Sri Lankan mourner to the ground – without apology.
Ostensibly, the Prime Minister’s official visit to tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka was about Canadian compassion.
See and hear for yourself how he shills the purified water of Zenon Environmental Inc., an Oakville-based company of which his lifetime mentor Maurice Strong is a board member.
See and hear some of the film highlights, including Padre Hardwick trying to do the job he was asked to do: namely honouring the dead. Padre Hardwick calls for a Moment of Silence. Fifteen seconds into the Moment of Silence, Prime Minister Martin ends it, saying, “Let’s go.”

I can’t play this on my computer – so haven’t yet watched it. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Video is here. It’s a 25 meg file, so you’ll need hispeed.

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.

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