PUBLICATION WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
DATE : SUN MAR.07,2004
PAGE : B4
CLASS : Special Section 6
EDITION :
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Good Men Do Nothing
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GORDON GIBSON
How could it all have happened in Ottawa? I mean not just the sponsorshp scandals, but the rest of it - the billion-dollar boondoggle in HRDC, the billion-dollar gun registry fiasco, the flighty Governor General, bilingual policies in the civil service effectivelly barring westerners from the goverance of our own counry, the CRTC telling us wht we can and can't watch on television, a rusted-out military, and disgusting patronage appointments.
And this takes no account of the slimy things things certainly yet to be found, a rocks are rolled ovr in high places in the current investigations. In my own province of B.C., the police in following a simple drug investigation turned up a political scandal apparently involving breach of the public trust by political aides. The lesson is this: When you put any powerful orgaznization - in this case the Chretien
government and particularly the PMO -under a microscope, many more bad things will emerge.
As an example, I spent half an hour on the telephone last week talking with a man deeply knowledgeable about Prince Edward Island politics. The stories he told me about the diversion of federal funds to personal and wasteful ends, all directed by a small coterie of federal and provincial Liberals (including members of the PMO), were hair-curling. I referred them to an investigative reporter. I hope they weren't true. I suspect they are.
What most of these things have in common is their relationship to "slush funds" -- big pots of discretionary money set up to do "good things". The "good things" include national unity, regional development, jobs for high unemployment areas, alleviation of aboriginal problems -- good things, indeed, but too often the excuse for corrupt practices. The "good" is supposed to somehow justify the diversion of funds to friends, relatives and political supporters. These little details seldom surface.
But still, the question: How could this have happened? The answer lies in an old proverb: "For evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do nothing." That is the key.
Who are these "good men" who have done nothing? They begin with the high and mighty, such as Ran Quail, deputy minister to public works boss Alfonso Gagliano while the sponsorship scandals were unfolding. We know already from his testimony that Mr. Quail adopted selective blindness as the scandal money flowed between the minister and bureaucrat Chuck Guite (now unreachable, being in a warm spot for a holiday, we are told), somehow never passing through the deputy's office.
The "good men" also include those bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office (the prime minister's "department", in effect) who attended a meeting with PMO officials Goldenberg and Ducros in the fall of 2000 to "spin" a most embarrassing audit of the sponsorship program and sanitize it during the inconvenience of an election campaign then underway.
Should members of the then-cabinet be included? Prime Minister Paul Martin himself has said that cabinet must bear some collective responsibility, and he is right. And that should extend to all of the other scandals cited at the head of this column. But how much responsibility? Who knew, what did they know, and when?
Conservative leadership contender Belinda Stronach had a good line on this last week. Mr. Martin, she said, was trying to act like he was merely a stowaway on the Good Ship Chretien, when he was really First Mate. It is a fine epigram, but little more than that. Insiders know that Ottawa doesn't work that way.
Ministers, even senior ministers, are relative nobodies and have been since the days of Pierre Trudeau. (An exception was made in those times for the Celtic fox from Cape Breton, Allan MacEachan.) I will never forget the day that Mr. Trudeau came back after a visit with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, from whom he had 'found religion' on the matter of government expenditures. Mr. Trudeau immediately booked airtime and announced a new economic program for the country -- and that's how his finance minister found out about it.
Who was that finance minister? Jean Chretien. But, for him, it was water off a duck's back. He understood the rules. I once asked him why he had done something or other that seemed a bit foolish to me, at the obvious behest of Mr. Trudeau. The Chretien response was simple: "When the boss says "jump', I say 'ow 'igh?" (Phonetic rendition supplied.)
Once prime minister himself, control-freak Chretien tightened things even more. Ministers, again including the mightiest, were imprisoned in their own little departmental silos. They were surrounded: below, by a deputy minister appointed by the PM; horizontally, by a personal staff recommended by the PMO (and fired by the PMO as well, in a case of which I have direct knowledge); and above, by the omnipresent PMO/PCO.
Cabinet meetings became focus groups. Ministers were not invited to ask nosy questions, and they didn't. They just waited for the boss to say, "jump". (You may recall the prime minister doing to his environment minister on Kyoto what Trudeau had done to Chretien himself, post-Schmidt.)
In short, ministers, including even the mighty Paul Martin, were not about to find out about the sponsorship scandals in advance of the general public. This of course went double for lowly MPs. Estimable Winnipegger Reg Alcock was back then agitating for a greater role for MPs, but he had to await the departure of Mr. Chretien to see that day.
However, all of this said, if the mighty were neutered, if they were out of the loop, if they were wilfully blind like Mr. Quail, there were still others who knew. These were the much smaller fish, including former Olympian Myriam Bedard. (She has now come forward, but where was she two years ago when she first knew of the wrongdoing?) A few secretaries and clerks would have known what was going on. The routine business of taking and delivering phone messages (and noting their content) has to be done by somebody, and those somebodies knew some things.
In short, you can be pretty sure that just about nothing importantly bad happens in the federal government but that some decent person knows about it. And they usually keep quiet.
No one blew the whistle here either. Why not? This is a serious question for Quebec Superior Court judge John Gomery, tasked with the inquiry about to begin. His recommendations will supplement the essential whistleblower protection legislation that Mr. Martin has already promised and should deliver before any election call.
But "whistleblowers" can't stop egregious policy errors, like the gun-registry program or the HRDC boondoggles. As far as we know, there was no graft in the gun registry -- just monumental waste. (HRDC may yet prove another story.) Stopping that kind of thing requires policy watchdogs, and that is one of the reasons we elect MPs.
Alas, MPs of the government party have traditionally worked for the government, not for we who elect them. They have protected their party interest, not the public interest.
That is the real answer to the opening question, "How could it have happened?" Parliament hasn't done its job. And that has to change.
DATE : SUN MAR.07,2004
PAGE : B4
CLASS : Special Section 6
EDITION :
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Good Men Do Nothing
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GORDON GIBSON
How could it all have happened in Ottawa? I mean not just the sponsorshp scandals, but the rest of it - the billion-dollar boondoggle in HRDC, the billion-dollar gun registry fiasco, the flighty Governor General, bilingual policies in the civil service effectivelly barring westerners from the goverance of our own counry, the CRTC telling us wht we can and can't watch on television, a rusted-out military, and disgusting patronage appointments.
And this takes no account of the slimy things things certainly yet to be found, a rocks are rolled ovr in high places in the current investigations. In my own province of B.C., the police in following a simple drug investigation turned up a political scandal apparently involving breach of the public trust by political aides. The lesson is this: When you put any powerful orgaznization - in this case the Chretien
government and particularly the PMO -under a microscope, many more bad things will emerge.
As an example, I spent half an hour on the telephone last week talking with a man deeply knowledgeable about Prince Edward Island politics. The stories he told me about the diversion of federal funds to personal and wasteful ends, all directed by a small coterie of federal and provincial Liberals (including members of the PMO), were hair-curling. I referred them to an investigative reporter. I hope they weren't true. I suspect they are.
What most of these things have in common is their relationship to "slush funds" -- big pots of discretionary money set up to do "good things". The "good things" include national unity, regional development, jobs for high unemployment areas, alleviation of aboriginal problems -- good things, indeed, but too often the excuse for corrupt practices. The "good" is supposed to somehow justify the diversion of funds to friends, relatives and political supporters. These little details seldom surface.
But still, the question: How could this have happened? The answer lies in an old proverb: "For evil to triumph, it is enough that good men do nothing." That is the key.
Who are these "good men" who have done nothing? They begin with the high and mighty, such as Ran Quail, deputy minister to public works boss Alfonso Gagliano while the sponsorship scandals were unfolding. We know already from his testimony that Mr. Quail adopted selective blindness as the scandal money flowed between the minister and bureaucrat Chuck Guite (now unreachable, being in a warm spot for a holiday, we are told), somehow never passing through the deputy's office.
The "good men" also include those bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office (the prime minister's "department", in effect) who attended a meeting with PMO officials Goldenberg and Ducros in the fall of 2000 to "spin" a most embarrassing audit of the sponsorship program and sanitize it during the inconvenience of an election campaign then underway.
Should members of the then-cabinet be included? Prime Minister Paul Martin himself has said that cabinet must bear some collective responsibility, and he is right. And that should extend to all of the other scandals cited at the head of this column. But how much responsibility? Who knew, what did they know, and when?
Conservative leadership contender Belinda Stronach had a good line on this last week. Mr. Martin, she said, was trying to act like he was merely a stowaway on the Good Ship Chretien, when he was really First Mate. It is a fine epigram, but little more than that. Insiders know that Ottawa doesn't work that way.
Ministers, even senior ministers, are relative nobodies and have been since the days of Pierre Trudeau. (An exception was made in those times for the Celtic fox from Cape Breton, Allan MacEachan.) I will never forget the day that Mr. Trudeau came back after a visit with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, from whom he had 'found religion' on the matter of government expenditures. Mr. Trudeau immediately booked airtime and announced a new economic program for the country -- and that's how his finance minister found out about it.
Who was that finance minister? Jean Chretien. But, for him, it was water off a duck's back. He understood the rules. I once asked him why he had done something or other that seemed a bit foolish to me, at the obvious behest of Mr. Trudeau. The Chretien response was simple: "When the boss says "jump', I say 'ow 'igh?" (Phonetic rendition supplied.)
Once prime minister himself, control-freak Chretien tightened things even more. Ministers, again including the mightiest, were imprisoned in their own little departmental silos. They were surrounded: below, by a deputy minister appointed by the PM; horizontally, by a personal staff recommended by the PMO (and fired by the PMO as well, in a case of which I have direct knowledge); and above, by the omnipresent PMO/PCO.
Cabinet meetings became focus groups. Ministers were not invited to ask nosy questions, and they didn't. They just waited for the boss to say, "jump". (You may recall the prime minister doing to his environment minister on Kyoto what Trudeau had done to Chretien himself, post-Schmidt.)
In short, ministers, including even the mighty Paul Martin, were not about to find out about the sponsorship scandals in advance of the general public. This of course went double for lowly MPs. Estimable Winnipegger Reg Alcock was back then agitating for a greater role for MPs, but he had to await the departure of Mr. Chretien to see that day.
However, all of this said, if the mighty were neutered, if they were out of the loop, if they were wilfully blind like Mr. Quail, there were still others who knew. These were the much smaller fish, including former Olympian Myriam Bedard. (She has now come forward, but where was she two years ago when she first knew of the wrongdoing?) A few secretaries and clerks would have known what was going on. The routine business of taking and delivering phone messages (and noting their content) has to be done by somebody, and those somebodies knew some things.
In short, you can be pretty sure that just about nothing importantly bad happens in the federal government but that some decent person knows about it. And they usually keep quiet.
No one blew the whistle here either. Why not? This is a serious question for Quebec Superior Court judge John Gomery, tasked with the inquiry about to begin. His recommendations will supplement the essential whistleblower protection legislation that Mr. Martin has already promised and should deliver before any election call.
But "whistleblowers" can't stop egregious policy errors, like the gun-registry program or the HRDC boondoggles. As far as we know, there was no graft in the gun registry -- just monumental waste. (HRDC may yet prove another story.) Stopping that kind of thing requires policy watchdogs, and that is one of the reasons we elect MPs.
Alas, MPs of the government party have traditionally worked for the government, not for we who elect them. They have protected their party interest, not the public interest.
That is the real answer to the opening question, "How could it have happened?" Parliament hasn't done its job. And that has to change.
