The Four Stages Of Adscam

Don't expect the Liberals to go quietly. You don't become the longest-ruling political party in the world by letting a little public disgust discourage you. While Justice John Gomery searches out the sponsorship scandal, the Liberals' best brains are searching for ways to get away with it.

But how? Thus far they have tried four strategies, each of them seemingly borrowed from the handbook of a defense lawyer for the Soprano family.

1. They're out to get us. Almost as soon as Judge Gomery began exposing damaging facts, former prime minister Jean Chretien and his circle denounced the inquiry as biased, wasteful, vindictive and unfair. This "poor little us" approach was copied from the Clinton campaign against Ken Starr. But Clinton had an advantage that the Liberals lack: He persuaded the U.S. public that his misdeeds did not belong in court at all. Nobody is going to believe that the theft of public money is not a public concern.

2. It's the price of doing business. This is the line repeated by poor, trapped Scott Brison, the renegade Conservative whose sensitive conscience forced him out of his old party and into Alfonso Gagliano's old job. In the House of Commons last Tuesday, Brison suggested that a couple of hundred million dollars of corruption was a price well worth paying for the inestimable benefit of Liberal rule--and that anyone who thought otherwise was seeking to "destroy Canada."

Apparently realizing that this line of argument sounded dangerously like something Marie Antoinette might have said to the peasantry, Brison amended himself this weekend: It's now OK to complain about corruption, up to a point--just so long as you remember that the sponsorship was noble in intent and only spoiled by a few unfortunate errors in execution.

Unfortunately, it seems increasingly obvious that corruption was precisely the intent of the program. On its own, the sponsorship program was an incredibly dumb idea. How could anybody ever have believed that it would "save Canada" to rent a luxury box at Ottawa's Corel Centre for the private use of top Liberals? Or to produce unspecified "concepts" for Canada Post? Or to pay for the cigars of senior Liberal officials? Misappropriation of funds was not an abuse of the program. Misappropriation of funds was the point of the program.

3. Which brings us to the next strategy: Make Canadians an offer they can't refuse. Liberals are now musing about hurrying forward on a great pile of wonderful new Liberal initiatives, from Kyoto to Paul Martin's oft-promised "cities agenda." Prodded by these exciting ideas, the public would wake up and realize the terrible injury it would suffer if the Liberals ever lost power.

If Strategy #1 is borrowed from Bill Clinton, Strategy #3 is copied from Richard Nixon. In February, 1973, the Watergate-wracked U.S. president substituted for the customary State of the Union address a series of eight separate messages, bulging with big new ideas. One of them even offered a Nixon version of a "cities agenda." (Among other things, it proposed a Cabinet-level Department of Community Development.) The strategy didn't work then and is even less likely to work now, for this reason: Martin's big new ideas are timid, tiresome and unattractive.

4. More promising is the last strategy: That was a different mob. Paul Martin has grimly tried to convince Canadians that the sponsorship scandal was a Chretien scandal, not a Liberal scandal. He and his associates knew nothing.

In one sense, this claim may well be literally true. Louisiana's famously corrupt Depression-era strongman Huey Long used to quip: "Never write what you can say, never say what you can nod, never nod what you can wink, and never wink what the other fellow knows already." It's not hard to imagine that Paul Martin took considerable care never to be told how Chretien was using the multi-million-dollar "national unity" slush fund that Martin was providing for him year after year after year.

Yet little as Martin and Chretien may personally like each other, the undeniable fact is that as politicians, they were in business together. The party that Martin runs is the same party that Chretien ran before him. Asking Canadians to believe otherwise is asking them to believe the unbelievable.

So what else might the Liberals do? They could imitate the master, Chretien himself. Chretien saved himself from scandal after scandal by a ruthless policy of delay, denial, intimidation and confusion--counting on the police and the courts to back down and on the public to get bored. Unfortunately for the Liberals, this plan does not work nearly so well in a minority parliament as it does with a majority.

Or--and this is advice they will consider only when their case becomes utterly desperate--they might consider an entirely new approach: honesty. Tell the truth, accept the inevitable punishment at the next election, go into opposition, expel the crooks from their ranks, renew their leadership and return to fight another day.

No fun for the Liberals, of course. But if the Liberals ever could brace themselves to confess the full truth, the now-sullied party could take comfort that at least one time, its talk of "saving Canada" had not been pure flim-flam.