The Questions Gomery Didn't Answer

During the days when the Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico, the country would undergo a remarkable ritual every six years.

A new president would take power in the one-party state. He would immediately order an investigation into his predecessor's abuses of power -- and would discover to his horror that his former boss had been a thorough crook!

Alas, by the time the truth was exposed, the former president had already left the country with his billions. Oh, well. But at least the new leader would solemnly pledge to clean up Mexican politics so that the abuses of the past would never recur .... And then six years later, the ritual would be re-enacted all over again.

Canadians are now witnessing a similar farce.

Prime Minister Paul Martin is now claiming to have been exonerated by the Gomery inquiry. He truly, truly regrets all his predecessor's wrongdoing and promises to take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again.

But can we please introduce a little reality into this performance?

Within hours of the release of the report, Paul Martin promised that the Liberal party would repay the money it should never have received, a sum Mr. Martin estimated at $1.14-million. Mr. Martin didn't get around to mentioning when the money would be repaid -- or on what terms. If a taxpayer makes a mistake on his tax form, he or she must pay interest and penalties. Will the Liberal party have to do that? Or will the whole sponsorship program turn into an interest-free campaign loan to be repaid in easy instalments over the next decade or so?

Sponsorship funds helped pay for the Liberal campaign in 2000. Had the Liberals been forced to reimburse taxpayers immediately, they would have faced real problems paying for their campaign in 2004. Instead, Mr. Martin played for time -- and kept the benefit of the wrongfully acquired campaign funds for one additional election cycle.

Who knows what Mr. Martin would have done next if he had won the majority he expected? All Canadians do know is this: Paul Martin got himself elected prime minister in large part thanks to money his party improperly took from the Canadian taxpayer. And unless that money is repaid before spring 2006, the Liberals will have the use of hundreds of thousands of illegal dollars for a third election in a row. Nor do Canadians yet truly know how much the Liberals got in this way. $1.14-million is merely the Liberals' own estimate of the party's take.

Mr. Martin has referred the matter to the RCMP, which is welcome. But will the RCMP be allowed to investigate the matter to the bottom? Will the government bring civil and criminal actions to recover taxpayer dollars in full from the Liberal party? Over the past 15 years, Canadians have seen too many instances in which federal law-enforcement authorities lost their curiosity as they approached nearer and nearer the highest levels of government. What assurances can Mr. Martin give that this time, the police will do the job they never quite finished in past Liberal corruption scandals?

And the answer is: none worth believing.

Look at the way the Gomery inquiry was set up. Justice John Gomery was given a mandate to investigate the misuse of sponsorship funds -- and only such funds. Allegations of abuse in, say, polling contracts, were not included in the scope of the inquiry. And yet there have been allegations of contracting abuses, and on a wide scale. These allegations centre not on Jean Chretien's Prime Minister's Office, but on Paul Martin's Ministry of Finance.

Could such allegations possibly be true? Could it possibly be that those around the "exonerated" Paul Martin were favouring Mr. Martin's friends and supporters in polling contracts? For the moment, that question seems fated to remain one of Ottawa's unsolved mysteries -- or should I say, one of Ottawa's uninvestigated mysteries?

Under the new rules of the Ottawa game, the police and the media have access to information that might embarrass or disgrace Jean Chretien. Information that might in any way inconvenience Mr. Martin remains, however, as scarce as ever.

One-party states are corrupt states, and it was never realistic to imagine that Canada would be an exception to the rule. If Canadians want clean government, they will have to elect a new government. They will need a new Minister of Justice and a new Solicitor-General who will tell the RCMP to follow the trail wherever it leads -- with no special protections, no doors locked, no company or organization marked off as beyond the jurisdiction of the police.

And if not? What if Canadians shrug and re-elect the Liberals one more time? If they succeed in getting away with all this, there would then be only one logical conclusion for the Liberals to draw: They were fools to take so little.