Reporting Gomery

For a very comprehensive coverage of the whole Federal sponsorship scandal, try CBC News. They have been compiling reports for the duration of the drama.

Commentators say former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his associates will take the worst beating in the release of the first Gomery report Tuesday morning.
The news to watch for includes:

* Prime Minister Paul Martin has forwarded the Gomery Report to the RCMP.

* According to his lawyer, Chretien may ask court to review report.

Martin is right to refer the report straight to the RCMP for further ‘police’ investigation. The only question is, why have they been so reluctant to get involved with this scandal from the outset?

Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, after a report on three Groupaction contracts in 2002, launched a full investigation of her own and asked the RCMP to probe the matter. At that time the RCMP raided Groupaction's Montreal office, removing files and documents.

CBC, Globe and Mail and other Canadian media have been publishing sordid details since at least 1999.

Former Groupaction vice-president Alain Richard says he raised concerns about irregularities at the firm. Richard claims he alerted RCMP years ago that Groupaction was creating invoices that claimed he worked hundreds of hours on specific government contracts.

That the RCMP were recipients of some of the Sponsorship funds, around $1.3 million in 2001, should not be sufficient cause to close their eyes to proper investigations. If that is the case the country really has something to be concerned about.
However, with the Prime Minister making this latest request for action so public, we might see some real action at last from that quarter.

That Jean Chretien should be contemplating leagal action really puts the icing on the cake. His lawyers are suggesting that there is no documentary evidence to implicate the Prime Ministers Office.
The cover up and lie, after the fact, is the norm for political scandal. That is generally the rap, in lieu of the real crime.
Here we have a case where documentation of the movement of large amounts of government money simply does not exist. All the harder to prove wrongdoing!
The lack of a paper trail is a corrupt practice and should constitute a crime in its own right.
In the end it hardly matters. Chretien will be hard pressed to vindicate himself, evidence or no. That this sordid affair even took place on his watch does the former PM no credit. That he appointed cabinet ministers of dubious background, and despite advise of their unsuitability makes matters worse for him.
This is ‘crony capitalism’, to use the Americanism, at its worst. I would not be on my own in suspecting that Chretien has been sheltered during the enquiry process. There has been plenty of incentive from a number of quarters to keep the fallout limited.
He should be careful now not to open a ‘Pandora’s box’ for himself. A court action would be, at best, an exercise in semantics and legalisms which will not sell to a cynical public. At worst, Chretien could find himself facing real charges, not just the finger slapping of the Gomery Report.