The Martin government blamed 14 federal employees for the entire sponsorship scandal yesterday as the Opposition countered that it was the work of a web of well-organized Liberal "bandits."
Prime Minister Paul Martin took vigorous and government-wide actions to contain Tuesday's scathing report from the Auditor-General, but seemed to play down the extent of the problem yesterday, insisting that it was the work of a "very small group" of 14 people that could not have been caught earlier.
"When they broke those laws and those rules, they did not come to cabinet and ask to break those rules. What they did was engage in a very sophisticated way of camouflaging what they were doing. As a result of that, the government did not know," Mr. Martin said.
The Opposition kept piling on the attacks yesterday in the aftermath of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's report that Public Works Canada had paid $100-million to a handful of advertising firms that resulted in little or no value to Canadians. The firms received millions of dollars for contracts in which there is no proof that they performed any work, in which they appeared to have submitted fake invoices, and in which they performed such simple tasks as transferring funds between two federal agencies.
The Conservative Party said the newly called public inquiry will have to look into allegations that these public funds were deliberately sent to selected advertising firms, which then kicked the money back to the Liberal Party of Canada.
"The Auditor-General said that this goes much higher than she could investigate," Conservative Leader Grant Hill said during Question Period. "Will the public inquiry be able to go right into the Liberal Party and look at those individuals, those bandits, who stole from Canadian taxpayers?"
Dr. Hill also said former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano, who was fired on Tuesday as ambassador to Denmark, is being used as a scapegoat by the party to duck widespread responsibility.
"This, frankly, was a money-laundering scheme for the Canadian taxpayer. It was by Liberals for Liberals. The Liberal Party of Canada, quite frankly, is implicated in this right up to their eyeballs."
Mr. Martin's government has given Mr. Gagliano three weeks to officially clear out of his post in Copenhagen.
Mr. Gagliano refused to shed any new light on his role. "This is a Canadian matter," he told reporters in Copenhagen yesterday. "This is an ordeal that has been dogging me for over two years now. I'll have a chance to go back home and answer those questions."
Mr. Martin rejected the opposition attacks concerning widespread Liberal involvement, though he also claimed two days ago that he did not know whether money had flowed back to the Liberal Party.
"Mr. Speaker, there is no need for the Leader of the Opposition to make those kind of allegations, allegations of a nature which are vicious in the extreme," Mr. Martin said in a second straight rowdy day in the House of Commons.
Liberal MPs and ministers used every occasion to state that the problems were to be blamed on a small group at Public Works who managed the sponsorship program.
"I think we have to keep things in perspective. We are talking about a group within the Department of Public Works, a branch that had 12 to 15 employees, whereas the whole department has some 14,000 employees," Treasury Board President Reg Alcock said.
Civil servants included in the group are from various levels of the communications branch of Public Works and include one high- ranking individual.
According to the Auditor-General's report, however, that number is misleading because it does not include a number of other government officials involved in the sponsorship program, such as Mr. Gagliano, a handful of political officials in his office who also worked on sponsorship files, and senior officials at five Crown corporations.
Even as the Martin government focuses on the day-to-day combat in the Commons, its longer-term strategy is also becoming clear: to do everything it can to differentiate itself from the former Chrétien government in terms of its Quebec operations and strategy.
In the Commons, Mr. Martin said that the sponsorship program was inexcusable even if the purported objective -- to improve the standing of federalist forces in Quebec -- had been laudable. "Let us understand that the end never justifies the means," he said. This was, in fact, a very different message than that given by Mr. Chrétien in the early days of the scandal, when he questioned whether the disappearance of a few million dollars warranted much attention at a time when Ottawa was fighting to keep Quebec within Canada.
"National unity in this country is going to be protected by thousands of Canadians who stand up for their country," Mr. Martin said yesterday. "It will not be protected by people who violate the laws of this land."
