My fear, and it is sufficiently rank that you may actually be able to smell it wafting off the paper in your hands, is this.
For all the outrage there would seem to be in the land at the federal Liberals now, my hunch is that it will not last, and that once again, I will get the government that many of you deserve.
I expect the fury will endure through to the next election — whenever Prime Minister Paul Martin calls it — only in Alberta, where sensibilities are so different, even separate, from those elsewhere that it is that province, and not Quebec, which ought to be the reference point in discussions about "the rest of Canada," or ROC.
In Toronto, in Ottawa, in the central vote-heavy part of the nation, that sound you hear is the hiss of dissipating anger.
I first heard it myself on Saturday night, or less than a week after the full sponsorship scandal engulfed the PM and his government, at dinner with some bright professional friends.
They said all the right things, of course. They just aren't going to do the right thing, which is to vote anybody but Liberal.
They were deeply saddened by the revelations in Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's report; they were shocked; they were even angry. But one by one, they veered back to the Liberal mothership. "Prime Minister Stephen Harper?" someone said with a delicate eastern shudder. "What are the alternatives?" someone added. Besides, said one of the men, "Don't you believe Martin when he says he didn't know anything?" One of the women muttered ominously, "Abortion."
I didn't even know if Mr. Harper had a position on abortion — and it's difficult to determine from the press clippings what it might be — but at that moment, if I could have mobilized the unborn, as the right-to-lifers insist on calling fetuses, I would have. "Better the unborn than the undead!" sums up my bottom line pretty nicely.
As for the question of whether Mr. Martin, embroiled still in his Mad as Hell cross-country media blitz, knew what was going on in Public Works and Government Services Canada, or better yet how much he knew, it's almost irrelevant.
He doesn't have the right to be mad as hell.
He was a senior member of the government that allowed all this to happen. He was the finance minister for the whole shabby time the folks at Public Works were throwing my money away. Whether there are 14 top political masters and/or bureaucrats, or 140 (and my bet is the number is closer to the latter than the former) who were deeply involved, they were not aliens from another planet. They were, respectively, Liberals and civil servants sufficiently politicized they looked the other way as the rules were busted and the cheques written. The handful of Quebec ad agencies that billed huge fees for cheque-transferring services and very little in the way of real work were not neutral shops that went through a proper bidding process, but Liberal friends and Liberal Party contributors, and not merely friends of the now-private citizen Jean Chrétien.
The fine distinctions now being drawn by political insiders — between Mr. Chrétien's top Quebec political operatives, from whom Mr. Martin was reportedly distanced, and senior Quebec cabinet ministers like him — don't count with me.
Good heavens, word of the bloody program even (clearly, mistakenly) leaked out beyond Quebec's borders and reached Alberta in 1999, with the result that, as Ms. Fraser documents in her report, a poor Edmonton soccer club applied for funds just the way a Montreal soccer club had, only to be told there was no money left.
Only after an MP contacted the public works minister did the government cough up some dough — a fifth of what the Montreal club got the year before. And of course, the Montreal club got another grant, too.
Ordinary Albertans had heard of the potential windfall to be had, but we are to believe the then finance minister had not?
Mr. Martin's curiously worded pledge made over the airwaves last weekend ("Anybody who is found to have known that people are kiting cheques, that people are falsifying invoices — me or anybody else — should resign") is hardly a bedrock pledge to quit if implicated.
Indeed, it is rather more reminiscent of the difficulty Shelley Martel, a former member of the Bob Rae New Democratic Party government in Ontario, once found herself suffering. Accused of spreading confidential information about a Sudbury doctor, Ms. Martel actually took a lie-detector test to prove she had been blowing smoke out of her ass, and not private data.
On the scale of reassurances, the flavour of Mr. Martin's promise is closer to Ms. Martel's bizarre action.
Does anyone really believe that any Liberals, after winning the next election, would voluntarily resign even if excoriated by a public inquiry?
This, alas, is not Britain, where, you may recall, the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, instantly quit when the broadcaster was harshly criticized for its role in the events leading to the death of British weapons scientist David Kelly.
I would bet Mr. Davies had no more or less intimate knowledge of the intricate details of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's famous "sexed-up" story than Mr. Martin arguably may have had of the sponsorship scandal. But he quit in a New York minute, because, as the man at the top of the totem pole, it was the correct thing to do.
I watched Mr. Martin on Cross-Country Checkup. I admired that he was putting himself out there, to be cut to ribbons by callers, but I did not mistake what I was watching as a Prime Minister being held accountable by the people. And I saw it not as courage, but gall, the gall of a man who has wanted the PM's job for so long he can hardly believe he may be in jeopardy of losing it.
Besides, Mr. Martin knows Canadians better than I do. The anger in the country is going, going, soon to be gone. As a caller to a Toronto radio station, explaining why he will vote Liberal again, said yesterday of the current scandal, "I think people should just get over it." Yes, indeed. It's been a week, after all. Time to move on. The government Torontonians deserve is this way coming.
