Yesterdays testimony by Jean Chretien at the Sponsorship Inquiry sought to lay the context as to why the Liberals had to do what they did and why if there was a little corruption that it was acceptable to save the country. Andrew Coyne of the National Post says there is more context to me laid.
...But the issue before the inquiry is not the merits of the sponsorship program, as such, but how and to what extent it was used as a vehicle for personal and partisan gain.
I must be betting at this because that is what I said yesterday.
...Yet consider that rationale, and the mindset it betrays. Mr. Chrétien takes it as self-evident, and trusts his listeners will as well, that the government of Canada should spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a continuing effort to persuade Quebecers not to destroy the country; that a major industrial democracy, a member of the G-7, should be forced, in effect, to beg for its life. An observer from another country would find this bizarre, not to say humiliating. Yet that is what we did, for the better part of four decades.
...That is one part of the “context” in which the sponsorship scandal should be set. The other, not unrelated, is one-party rule. I don’t just mean the arrogance, the complacency, the invincible sense of entitlement that accrues over many years in office, all of which has been richly in evidence throughout the inquiry’s hearings. I mean the tendency to equate the party with the country, or at least to assume that the interests of the one are consonant with the other’s. Mr. Chrétien was quite explicit, as his ministers had been before him, that we should not look upon the advertising firms that profited so handsomely from their coziness with the ruling party as “Liberal-friendly,” but rather as federalists. Yes, the program was political, Alfonso Gagliano insisted — “not political in the sense [of] partisan, but political in the sense of being federalism against separatism.”
