One of the most compelling elements of the "Sponsorship Scandal" is now bubbling to the surface. This element is the timing. The bribes and kickbacks started earlier than the Unity Crisis so the Sponsorship Scandal is misnamed. The first mention I saw of this was on the Hacks blog. Shortly thereafter he linked to Andrew Coyne and Adam Radwanski.
Testimony today supports this stance.
...Jean Brault, whose dramatic testimony at the sponsorship inquiry has rocked the country, donated $30,000 to ex-prime minister Jean Chretien's victorious 1993 campaign in the hopes of landing future federal contracts, the inquiry was told Friday.
Former Groupaction employee Alain Renaud testified that a year after the Liberals swept to power in 1993, Brault showed him a $30,000 cheque payable to Michel Fournier, who served as Chretien's chief of staff when he was Opposition leader.
Others are beginning to ask important questions about this and possible linkage to the HRDC boondoggle and the Gun Registry fiasco. We already know the Jean Brault paid bribe money to delay an advertising campaign decision by the Justice Department. What else was going on in these programs that caused such dramatic over-spending. Is there a pattern here?
Update: Macleans is now on the case with this story today:
...The alleged web of tax-dollar kickbacks to Liberal officials from Quebec ad firms can be traced to a murky pre-sponsorship unity fund.
The little-known reservoir was worth $50 million a year. It was all that was spared when the cost-cutting Liberals wiped out an array of long-standing "rainy day" funds in the 1990s.
...By 1997, the sponsorship program was born of seed money drawn from the national unity fund.
The year before, Chretien had signed off on $17 million for various ad contracts from the reserve he personally controlled, Bourgon testified. He did so even after she cautioned that he'd have to answer to anyone who questioned spending from the government's sole source of discretionary cash.
Another article from Macleans digs deeper on the Chretien control.
...One of the ad firms involved in the federal sponsorship scandal had contracts steered its way after lobbying the office of ex-prime minister Jean Chretien, an inquiry was told Friday.
In yet another major allegation in a scandal that has jolted the country, former Groupaction employee Alain Renaud said he had the ear of Jean Pelletier, Chretien's chief of staff from 1993 to 2001.
...The testimony is among the strongest evidence heard by presiding judge John Gomery that Chretien's inner circle may have had control over sponsorship dollars now tainted by allegations $1.1 million was redirected into Liberal coffers.
...Also on Friday, Renaud said Brault donated $30,000 to Chretien's victorious 1993 campaign in the hopes of landing future federal contracts.
The year after the Liberals swept to power, Renaud said Brault showed him a $30,000 cheque payable to Michel Fournier, who served as Chretien's chief of staff when he was Opposition leader.
It was unclear whether Fournier was still working for Chretien when the cheque was written in 1993.
[Emphasis added: 1993!]
Greg Weston jumps on the bandwagon today (actually, he was probably already on it). Not only is the timing fishy but does anyone think that the corruption is limited to the "Sponsorship Program". Mr. Weston digs a little deeper.
...In the same time the Liberal government squandered $250 million on the sponsorship program, over $800 million was spent on federal ad programs.
As it happened, a pile of that cash went directly into the coffers of the same Quebec ad firms involved in Adscam.
Were palms greased and favours granted? Hmmm.
...In one case that emerged at Gomery this week, Groupaction president Brault described how a $100,000 bribe got the firm over $5 million in contracts with the federal Justice Department.
According to the AG, in 1998, Justice officials were not happy with work being done by Groupaction and wanted to re-tender the contract. The retendering process began, but suddenly "was halted without explanation, and Groupaction was retained until mid-2002" after getting another $5.4 million in contracts.
What really happened, according to Brault, was he had asked Liberal Party bagman Joe Morselli to see if anything could be done to help Groupaction keep the contract in 1999. The two men met one day in Montreal, Brault testified, and Morselli told him: "$100,000 and your problem is solved."
...Over $1 billion has been thrown at the largely useless registry, four times the total amount wasted on the entire sponsorship program. To date, no one knows how much of that money was pilfered, laundered, or otherwise made to vanish in shady deals.
In one case, a Sun investigation almost two years ago revealed Groupaction billed the feds hundreds of thousands of dollars for gun registry work that no one seems to remember being done. The firm is now facing criminal charges related to those contracts.
Here is how he concludes.
...None of these potential scum ponds of corruption -- advertising, contracting, the gun registry, shakedowns -- had anything to do with the sponsorship program.
Worse, they were business as usual in the Chretien government -- a government in which Paul Martin was finance minister for eight years.
Martin can now try to run from the Adscam mess, but he cannot hide from the rest of the government he helped to run.
