Hmm, interesting review
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnist ... 89946.html
By GREG WESTON -- Sun Ottawa Bureau
If Adscam was the only problem Paul Martin faced, notes Greg Weston, he'd be in trouble. But things may be far, far worse than that ...
It is an understatement to say this week's shocking Adscam testimony from Montreal advertising executive Jean Brault was every taxpayer's horror, the sponsorship program suddenly exposed as a reeking swamp of fraud, kickbacks and money laundering, all in the name of the federal Liberal Party in Quebec.
Now for the bad news: Adscam is likely just a puddle in a far wider, deeper and dirtier cesspool of corruption involving potentially billions of dollars in government programs unrelated to the sponsorship fiasco.
***
For years, lucrative government ad contracts have been treated like so much political pork by the party in power, dispensed to loyal firms as a reward for providing "free" ad services during elections.
Systematically fleeced
Piece it all together, and taxpayers have been systematically fleeced for millions of dollars of Liberal Party election advertising.
But the ad scams don't end on election day. Investigations by the auditor general and now the Gomery inquiry point to potentially widespread bid-rigging.
It is a huge amount of money. 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.
The government also hands out billions of dollars a month in contracts for everything from military tanks to pencils.
While the auditor general found bureaucrats broke "every rule in the book" in the sponsorship scandal, evidence is emerging at the Gomery inquiry that Adscam may be only the tip of corruption in government contracting.
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."
Brault said he slipped the first $50,000 to Morselli at a spaghetti dinner, and never got around to paying the second instalment before the sponsorship scandal erupted in 2002.
***
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.
The government hires thousands of private contractors for a vast array of services, at a cost of billions of dollars a year. There is now evidence some of them may have been victims of a systematic shakedown by Liberal operatives.
A year ago, we reported a case of one public relations executive caught in a shakedown by one of the Liberal ad firms now implicated in the sponsorship scandal. On Friday, the case became part of the Gomery inquiry.
Ad exec Jean Lambert testified that his spouse, Sylvie Cloutier, had won a competitive bid for a $200,000 Health Canada contract in 1994. Instead, she was forced to run the work through Lafleur Communications, a firm now at the centre of Adscam.
The Gomery commission was told Cloutier was forced to pay Lafleur $50,000 to do nothing but pass along her invoices to the government.
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.
