Quick background for int’l Dopers who may not know the basics. The sponsorship scandal (or Adscam, as it’s affectionately known) is an ongoing scandal in Canada revolving around the alledged siphoning of government money to ad agencies friendly with the government-forming Liberal Party. More thorough background is available at Wikipedia.
Jean Brault, president of ad agency Groupaction, one of the prime ad agencies at the centre of the scandal and who is himself facing criminal charges revolving around the scandal, testified at the Gomery inquiry last week. In order to preserve the integrity of his yet-to-take-place criminal trial, a publication ban was put into place covering his (and some others’) testimony. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to have a meaningful publication ban in place these days.
The Canadian media has been abuzz over the weekend about his testimony last week. It was said to be so explosive that the information has the impact to potentialy bring down the minority government.
For those who have come across the American blog that has published the details of last week’s testimony, what’s your impression. Is there enough there to crumble the minority government? If an election is called, do you expect the Libs to be crushed in the ensuing election? What happens next?
I admit it’s difficult for me to understand how this necessarily changes anything. It was obvious to me before the last election that the Liberal Party was rotten to the core and had stolen millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money; I mean, you had to be lobotomized to not know that. They could not have been more obviously criminal if they’d been brought down by sheriff’s deputies on “Cops.” They still got enough votes to win.
If there is another election, the Liberals will be wise to simply play the same cards; say the Conservatives are racist and plan on destroying Medicare, and a huge number of people will vote for them. They’ll be annihilated in Quebec, but can still form an Opposition with some good campaigning elsewhere. If there was a good opposition leader this might not necessarily work, but as long as there’s no inspiring leader on the other side of the House, why would people vote against them based on stuff that didn’t cause them to vote against them last year?
My speculation is that most Liberal-voting Canucks were not convinced of the Liberal Party’s depth of involvement in the scandal. This new information from Brault speaks not of creative accounting, nor the malfeasance of certain individuals, but direct involvement from the highest levels of the Liberal Party (PM Cretien?) in creating a mechanism whose sole purpose may have been to enable massive embezzlement.
It certainly feels different than past information.
It really is amazing how well this seems to work. No matter what comes up, just call Harper an extremist, problem solved.
“Mr. Libereal Guy, how do you explain the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars?”
“Well, I should point out that Mr. Harper is an extremist. I call him Extremely Extremerson!”
“Ah yes, good point, nobody wants an extremist, clearly.”
Ah yes… but not Paul Martin, from what I’ve been able to ascertain. The scandal will be played in English Canada as being the work of a bunch of guys with funny-sounding French names who aren’t in the government anymore.
This is a bit offtopic, but I sense we’re entering an era of absolutely entrenched politics. It was once the fact that half the people always voted the same way and you fought for the other half. Now, it seems, almost EVERYONE always votes the same way, and any information that suggests you’re unwise to do so is dismissed.
Consider: If you’re a Liberal voter, it seems, the tales of graft and corruption are simply ignored. Millions of Republican voters in the USA will absolutely not be swayed by any facts you can muster from the belief that Saddamn Hussein was involved in 9/11 and had WMDs.
I would imagine we can find the same sort of things for Conservative voters or Democrat voters, but it’s not as obvious to cite them when they didn’t win the last one. I can think of one out of power example though: I still have relatives who are die-hard NDP voters who still honestly think free trade will result in Canada being fully absorbed by the US and losing all its jobs and having a massive trade deficit. It’s been seventeen years now, we’re still independent and our trade surplus with the USA has shot to astounding levels - economically, the result has been precisely the opposite of what the NDP claimed would happen - and everything from that point to now is just blithely ignored.
I predict the Liberals will win another minority government if an election takes place this year. I know dozens of people who voted Liberal and not a single one will change their vote or will be swayed by any amount of evidence. That’s just anecdotal evidence but I cannot see any other party taking votes away from them. Stephen Harper has done an awful job, and Jack Layton is still a slimy weasel and (fatal west of Oakville or north of Barrie) a Torontonian.
I have my doubts that the revelations of this inquiry will amount to anything. You have to understand that the Canadian people are incredibly apathetic/cynical about our government. As Rickjay said, the Liberals seemed to skate through the last election despite much of this already being known.
This is just one of many, many scandals that get treated with yawns in Canada. Scandals that would bring down any politician in the U.S. Graft, corruption, patronage, sweetheart deals to companies that have children of politicians in high positions, revolving doors between government and industry (with said industry receiving bafflingly good deals)… This is day to day life in Canadian politics.
And if the government does fall, it may not change much. The Conservatives could wind up in power with their own minority government, and collapse in a non-confidence motion in a few months, then we’ll elect the old bastards right back in again, and it will have been ‘proven’ that the Conservatives are not able to govern and they’ll be marginalized for another generation.
I’m very cynical about Canadian politics. We don’t have a federal party - we have a bunch of regional parties. The Bloc in Quebec, the Liberals who control the major population areas in central and eastern Canada, and the Conservatives who rule the west. Since none of these parties seem to make huge inroads into areas outside their region, we wind up being ruled by the party that represents the most populous region, and that’s the Liberals. It will take an act of God for our government to fundamentally change.
It’s all Mulroney’s fault. (Not Adscam, but the regional fracturing of Canadian federal politics.)
I’m more or less a Liberal supporter, though not because I’m apathetic or cynical. I voted NDP last time round (strategically, trying to unseat the Conservative incumbent), but my current preference is for a Liberal government. It’s not that I refuse to consider evidence against them, but a question of political ideology. Should I prefer to have the country led in what I think is the wrong direction over a quarter billion dollars? No, I say. Yeah, it’s criminal, and yeah, it’s rather a lot of money (though a lot more has been blown on the whole navy helicopter replacement fiasco, or the gun registry, or…) and yeah, if evidence came to light that the current leaders of the party were heavily involved I might well want them out. But what’s the alternative, hmm? The Conservatives are still pushing the social conservative side of their agenda, and I will not support that, never, ever, not in a million years. So that leaves me voting NDP, and hoping they don’t ever actually get into power (not a big worry, granted) because I think their economic policy is ass-backwards. So we end up with a Conservative minority (cuz they have no chance in Quebec) that can’t get anything done, and that’s supposed to be an improvement on a corrupt but reasonably competent government?
See, I would love if there were a party that could win seats in every province in the country that held roughly the same political ground as the old Tories. Fiscal conservative, social progressive. Oh wait, there is. It’s the Liberals. And they’re apparently crooks, but I’ll probably vote for them as the lesser of three evils.
My sister was once at a (Stan’s brother) Garnett Rogers concert shortly before an election, and Garnett said, “If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.”
Pfft. Why must you always suggest things are better in the States? They’re just as bad; voter apathy is WORSE, not better, and Congress is a haven of porkbarrelry. Let’s stop talking about the USA.
Having looked at the electoral map, I now realize you’re right, and I was wrong in saying the Liberals would automatically win; actually, a new election COULD result in a Conservative government. Assuming the Liberals are utterly devastated in Quebec - the virtually certain result - the Conservatives actually would not have to gain very many seats to “win.”
Presently the score is 135 to 99. That includes 21 Liberal seats in Quebec; it is entirely possible that could be reduced to just six or seven in a new election. Assume the Liberals lose 11 and are left with 10; the Conservatives would then have to convert only 13 seats elsewhere to win, which would not actually require that much of a swing in the popular vote. The Conservatives could pick up that many seats even without gaining a single one in Ontario, and they’d get some more in Ontario, too.
What’s different in Ontario from the last few elections is that Ontarians now have a provincial Liberal government they’re already getting dreadfully sick of. Believe me, it does matter.
They can’t gain any in Saskatchewan - in fact, they’ll lose at least 2 is my prediction. Goodale is in no danger, and the Conservatives hold all the rest, but the NDP will win back a couple they lost by razor-thin margins last time.
In Alberta, let’s say Landslide Annie loses her seat, but there’s not a lot of room for the Tories to pick up anything here.
BC? The Liberals might lose a couple more, but whether that’d be to the Conservatives or the NDP is an open question. Probably not more than a couple seats can be gained here.
Manitoba. Only 3 Liberal seats, and again as likely to swing orange as blue if they swing at all.
That leaves the Maritimes, where the Liberals hold 21 seats that are theoretically vulnerable to Tory gains, but I am not sufficiently familiar with the region to comment on whether those seats are actually vulnerable.
It’s not a matter of ignorance. Many of us are well aware of the Liberal involvement in the scandal, and in fact, were aware of it during the last election. The Liberals are crooks, but they are also the only option for those of us who can not support the pro-labour economically backwards NDP, or the living-in-the-dark-ages socially backwards Conservatives.
The Maritimes were at one time amenable to P.C. candidates. The new leaner, meaner Alliance-fed Conservatives, I don’t think so. There’s still a strong tendency to Canadian liberalism (not Liberalism) there.
But don’t write off Ontario for the Conservatives. I can remember when Kingston going P.C. was as assured as the area I grew up in across the St. Lawrence going Republican. And the North is, from what I’ve seen, tired of being the unwanted redheaded stepchild of the London-Hamilton-Toronto-Ottawa axis. Intelligent, non-ideological marketing of the Conservatives in Ontario could make all the difference. They won’t do it, though.
(And while we’re having pipedreams, it might be nice to see some national party taking a good look at what Quebec needs and wants, and seeing if an accommodation that works for all sections of the nation can be devised. And that will happen when palm trees grow in Nunavut!)
Mulroney was the last person to try that, and look what happened to him. If Canadian politics has a “third rail”, it’s Quebec’s needs and wants.
I think I’d heard of this sponsorship scandal thing before (barely – as an ex-pat Canadian in the States I don’t get as much Canadian news as I could), but I hadn’t given it any thought at all until today. Now, to judge from a few breathless blogs, you’d think my home country was a heartbeat away from civil war and riots in the streets as a merciless jack-booted government crushed free speech in a desperate cover-up. Needless to say, I think I’ll reserve judgement on the weight of scandal until the testimony is officially released.
But supposing the testimony really is that damaging, is any party going to risk dragging the entire country to the polls a year after the last election? I can’t help but think that the voters’ ire at having another campaign season forced down their throats will be greater than their ire about the sponsorship scandal.
RickJay is right - this sort of thing is business as usual down here. Wouldn’t even make the major blogs, much less the Liberal Media. Consider yourselves fortunate that this is the biggest thing you have to get upset about.
If I was a Liberal planner I’d heavily play up the Tories inclination to reduce subsidies and the threat that could pose to the “imminent Maritime economic renaissance” the Liberal party has “offered” through the recent oil/gas agreements.
But I’m still curious to understand how the election of the Tories immediately destroys Canadian social justice. There’s bureaucratic inertia through the civil service, Senate opposition via the Liberal majority, plus a Charter and judicial rulings that have helped form the liberal basis for social mores. Why people would rather have criminals with the political power to enrich themselves as the government, than a political party they disagree with leaves me scratching my head.
Not to mention the fact that the Liberals have given separatism a major shot in the arm; we now face the extreme likelihood of the traitors gaining power in the next provincial election in Quebec, and calling another referendum. And with the Liberals making the federal government look worse than ever, they’ll have a shot at winning.
Who’s going to represent Canada in THAT referendum? Paul Martin?
Elections are not a burden. Honestly, everyone expects a minority government to fall, it’s only a question of when. Besides, how much work does an election force on anyone, aside from watching election coverage?
You think Stephen Harper would do a better job? Especially considering the inevitable “oopsie” remarks from western Tory backbenchers about how they hope Quebec does go, and good riddance? Maybe, maybe a minority Tory government receiving support from “the traitors” might help the image of the federal government in Quebec because it would have to throw some sops to provincial autonomy in order to survive, but it could just as easily blow up in the other direction.
That’s going to happen regardless of who’s in power. I’d even wager that a Liberal MP could utter those very words…assuming there were enough Liberals out west to make a reasonable sample size.
The PQ getting back in power is tied more to Charest’s (in)ability to manage the province than a resurgent Bloc.
