Peer Reviewer 1:
Peer's review: Canada
By Diodora Bucur
While there is no doubt the sponsorship scandal was the event that rocked the federal leadership and reshaped the political landscape in Canada, key aspects to a full understanding of this political fiasco were left out of the reporter's notebook.
Jean Lafleur, whose case went to trial during the period of time under survey here, was indeed the last man to be convicted so far in connection with the sponsorship scandal and received the stiffest sentence. However, the report fails to elaborate on the case of Chuck (Charles) Guité, the only public servant convicted in this case and a far bigger player in the influence-peddling scheme. As the top bureaucrat of the Public Works Department, Guité was in charge of handling the federal sponsorship program. Guité's case resurfaced in April 2007 as he returned to court in a bid to have his 42-month jail sentence reversed. The disgraced bureaucrat was found guilty of breaking government tendering rules and giving contracts to friends, and is currently free on bail while awaiting his appeal trial.
In his report, Justice Gomery wrote, "With the support and approval of persons at the highest level of government, Mr. Guité was untouchable," adding Guité "acquired a reputation as the person in the public service able to cut through red tape and achieve results rapidly, without the usual restrictions and paperwork which are characteristic of a normal bureaucracy, but which are generally deemed necessary for the prudent administration of public funds."
Another major figure in the scandal is Paul Coffin, an ad executive and Guité's close friend. His Coffin Communications was among the five agencies that received the largest share of the sponsorship contracts. Coffin was the first to be convicted after pleading guilty to fraud. He was handed a conditional sentence of two years to be served in the community and ordered to reimburse the federal government about 1.5 million Canadian dollars (US$1.49 million) and give speeches about his experience.
The list also includes Groupaction Marketing Inc.'s Jean Brault, who was granted full parole in October 2006, after serving five months of a 30-month sentence. He had admitted to placing Liberal party workers, who never did work for him, on his company's payroll and filing fake invoices for 1.6 million Canadian dollars (US$1.59 million) for jobs of little or no value.
The convictions were harshly criticized as a slap on the wrist, considering the magnitude of the abuse-of-power scam.
What's more, the reporter's notebook fails to make it clear that part of the 100 million Canadian dollars (US$99 million) in taxpayers' money ended up in the Liberal Party's war chest in the form of political contributions.
"Those five agencies were contributors to the Liberal Party of Canada, some with greater enthusiasm and generosity than others," Gomery wrote. "After one of them, Gosselin [Communications] agency, became reluctant to make further political contributions, it received a sharply diminished share of sponsorship contracts."
The Liberals did pay the political price by losing their grip on power in the 2006 federal election. And the reputation of former Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano, who was demoted to the post of ambassador to Denmark before being fired, suffered. Also, concerns were raised over the extent of the involvement of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in the sponsorship program.
However, Gomery did not find former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, the architect of the sponsorship fund, directly responsible for the mismanagement of the money, but called both him and his chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, "naïve" and "imprudent" in trusting Guité with administering the program without a proper system of checks and balances in place.
The sponsorship fund was politically driven, yet no elected official ever faced criminal charges in connection with the kickbacks.
Peer Reviewer 2:
The document is interesting but does not reflect, from my point of view, what happend in Canada in 2007, or the actual situation in terms of corruption in the country. Even if the information provided in this document is true, a lot of other information is missing: the scandal involving HIV-infected blood, problems linked with military spendings and equipment refurbishment (submarines bought from England with tremedous trouble, causing the death of one military personnel, plus suspicious contracts in a helicopters deal, etc.), problems with the CANDU nuclear contract, corruption linked with governmental contracts (i.e. a bridge that collapsed in 2006, causing the death of four civilians.)
Half of the document is about the Gomery Commission. It was a major problem and the results of the investigation were important, but more information on other issues would have given a larger view on corruption and misconduct in Canada. For sure, that would have required a little more research, but it would have provided a more realistic picture of what is going on in Canada.
One final point: the document contains a lot of names and organizations well-known to Canadians, but I am not sure what they will mean to a foreign audience. Maybe more references to internationally-accepted reports or statistics, such as the ones produced by the World Bank, would have had a more powerful impact.
Peer Reviewer 3:
The reporter does a fine job of summarizing the complex sponsorship scandal and its fallout. But why was Lafleur chosen to personify the scandal when he was only one of five people - all admen - who faced criminal charges relating to the sponsorship scandal, and only one of four convicted? The real shame in the investigation was that not a single politician or political personality was held accountable.
The Notebook did not put enough emphasis on this fact and the bigger casualties: voters' faith in their politicians and the collapse of the Liberal Party, and perhaps questions about the legitimacy of the Canadian political system itself. Liberals betrayed and let down their voters. Quebeckers, especially, felt personally disrespected. The sponsorship program, which was intended to encourage pro-Canada sentiment in their province, ironically gave a leg up to separatist forces.
The writer mentions it was "too late for the Liberals," but it is unclear in the report just how much a role Adscam played in its downfall. The 2006 election -- on the heels of the last installment of the Gomery report and two fresh Liberal financial scandals -- was considered by many political pundits and voters alike to be more of a referendum on the character of the Liberal Party itself, rather than a vote for Harper and the Tories, or a vote based on the key issues of health care, day care and tax cuts. The author also failed to address the bitter rift between Liberals that the scandal uncovered. Past corruption controversies have pitted the governing party against the opposition. This one also exposed the messy feud between former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his successor, Paul Martin.
What is most unusual is why the reporter spent more than half the time explaining the sponsorship scandal, when it drudged up nary a mention in the papers and rolled eyeballs from your average citizen in the June 2006-June 2007 period the Notebook aims to cover. Then and now, Adscam is old news. It would have been more meaningful if the reporter used the scandal only to set the stage for why the Accountability Act came into being, and then explored the failures of the act, like giving concrete examples of how those loopholes are being used, or spelling out who's using the revolving door between lobbying and the government. That way, when recent news like why Harper, who allegedly knew about the controversial dealings between former Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Karl Schreiber, a German-Canadian businessman facing fraud and bribery charges, sat on the information before acting, readers would realize how Harper's government itself has been anything but transparent. And that the sponsorship scandal was not a one-off nor only a Liberal problem, but a textbook case of the "culture of corruption" within the Canadian government.
Peer Reviewer 4:
On Nov.1, 2005, Commissioner John Gomery released the first part of his report. Gomery criticized former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Chief of Staff Jean Pelletier but cleared them of direct involvement in kickback schemes. While people such as Francisco Gagliano, Chuck Guité and Jacques Corriveau took advantage of the program, Gomery observed that such abuses would not have been possible had Chrétien not set the program up without safeguards in the first place. Gomery said that Pelletier "failed to take the most elementary precautions against mismanagement, and Mr. Chrétien was responsible for him."
Gomery also exonerated Prime Minister Paul Martin, the former minister of Finance during most of the sponsorship program. Gomery specifically said that Martin "is entitled, like other ministers from the Quebec caucus, to be exonerated from any blame for carelessness or misconduct", as the Department of Finance's role was not oversight, but setting the "fiscal framework".
Apart the Jean Lafleur culpability, the Gomery Commission of Inquiry found: "clear evidence of political involvement in the administration of the Sponsorship Program; insufficient oversight at the very senior levels of the public service which allowed program managers to circumvent proper contracting procedures and reporting lines; a veil of secrecy surrounding the administration of the Sponsorship Program and an absence of transparency in the contracting process; reluctance, for fear of reprisal, by virtually all public servants to go against the will of a manager who was circumventing established policies and who had access to senior political officials; gross overcharging by communication agencies for hours worked and goods and services provided; inflated commissions, production costs and other expenses charged by communication agencies and their subcontractors, many of which were related businesses; the use of the Sponsorship Program for purposes other than national unity or federal visibility because of a lack of objectives, criteria and guidelines for the Program; deliberate actions to avoid compliance with federal legislation and policies, including the Canada Elections Act, Lobbyists Registration Act, the Access to Information Act and Financial Administration Act, as well as federal contracting policy and the Treasury Board Transfer Payments Policy; a complex web of financial transactions among Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), Crown Corporations and communication agencies, involving kickbacks and illegal contributions to a political party in the context of the Sponsorship Program; five agencies that received large sponsorship contracts regularly channeling money, via legitimate donations or unrecorded cash gifts, to political fundraising activities in Quebec, with the expectation of receiving lucrative government contracts; certain agencies carrying on their payrolls individuals who were, in effect, working on Liberal Party matters; the existence of a culture of entitlement among political officials and bureaucrats involved with the Sponsorship Program, including the receipt of monetary and non-monetary benefits; a pattern of activity whereby a public servant in retirement did extensive business with former recipients of Sponsorship Program contracts; and the refusal of Ministers, senior officials in the Prime Ministers Office and public servants to acknowledge their responsibility for the problems of mismanagement that occurred.
