I said at the time that I suspected a whitewash job was being set up, and sure enough, the parameters Johnston suggested today are exactly what Harper (and Mulroney, no doubt) would love.
Mr. Johnston's limited terms of reference do not include the $2.1-million libel settlement Mulroney negotiated with the Canadian government in 1997 while allegedly misrepresenting, under oath, his relationship with Mr. Schreiber.
And they would likely keep an inquiry from following the $10-million in “grease money” that German court records suggest was given to Mr. Schreiber by Airbus International to bribe Canadian officials in the 1980s.
When following government corruption, the ability to follow the money, wherever it should lead, without constraint is a critical aspect of an effective inquiry. We know enough in the public domain on this affair to know that there are only a handful of "straight lines" in this web, and the harsher reality is that these affairs are part of a veritable spider's web of interactions. Any inquiry with as limited a scope as Johnston is proposing will be unable to make any meaningful findings at all - and the resulting report will be less than useless in resolving the questions involved.
Then, as if to play to Harper's near-fetish for secrecy, Johnston suggests the following:
The president of the University of Waterloo also wrote that “if the public interest warrants an inquiry, there are aspects of the allegations that would be its focus that should be fully ventilated in a public proceeding.”
But he added the inquiry commissioner might be encouraged to follow the model of the SARS Commission in Ontario, which “conducted most of its proceedings by confidential interviews.”
Mr. Johnston also cited as a possible model the highly secretive inquiry by Justice Frank Iacobucci into the treatment of three Arab Canadians who say they were tortured overseas with the possible complicity of Canadian authorities.
Right. All stop. If the inquiry is held behind closed doors, the public has no reason whatsoever to accept the results of this inquiry as even having shadings of validity. Of course, this doesn't surprise me - by the time Mulroney left office he was almost universally seen as dishonest; and Mr. Harper being the man that he is has not chosen to distance himself from Mr. Mulroney's past, nor to differentiate himself other than proving to us that he is even more secretive than Mulroney was at the end of his tenure at 24 Sussex.
The smell you are now experiencing is the rotting corpse of Conservative Scandals past oozing through the layers of whitewash poured over them in the intervening years.
1 comment:
And this is the new way, the CPOC way of transparency? They can keep it. Sakes alive, these guys are worse than previous governments cause they won an election based on their promises......This is not the reformed Conservative party, this is the Reform party, with a new name. Bah, humbug
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