If
anything, the Gomery Inquiry should have taught Canadians how much of a
waste of money public inquiries are. So, we’ve chosen to forget the
lessons learned and doomed ourselves to repeating history. Here we go
again.
Despite the honesty and the competence of the people involved,
these inquiries can tell us nothing we don’t already know about our
politicians and will do nothing more than the legal and judicial systems
can’t already do. Lamentably, however, these inquiries have failed to
be instruments to find truth and promote justice and have become yet
another tool in the hands of politicians to do exactly what they are
trained to do: politics.
Take the Gomery Inquiry, for instance, on the so-called
sponsorship scandal.
Despite the competence and the honesty of the people who handled
it, after spending more than $60-million to find out how the government
spent the original $60-million, they told us nothing that we didn’t
already know before and the only practical consequences where those
related to the work of the RCMP sending two or three people to jail. The
sponsorship scandal grew like a weed out of the typical tempest in a tea
pot.
Yes, there were catastrophic consequences for the Liberal
government. But that’s exactly my point: the inquiry served as a
political instrument and not a tool to promote justice.
I’m not defending the previous Liberal government and I believe
that there were many issues that the opposition could have resorted to
in order to send the government back to opposition. Unfortunately they
used the easiest and the most damaging for the credibility of the entire
political system: corruption.
I don’t believe that people handling our finances are
Franciscan friars. But if we want to address the waste of public money,
politicians could find many more serious and damaging issues to bring to
the public’s attention. For example, why are people not interested in
knowing why taxpayers are funnelling over $11-billion every year to take
care of aboriginals yet they still have miserable living conditions with
the highest alcoholism and suicide rate amongst their young people.
Why was there no public inquiry called into the two Ottawa
businessmen who were charged in 2006 with defrauding the Department of
National Defence of more than $100-million through an elaborate billing
scheme? The simple answer is the sponsorship scandal involved
politicians and that’s what those inquiries are all about.
In the process, the good work done by the Jean Chrétien’s
government for the economy, as well as foreign and social issues, were
thrown out the window because of a few million dollars that ended up in
the pockets of some individuals. Wow. Something of this nature has never
happened before in Canadian politics and after Gomery, I’m sure it
will never happen again.
Now that the fog of war has settled from Gomery, I can understand
the Liberals’ need for revenge over justice. My comprehension of the
Liberals’ blood lust notwithstanding, it is still morally wrong and
politically stupid.
It’s morally wrong because they have now put the entire
Parliament on hold and have pushed issues of vital importance for all
Canadians to the backburner. There are economic problems on the horizon,
the manufacturing sector is ailing, Kyoto is dying and they don’t have
an alternative, our young people are still dying in Afghanistan, our
aboriginals are still suffering, and the list can go on and on and on.
Just read a speech that Stéphane Dion delivered only a few days ago
telling us that those issues were of paramount importance for his
leadership and for Canadians in general.
Now he has put everything on hold because he wants to know why a
former prime minister took $300,000 almost 15 years ago and why the
present Prime Minister was trying hard to prevent a businessman in a
Canadian jail from involving our institution in a private transaction.
Can you imagine the fury of the opposition if Stephen Harper had been
involved in a case regarding an individual who is trying hard to avoid
extradition to Germany? I did not agree with the call for the Gomery
Inquiry as I don’t agree with this one: two wrongs don’t make a
right.
However, if the Liberals believe that they can resurrect their
political fortunes by trashing their opponents, they’re in for another
big disappointment because the two events are completely different.
In the sponsorship scandal we were talking about politicians
potentially caught with their hands in the cookie jar while still in
office. In this case we are talking about two individuals with a deal 15
years ago.
Furthermore, there is another element Liberals should be mindful
of: the sponsorship scandal was homemade. It was Liberals against
Liberals. In this case we are talking about a controversial businessman
and a former prime minister.
And, I suspect, Dion is not interested in finding the truth about
that relationship, but only the possibility of tying up the present
Prime Minister to those events.
And that, even if understandable, is not justice, it’s
politics. Again. And Canadians will be picking up the tab. Again.
