Chrétien’s integrity defended

Dion reacts in wake of Star report Opposition awaits Gomery conclusions

OTTAWA— Former prime minister Jean Chrétien may have been “imprudent” in trusting people close to the sponsorship scandal, says Environment Minister Stéphane Dion, but his integrity should not be questioned.

“ I just want to say how much I have full confidence in the honesty and integrity of Mr. Chrétien,” Dion said yesterday, after the Star reported that Justice John Gomery’s report on the sponsorship scandal will single out a small band of Chrétien loyalists as largely to blame. “ Maybe he has been imprudent when he gave his confidence to some people and the same for Mr. ( former Chrétien chief of staff, Jean) Pelletier. That is a man of great integrity.”

Chrétien himself was staying out of the spotlight yesterday, refusing to comment on these early hints of how Gomery’s report, due out in a couple of weeks, would affect his legacy and his reputation. “The former prime minister will speak at the appropriate time — that is, after the official Gomery report is released,” said Senator Jim Munson, former communications director for Chrétien.

According to yesterday’s Star, Gomery’s Nov. 1 report will focus largely on a small rogue group of Chrétien loyalists as responsible for the rampant abuse of the government’s $250 million advertising and sponsorship program.

This, as the Star noted, could be good news for Prime Minister Paul Martin, who has maintained he was too distant from the Chrétien inner circle to be aware of any wrongdoing, even if he was finance minister and a top minister from Quebec when all of it was taking place through the late 1990s. Some in Ottawa were speculating yesterday, in fact, that Martin’s people were floating these early hints of the Gomery report to get an early start on distancing Martin from the Chrétien legacy. Bloc Québécois MP Michel Guimond ( MontmorencyCharlevoix-Haute-Côte-Nord) said during CBC’s Politics broadcast on Newsworld yesterday that it was all part of a “ spin operation” by the Prime Minister’s Office or the Privy Council Office. But Scott Reid, Martin’s communications director, vociferously denied those allegations yesterday and made clear the PMO was very unhappy.

“ The government is not in receipt of Judge Gomery’s report,” Reid said. “ We have not had a preview, a draft, or a summary. Nor have we been briefed on its contents. We do not know what conclusions the commissioner has reached. We obviously cannot share what we do not know.”

Transport Minister Jean Lapierre, the chief Quebec lieutenant in the Martin government, underlined the same point.

“ We don’t even know when we are going to get it,” Lapierre said. “We know there’s a deadline, but we don’t know how or when we’re going to get our copy.”

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper directed his MPs to avoid any questions about the Star report in the Commons yesterday, urging them to treat all early hints as mere speculation until the report is public. Harper reportedly does not want his MPs to spend the next couple of weeks in back-andforth rhetoric about which Liberal is more guilty, believing it will take away from the Conservatives’ insistence that the whole Liberal brand is sullied. NDP Leader Jack Layton seemed similarly unmoved yesterday to give Martin or the Liberals an easy ride.

“ The Liberal party has been in power throughout this entire scandalous affair and Mr. Martin has been, to the best of my knowledge, a very senior Liberal often times in charge of the financial probity of the government,” Layton said yesterday.

“ It’s very clear that when you have Liberals in power, particularly for a long stretch of time, you can’t expect that your public funds are going to be well taken care of,” he said. “ I doubt that Canadians will want to give them a fifth turn at bat, untrammelled, faced with this kind of evidence.”

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe, meanwhile, insisted that it was wrong to conclude that everything can be laid at Chrétien’s doorstep.

“ He presided over a cabinet in which the No. 2 man was Paul Martin,” said Duceppe. The Bloc leader argued that if Martin didn’t know what was going on it was because he turned a blind eye. “ You can’t know what you don’t want to know.”