Beryl Wajsman had some verrry interesting comments to make on CBC Radio 1550 Windsor, on Saturday morning. I don’t have the exact words (you can do the research, while I’m canvassing). As closely as I can remember:
On justice Gomery’s exoneration of Paul Martin: Gomery has created a two-tiered justice system. Paul Martin said he knew nothing, so judge Gomery takes his word for it even though there was substantial evidence that his office went to the Liberal ad fund for financing of pet projects. (Names and dates.) For the rest of us, ignorance of the law or what is being done for you is not an excuse.
On the expulsion: A government that does nothing and has no vision needs lots of enemies to survive. Enemies that it can frighten the public with. (Here he compares the Liberal administration strategy to the tactics of the embattled Nixon administration.)
This is my kind of Liberal.
Inquiry flawed, lawyers argue
Fuelled more by internal Liberal politics, some contend, than by a thirst for truth
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WILLIAM MARSDEN |
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The Gazette |
After nine months of hearings, the Gomery commission has made and destroyed reputations, exposed incompetence and alleged wrongdoing, and spent millions of tax dollars trying to unravel the twisted story of the $250-million sponsorship scandal. Left behind to dissect the entrails and help find the truth are the lawyers who followed the hearings from beginning to end.
They face the uphill battle of pleading their clients' cases in the absence of any charges. In many cases, all they have are unsupported and often conflicting witness statements. Judge John Gomery's report is due in five months. But with the public phase of the inquiry over, what do the lawyers think of a system that is in many ways alien to our fundamental precepts of justice? Did it accomplish anything? Was it necessary? Who were the winners and losers? And what was it really all about?
Perhaps the best person to start with is Pierre Fournier, lawyer for the politician ultimately responsible for the sponsorship program - former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano. Was the commission necessary? "Absolutely not," he said. "I don't think the commission found anything relative to its mandate that we didn't already know from internal government auditing reports and the auditor- general's report. ”What it did find were things that were not relevant to its mandate ... such as the Liberal Party financing. And personally, I have my doubts about the truthfulness of these so-called admissions."
What the commission was really about, he said, was the new guard of the Liberal Party trying to gain public support by cleaning out the old guard. "We live in a funny country. The Liberal Party has no opposition and yet it is unpopular. ... So we might as well have an enemy." Therefore, he said, the party turned in on itself, targeting the faction led by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. "Mr. Martin and his gang thought that Mr. Chrétien and his gang were the old people who needed to be cleaned out," Fournier said, referring to current Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Sylvain Lussier, lawyer for the attorney-general of Canada, said flaws in the commission, while serious, are the nature of a beast that pays little attention to the normal rules of justice. Still, he said, the commission achieved a balance between efficiency and fairness.
"It's an exercise in democracy. But there is a price to pay. Some reputations were damaged ... and some people have lost their jobs because of the mere fact that their names were mentioned. ... These people didn't benefit from a right to a fair hearing." Lussier said that when the lawyers make their final representations to Gomery, he will argue that the federal government was the ultimate victim in the sponsorship affair. Fournier said the public hearings had merit from the point of view of democratic process.
"To me," he said, "it's a wonderful opportunity to learn about a lot of things some of which I hadn't even dreamed about in how to run a government, and the interaction between politicians and civil servants, and the safeguards that are or should be put in place, etc." But he worried that while the Gomery hearings strengthened democracy, they might have jeopardized the country. "I think it helped sever the ties between the majority of Quebecers and Canada," Fournier said.
This is because the federal government has stopped spending money advertising its services. "If you don't tell them what you do for them, you might as well not do it." Fournier agreed that his client is one of the big losers, but said it's not because Gagliano did anything wrong. Rather, Fournier argued that the commission is a systematic destroyer of reputations. "You are going to have a lot of hearsay and rumour-mongering, and reputations will get hurt in the process," he said.
Like Fournier, Pierre Latraverse, lawyer for Jean Carle, once Chretien's director of operations, questions whether the public will find out the real reasons behind the commission. "This process does not clearly define whose interests are at work here. ... In the context that triggered it, they may have had an agenda that has nothing to do with the noble agenda put forth by the commission," he said.
Doug Mitchell, lawyer for the Liberal Party of Canada, said the commission too often lapsed from its purpose. "A public inquiry is supposed to be an investigation into what went wrong to make things better," he said. "It's not supposed to be a witch-hunt. And this one has turned into a bit of a witch-hunt. It has had aspects of a witch-hunt in that people have run with the evidence and have tried to use it for political or whatever purposes - and that's not what the purpose of the inquiry is."
