For those of you not in touch with Canadian politics, November 1, 2005 was a day that went down in Canada’s political history as monumental. Justice John H. Gomery handed down the first of two reports on the Sponsorship Program abuse that occurred in the province of Quebec and within the Liberal Party of Canada. For those of you that are not familiar with this scandal, allow me to elaborate.

To understand the gravity of the situation, we go back to October 30,1995 when the province of Quebec held a referendum on whether or not to remain part of Canada. The results were incredibly close, with 49.4% voting in favour of separating from Canada and 50.6% voting to stay part of the country. As such, the government of then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien decided that they needed to promote Canada in Quebec and proceeded to create the “Sponsorship Program” which would make the Government of Canada visible at public festivals, events and shows across the province, in order to counteract the sovereignty movement. This would be done by paying communications firms in Quebec to produce the ‘promotional material,’ as well as paying for the production costs. This program ran from 1994 until December 2003 when newly sworn-in Prime Minister Paul Martin cancelled the program. The troubles began in November 2003 when the Auditor General of Canada, Sheila Fraser, delivered a report on the government’s bookkeeping and finances. Her observations on the tracking of funds and financial mismanagement of the sponsorship program were scathing. She declared in her report that at least $100 million dollars of taxpayers’ money in federal coffers was unaccounted for. Furthermore, it was determined that many of these “firms” were paid for little or no work and that much of the money that had “gone missing” had actually found its way into the coffers of the Liberal Party of Canada, the party that had been given the governance of the
nation.

As this news broke and as the story began to unfold, the Canadian public was furious and Prime Minister Martin called a commission in early 2004 to investigate what had happened and to tell us who was responsible. The hearings for the commission began on September 7, 2004 and ran until June 17, 2005 with over 136 days of hearings and 172 witnesses called before the commission. A Quebec Superior Court judge, Justice John H. Gomery, was asked to head the inquiry and henceforth the commission was known as the “Gomery Commission.” The inquiry itself has been criticized, however, because the governing Liberal Party, the ones implicated in the scandal, inserted Clause K into the commissions’ mandate, which prevents Justice Gomery from “expressing any conclusion regarding the civil or criminal liability of any person or organization.” This effectively limits him from implicating the Liberal Party of Canada directly and from calling for members of the party to be criminally prosecuted.

This brings us to November 1, 2005, the day on which Justice Gomery delivered his first of two reports on who is responsible for “Adscam,” as it has become commonly known. All the normal rules and protocols, Justice Gomery declared, had been circumvented and broken and that a veil of secrecy had surrounded this program from the very beginning. His final conclusions found that former Prime Minster Jean Chrétien and his inner group of cronies were the ones responsible for the funnelling of over $100 million into the coffers of the Liberal Party of Canada. Consequently, Chrétien is suing Gomery over his conclusions claiming they are slanderous and unfounded. David Kilgour, MP was right: Canada has indeed become a “banana republic.”