I was thinking as the torrent of anguish flying around the Canadian bit of the internet began to subside this afternoon about scandels as we have them here. They have tended not to be in the British style about sex or in the US style about power. They tend to be about cash:
- There were all those allegations about that friend to both the Christian Democratic Union Party of Germany and Brian Mulroney:
That would be the same Karlheinz Schreiber from whom Mr. Mulroney was later — wrongfully, as it turned out — accused of receiving kickbacks in connection with Air Canada’s $1.8-billion purchase of aircraft from Airbus Industrie. The false accusation prompted Mr. Mulroney’s famous lawsuit against the government of Canada, in settlement of which he was eventually paid $2-million. Much of this was documented in Mr. Kaplan’s 1998 book, Presumed Guilty, a passionate defence of Mr. Mulroney’s reputation…
- Saskatchewan’s Tories of the early 1990s were not so fortunate as…
14 Conservative members of the legislature and two caucus workers were convicted of fraud and breach of trust for illegally diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from government allowances in a phoney expense-claim scam. The party was destroyed by this scandal
Having worked on a breach of public trust case, I was very grateful to these guys for creating such a solid body of legal precedent to work with.
- A number of Buchanan’s Conservatives Nova Scotia’s in the 1980s always seemed to be in the courts and/or the locally known “bagman” it seemed before the Westray diaster put all that in perspective if not entirely in the past. [Google, by the way, is a rotten historian as there is little to be found on the topic.]
- And, as we all know, it was not only Tories as Jeffery Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail in February 2004 about Trudeau’s Liberals:
And, of course, there was patronage. When running for the party leadership in 1968, Mr. Trudeau said, “I’m not against helping a friend of the Liberal Party when I get a chance.” Generally, however, he disliked the grubby
business of patronage. He couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in politics for the hope of reward.He learned — and wound up filling the Senate, agencies, boards and commissions with Liberals, ending his prime ministerial career with the greatest single-day orgy of patronage in Canadian history. His Quebec ministers met Thursday mornings in a dining room adjacent to the parliamentary restaurant to exercise political discretion on behalf of supporters and party friends. Mr. Trudeau’s ministerial fixers in Quebec
included Jean Marchand, Marc Lalonde, André Ouellet and Francis Fox, now responsible for Quebec in Mr. Martin’s office.
There must be others. Any other bouts of sticky fingers from Canada’s past?