Adscam was valiant

The historic context of the scandal that brought down the Liberal regime is one in which we would not have done differently

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

I recall the late afternoon of October 30, 1995 as a typically gray Vancouver rush hour. I carried my two-year-old son over my shoulder and patted his back as I swung in slow wide arcs around our tiny living room waiting for five o’clock. Outside on the busy street, eastbound commuter traffic was backed up from the traffic lights far enough that bored drivers could stare through our living room window.

Inside, Peter Mansbridge came on TV to begin explaining how the horizontal blue and red bar across the bottom would indicate the tally of the referendum for sovereignty in Quebec. The show had the air of a moderately important hockey game, including when it came on for west coast audiences—like everything important to the nation, incongruently in the late afternoon.

Like a game, CBC host Mansbridge delivered a play-by-play that did not lack for enthusiasm and he seemed genuinely delighted when the bar spilled over centre this way then that. In the coverage of politics and balloting, there is typically an election taking place in hundreds of different ridings in which untold numbers of races, personal stories, tragedies and triumphs are everywhere to be rooted out by an army of reporters feeding back to many television networks. But not so on this evening. There was only one race, no candidates, and only one story to cover. The broadcast hardly ever parted from Mansbridge’s face. The technicians put his monitor, the one showing him that infuriatingly twitching blue-red bar, in front and below the line of his desk, so that it appeared as though Mansbridge was looking down at the very bar on the bottom of our own screens. That bar was the only game in town, and it began the night much the same way it ended: pretty much at the 50 – 50 point, never varying, to my recollection, more than 2% to the Yes or to the No side.

And this was how the country was recklessly placed in the balance. From my Vancouver living room, the easy all-Canadian style of Mansbridge, the game-like presentation of the referendum outcome, and the nonchalant gazes of bored commuters out my window passively watching me balance a small part of the future of Canada over my shoulder while keeping a fixated eye on the blue-red bar foretelling calamity or relief, all added up then, as it does to this day, to a thoroughly surreal memory.

It was only later that Canadians learned Jacques Parizeau had some scheme planned for the morning after a 50%-plus-one Yes vote that involved calling out the Quebec wing of the Canadian Armed Forces to take up positions on the bridge from Ottawa to Hull. His blame for the failure of Quebec sovereigntists that night—pointing to “ des votes ethniques”—hinted at an even more chilling potential that Canada may have narrowly avoided when Quebecers voted just this side of federalism that fateful day.

The country outside Quebec, following the lackadaisical lead of then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien, had just whistled past the graveyard and barely took notice at all, until it was almost too late. The near miss in that referendum, which everyone knew and continues to know will not be the last, woke the country up. The government, now spurred by a startled and alerted Prime Minister, vowed to not take a chance like that again.

That is the nearly forgotten backdrop to the sponsorship scandal known as Adscam and revealed in all its corruption by the Sheila Fraser inquiry and later the Gomery commission whose early findings cut the Liberals down to a minority government in 2004 and whose later testimonies encouraged a cabal of opposition parties to collapse the government altogether, bringing us the election campaign we are mired in today. But lost in all the sensational revelations of corruption is the underlying rationale of the sponsorship program in the first place.

Another Quebec referendum has, since 1995, never been more than a couple years off. The federal government was charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the nation would not be lost in another near-future Yes victory in Quebec, but exactly what could it do? Increased spending on federalist-inspiring programs would take a generation or more to produce the Canada-positive attitude among wavering sovereigntists necessary to soundly win a referendum. Political debate in both the House of Parliament and the Assembly in Quebec would only carry the day so far with the average ho-hum separatist in the street who, in common with all Canadians, is largely unaware of or unaffected by official politics. The private sector knows: it is far cheaper and way more effective in the short term to post up pictures of thick sizzling steaks than to actually produce them for customers. The feds were left with only advertising as the means to win the country’s future.

Even if you, as the leader of the federal government, were pretty sure that a concerted advertising campaign to sell the sizzle of Canada to a drifting Quebec audience would be corrupted to some degree to the personal benefit of some operators, would you not anyway back such a campaign? If it was the best (albeit a dirty) method of quickly and relatively cheaply generating a more positive nationalism in the short term between potential referendums in Quebec, would any of us have made a different choice?

Conversely, would we as Canadians be happy to learn that, following the dreadful near-miss in 1995, caused in part by a negligent federal government, the leaders, concerned to avoid any funds slipping through the cracks, chose to still do nothing to promote Canada in Quebec in the years afterward?

Imagine such a later referendum in the early new century, this one tipping over to the Yes side, with all the attendant turmoil and confusion, and possible military hostilities, near-certain economic disruption, and potential disintegration of the whole country. The bigger scandal would be in the national inquiry to follow (assuming there would be a nation to conduct such a thing), finding that the government chose to avoid promoting Canadian nationalism with advertising in Quebec because of the risk that some people might improperly pocket some of the expenditures.

****