There is no doubt that the Gomery Inquiry has drastically changed the Canadian political landscape, so much so that the once-mighty Liberal dynasty was humbly brought down in the House of Commons after struggling to retain its minority government.

In addition, as any government supplier will tell you, civil servants are being careful to the point of being anal retentive about following the rules of tendering and spending.

But the question remains whether Gomery will be a lasting deterrent against malfeasance and misspending in Ottawa. In addition, there is the question of whether whoever forms the government after the pending election will follow up Justice John Gomery’s final report in February with concrete preventative measures.

Much has been written in recent months about the sponsorship scandal being the worst in Ottawa since Confederation. However, a quick trip down memory lane will reveal that superlatives flow easily in times of scandal. Really, Gomery is just one more horrific entry in the Parliamentary Hall of Shame on the Rideau, along with Guy Favreau, Sir John A. Macdonald’s Pacific Scandal, the Oerlikon scandal, in which insider knowledge of a pending federal contract worth $1 billion was used to buy land, and so on.

Indeed, there may have been a huge advertising scandal in 1993 when the former Conservative government of Brian Mulroney gave $21-million worth of contracts to ad agencies with Tory ties without any semblance of competitive bidding — had there been any rules, that is.

The Liberals introduced guidelines the following year governing advertising, polling and communications contracts to prevent patronage. The subsequent sponsorship program less than three years later speaks volumes about the success of those guidelines.

The Conservatives’ Canada 125 Celebrations of 1992, headed by a civil servant named Chuck Guité, might also have attracted intense scrutiny had the ruling Tories not disbanded the comptroller general’s office (subsequently reinstated by the Liberals) or severely cut the auditor general’s budget.

Guité is now facing criminal charges in connection with the Liberals’ sponsorship scandal.

But enough digression about the past.

It is interesting to note that a week after the first report by Justice Gomery in late October, its contents were no longer considered news because the media and the rest of the country were preoccupied with a soap opera spawned by the Opposition about whether there would be Christmas election. This, of course, culminated with the government’s downfall on Nov. 28.

One-day wonder

The Gomery report may be more than 1,000 pages long, but the media’s handling of its contents made it virtually a one-day wonder. Discussion of the report’s findings was absent from the media within four days.

A Canadian voter could be forgiven for not knowing that Gomery exonerated Prime Minister Paul Martin for any part in the sponsorship scandal.

Considering that much of this report dealt with a “culture of entitlement” in Ottawa and how a huge spending program could be carried out without the knowledge of Cabinet, you would think at least a few follow-up analyses would be warranted.

The media’s short shrift of such an important document doesn’t bode well for reform. But it does fit the pattern of past scandals.

Once the political fallout from a scandal has settled, the media — and Canadians themselves — experience scandal fatigue.

By the time the Mulroney government completed nine years in office, almost a dozen ministers had been forced to resign and several members of the Conservatives’ Quebec caucus had gone to jail for everything from soliciting bribes to outright theft.

Yet, the voters and media were quite willing to give the succeeding government of Jean Chrétien an easy ride for many years despite disturbing reports coming out of Shawinagan about hotel loans from the public purse, improper phone calls to the former president of the Business Development Bank by the prime minister, and an entire inquiry being prematurely shut down because the government didn’t like what it was hearing about its soldiers in Somalia.

As late as 1998, evidence before a Montreal criminal trial pointed to an elaborate toll-gating scheme in which Liberal organizers somehow got hold of the names of applicants for job-creation grants and hit them up for donations to the party in exchange for approval.

A prominent Montreal Liberal organizer went to jail for influence-peddling.

Nova Scotia MP Peter Mackay tried hard in the Commons to hold the government accountable. But there wasn’t enough public interest to cross the tipping point. Canadians just didn’t want to hear about any more scandal.

@page_break@In the mid-1960s, the Favreau scandal nearly took down Lester Pearson’s government. But, by June 1968, it had all been swept away by Trudeaumania.

Unfortunately, Canadian vigilance over probity and government spending is spasmodic. Once the Opposition has finished making use of Gomery, the cycle toward the next big scandal will begin. IE