Right, so, where was I. Oh, right...

Canada

(Thanks to Jocelyn Wirth and her unnamed co-worker for some fact-and-sanity checking on this section, and some insight into the current state of affairs. Any errors of fact, however, should be assumed my own, not theirs)

Prologue: The Sponsorship Scandal

Canada is in the grips right now of a messy money scandal generally referred to the 'sponsorship scandal'. It has its roots in the governing Liberal Party's reaction to the 1995 referendum in Quebec on independence—a referendum that failed. However, the federal government decided to try to reduce the chances of future referenda—or at least improve the chances of such referenda continuing to fail—by initiating an advertising campaign within the province.

By 1999, there were already some concerns in the Chrétien government that the money was being misused, an investigation was begun. A couple years later, the minister responsible for the program was quietly replaced and sent to Denmark as ambassador.

An investigation was finally completed and a report issued in late 2003. It did not become public knowledge yet, however, because Prime Minister Jean Chrétien prorogued Parliament for the winter, thus preventing the report from being tabled. Chrétien retired while Parliament was still recessed, leaving Paul Martin, until then the Finance Minister, as Prime Minister, with the dubious honour of getting to make the whole mess public and deal with the fallout.

Parliament reconvened in February 2004 and the scandal thus became a public one with the tabling of the report. The report made it clear that lots of money had been spent for work that had never actually taken place, and that an alarming number of government departments, Crown Corporations, and private entities were involved. The report did not directly finger either the former or the new Prime Minister, but the public was left wondering how such a broad scandal could have been missed. It was a classic no-win scenario, particularly for former Finance Minister Martin. If he was involved, obviously that was bad. If he had no idea, it made him look like an incompetent overseer of the nation's money.

Martin countered this impression by insisting that Chrétien, long a rival within the Liberal Party, had kept him out of the loop on many policy issues—notably issues involving national unity. His take was that the entire mess was perpetrated by a small, well-organised cadre within the government who kept their doings carefully hidden from their bosses. Initially, his remarks attempted to shield Chrétien as well, but over time, this shifted to a position where the former PM was blamed for involvement.

An investigatory commission, headed up by retired Justice John Gomery, was convened almost immediately, and has been active ever since. A preliminary report was released in early November 2005, seeming to exhonorate PM Martin.

Meanwhile, Martin allowed himself to be pursuaded to go to the polls to secure a proper mandate for his government in the wake of the February 2004 report, and asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for June 2004. The electorate delivered something of a rebuke to the ruling Liberal party—enough to keep them out of the majority in Parliament, but still giving them the largest block. The result was a minority government, rather than a coalition: the Liberals retained full control over the government with the backing mostly of the New Democratic Party (NDP), but the NDP did not actually join the government. This is fairly rare in most modern Parliamentary states, and turned out to be as fraught with peril as it sounds.

The Current Situation

The official plan was always that Paul Martin would call another general election after the release of the Gomery Report, scheduled for February 2006. The various opposition parties appear to have become impatient, however, and so Canada is going to the polls before this crucial report on government corruption is released.

If you're beginning to suspect that the report, and the scandal it's about, might all just be flimsy excuses to force a new election, you might be right. Hang on a sec and we'll get to that.

They're also going to the polls in the dead of winter. In Canada. Think about that for a minute, especially if you live in any northern climate, like I do here in Minnesota.

Unsurprisingly, the Canadian populace—or at least, the Candian press—seem to be unamused by the idea of slogging through the cold and snow of a Canadian January to vote, and equally unimpressed by the idea of having their Christmas &c season made all the more irritating by political campaigning. In fact, they seem rather unimpressed by their politicians in general.

Reading between the lines of a speech Mr Martin made on the first day of the election season, he appears to be counting on the electorate to blame the three opposition parties—the Conservaites, the New Democrats, and the Bloc Quebecois—for the timing of the election. Strictly speaking, I suppose, he's correct. The No Confidence motion was introduced by Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservatives. However, the motion seems to have been the end-game of a series of negotiations attempting to reach a compromise over the originally-intended post-Gomery-Report elections. Since it's arguable that Mr Martin, as a minority PM, should have recognised he was in no position to be inflexible unless he wanted to cause a fuss, the fuss thus caused is at least as much his fault as Mr Harper's.

At any rate, the campaign so far is covering a pretty intense range of issues—tax reform, possible reform of the Canadian Senate (Canadian Senators are appointed by the Governor General on advice of the Prime Minister; they serve until they're 75 or dead, whichever comes first), some really messy ideas for child care and child sports credits. There's some US-bashing going on (in fact, the US Ambassador to Ottawa told them to stop using the US as their bogeyman, and Paul Martin told him to stuff it). There's posturing on gay marriage.

You'll notice there's very little in there about the Gomery Report, or the scandal that it's about, or about reforms to prevent that sort of thing happening again. Curiously, nobody seems to want to talk about it—not even the opposition, which really would have been better served waiting for the report and using it to tear the Liberal Party to itty, bitty pieces, when you think about it.

(Note, this is not an anti-endorsement of the Liberal Party. I'm not Canadian. I don't much care who wins as long as they're smarter than the monkey in charge here in the US, which all the candidates appear to be. It just seems odd to me that the opposition parties didn't wait, that's all).

Meanwhile, surveys are turning up some interesting results. Keep in mind that the Liberal Party has governed for most of the century, with a few stints of Tory government. The New Democratic Party has never governed or come close to it.

Except that at the moment, in Manitoba at least, the three parties are running close to even! Specifically, the Liberals and Conservatives are slipping and the NDP is climbing.

There's still several weeks, of course, and the campaign is quite intense—as you might imagine when there are only a few weeks to do it in and a holiday in the middle of it. Lots could happen, and there's really no clear telling who is going to wind up the next Prime Minister of Canada....