Political corruption at the highest levels of Canada’s government appears to be happening with frightening regularity these days.
While the country has borne witness over the past several months to the spectacle of the Mulroney scandal and the reasons behind the former PM’s acceptance of a quarter of a million dollars in cash from a known arms dealer, the quest for the title of “most corrupt” in the Nation’s capitol goes on.
After the Liberal sponsorship scandal the newly minted Conservative party of Canada, under leader Stephen Harper, sailed to an election victory on with a promise to clean up government once and for all. A new era of “accountability” was the clarion call that led the Conservatives to the seat of power in Ottawa.
Now, more than two years later very little has changed and it’s business as usual up on the hill.
The people of Canada find themselves with an accountability act that is little more than a watered down perversion of its original promise. The Conservative government that has yet to implement all of the actions set out in its own legislation. The PMO has made it standard practice to scapegoat government employees for any and all failures in its own administration and allegations of bribery, by none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, are now beginning to surface.
In a recently released biography of late federal MP Chuck Cadman, an independent in the House of Commons, his widow alleges the Conservative party leadership offered Mr. Cadman a $1 million dollar life insurance policy shortly before his death. The offer was made on the condition that he vote with the Conservative party and help them topple the sitting government in an undercover coup of sorts.
Cadman's widow and daughter both say that two Conservative representatives made a $1-million life insurance offer to the dying MP, who was suffering from terminal cancer at the time, in return for his support on a May 2005 confidence motion.
To set the stage, at the time of the vote on implementation of the federal budget, Mr. Cadman had been ill for some time and was a mere weeks away from death. The Liberal government of Paul Martin was a beaten and battered shadow of its former self after the sponsorship debacle had nearly played itself out. Hanging in the balance were, among other things, the survival of the Liberal government and the long awaited implementation of the hard fought Atlantic Accord contracts between Ottawa, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador, contracts that would later be unilaterally undermined by the Harper government after taking office.
Sadly Mr. Cadman died of cancer two months after the critical vote, a vote in which he refused to side with the Conservative party.
In not supporting the Conservative cause Mr. Cadman’s lone vote allowed the bill to pass, the government of the day survived, for a short time at least, and the Atlantic Accord contracts become a reality.
Now, his widow, Dona Cadman, a Conservative candidate herself, claims that shortly before his death her husband told her and her daughter that he had been approached by members of the opposition Conservative party with the offer to buy his vote in Parliament.
Dona Cadman has since told reporters that her husband was livid at the alleged offer.
While the Conservative leadership has been busy of late trying to diffuse and refute the claims, saying they are nothing more than hearsay since Mr. Cadman is not around to speak on the matter himself, on Friday a three-year-old radio interview surfaced that lends a great deal of credibility to the Cadman family's claims.
In a June of 2005 interview with radio station CKNW, Mr. Cadman himself told the Globe and Mail's Dan Cook that the Tories did, in fact, make him financial offers days before the crucial vote.
"There was certainly some, you know, some offers made and some things along those lines about not opposing me and helping out with the finances of the campaign and that sort of thing…”
Another tape, released Thursday, clearly indicates that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of the official opposition at the time, not only knew of the offer to the ailing Cadman but that he supported the buying of a Parliamentary vote, an act that is a direct violation of Canadian law.
Author Tom Zytaruk has released a 2:37 second taped interview with Harper made in September 2005. On the recording, Harper confirms that party officials made a financial appeal to Cadman.
The RCMP are now investigating the allegations, but if the decades old Mulroney-Schreiber affair is any indication, no political figure will ever be charged in the case, least of all the Prime Minister himself.
