Chuck's warm blanket of denial

John Ivison
National Post

Friday, April 23, 2004

A mass e-mail doing the rounds yesterday has the CBC developing a Canadian version of Survivor, in which contestants have to drive through Saskatchewan in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says: "I voted for Chretien. I'm from Ontario. I'm gay and I'm here to take your guns." The first to complete the round trip alive is the winner. According to testimony before the public accounts committee yesterday, a variation could be a sticker reading: "My name is Chuck Guite. Sponsorship pays -- particularly the advertising agency."

The former bureaucrat in the middle of the sponsorship scandal would probably be a marked man in Saskatchewan, but if he really wants to walk on the wild side, he should take a stroll past the Langevin building in Ottawa, where the Prime Minister's Office is located.

Guite spent hours yesterday steadfastly denying there was any political interference during his years as one of the senior public servants running the government's advertising activities. There was political input into the the sponsorship program that the Auditor-General says led to the questionable spending of $100-million of taxpayers' money -- input, but not interference.

However, after much prompting by MPs, he did remember some political interference in the appointment of a consultancy. But it was not from the expected source of former prime minister Jean Chretien.

Or former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano. Rather, it was from the office of Paul Martin, then the finance minister.

"Mr. Martin personally, no. His office, yes -- and on many occasions,'' Guite said. "There were many contracts with a local company ... Earnscliffe."

Guite recalled that, once the Liberals were elected in 1993, his new boss, public works minister David Dingwall, questioned him on how the program worked under the Mulroney Conservatives, information the bureaucrat refused to divulge.

"I recall as clearly as if it was yesterday, Minister Dingwall, who I was meeting for the first time, got up from his chair, walked around his desk towards me, extended his hand and said 'Welcome aboard -- you won't rat on them, you won't rat on us.' "

Dingwall was at least partially right. Guite's testimony yesterday was remarkably consistent with that of Chretien's former chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, and Gagliano, save for the discrepancy between them in the number of times they met (Gagliano said once or twice a year; Guite said once a month).

It was just the current Prime Minister's luck that the only document the former public servant tabled before the committee all day linked Martin's office to the sole-sourcing of a contract to Earnscliffe, the firm where many of his closest advisors worked.

Although potentially incendiary, the revelation was something of a distraction, since it had only a tangential relationship to the Auditor-General's report on the sponsorship program that sparked the public accounts committee inquiry.

From the outset of his testimony yesterday, Guite attempted to appeal to the humanity of the assembled parliamentarians -- a forlorn hope in most cases. "Where my wife and I winter in Arizona ... we had Canadians driving by our trailer yelling obscenities at us."

This was mystifying to Guite because, as he repeated throughout the morning, he is blameless of any wrongdoing.

In his opening statement, Guite took issue with the A-G's findings, specifically that the administration of the sponsorship program showed little regard for "contracting rules and regulations, transparency and value for money."

Canadians got value for money from the program, aimed at raising the profile of the federal government in Quebec at the time of the sovereignty referendum, Guite said. How do we know? Because the country is still together. "The proof of the pudding..." the now retired public servant said more than once.

That was Guite's story and he stuck to it resolutely, even as the evidence to the contrary threatened to engulf him. The Dalai Lama was holding a press conference across the road from the committee room and more than one MP must have been tempted to nip over and ask him the secrets of his tolerance. A quick recital of verse three of Training the Mind -- "may I examine my mind in all actions and as soon as a negative state occurs ... may I firmly face and avert it" -- might have lowered Conservative MP Vic Toews' blood pressure as he ran into Guite's blanket denials.

Toews could barely contain himself at one point when asking about the numerous advertising agencies who were paid $244,000 in commissions simply for transferring $1.7-million in funding from Guite's division in the Department of Public Works to the RCMP for its 125th anniversary celebrations. "It appears that these transactions were designed to hide the source of the money. Why not pay it directly to the RCMP and save a quarter of a million dollars in commissions ... Do you take us for fools for listening to your nonsense?"

Guite's only concession was that the agencies received "fairly good commissions -- I won't deny it."

To Guite, his department worked in exactly the same way as the private sector. He identified sponsorship opportunities, such as the placing of the Canada logo at centre ice at the Montreal Forum, former home of the Montreal Canadiens. "Obviously I knew there was value because I could see the wordmark every time the puck went over the ice."

To anyone looking in from the private sector, this would probably have been regarded as a going concern that would swiftly have gone out of business had it not been larded with more and more federal funding. One marketing source said that, as a consultant, she would be fired if she applied the return on investment criteria used by Guite.

At the end of the day, whether Canadians got value for money essentially rested on whether Guite said it had. And he is more likely to take a drive through Saskatchewan in a Volvo with his name on the side than admit to mistakes in that department.