February 10, 2004
The Chretien legacy
Don't look at me. I didn't vote for him:
The quarter-billion dollar federal sponsorship fiasco was so widespread that even Canada's storied national police force was used to funnel cash to friends of the federal government, according to a scorching report tabled Tuesday by Auditor General Sheila Fraser.
Fraser's damning indictment claimed its first casualty before being made public. Alfonso Gagliano was summarily fired from his job as ambassador to Denmark because of his role in the affair.
It was under his watch as public works minister that the federal government ran a sponsorship and advertising program that was lambasted in Fraser's report.
[...]
The RCMP case was one of several examples highlighted by Fraser to show how the sponsorship program worked.
In 1997, the national police force began planning for a splashy 125th anniversary party that was held two years later.
Over that time, Public Works contributed $3 million to a trio of ad agencies - Lafleur, Media/I.D.A. Vision and Gosselin - who were responsible for transferring the money to the RCMP.
Those three agencies took a combined $1.3 million in fees and commissions and transferred $1.7 million to the RCMP for its anniversary celebration.
Fraser's audit concluded that the RCMP's Quebec division received its payments through a separate non-government bank account, which violates the federal Financial Administration Act.
The transactions were recorded manually rather than in the RCMP's standard accounting system, and some of the supporting documents were subsequently destroyed.
Fraser outlined similar practices in a stamp competition organized by Canada Post; in a Via Rail-sponsored television series on hockey legend Maurice Richard; and in a project to raise $1.5 million for a giant screen TV for the federally run Port of Montreal.
The auditor general expressed two major concerns with the practice.
First, there was no need to go through private middlemen to transfer money from a government department to a government agency.
And there was no need to pay federal agencies like the RCMP to display the federal logo at their events. Treasury Board guidelines required them to do it, with or without the sponsorship program, Fraser noted.
The overwhelming majority of suspicious transactions went to people and organizations in Quebec, though I run the risk of getting this blog placed on a seven-second delay if I say much more about it. We're talking about millions of dollars here, yet I find this one the most telling:
[Fraser] also explained how the Montreal Impact soccer team received almost $150,000 in sponsorship funds during the 1998-99 indoor season.
A similar request by the Edmonton Drillers soccer team was rejected, with the government claiming no funds were available.
Posted by damian at February 10, 2004 08:01 PM