March 12, 2004
A decade of scandal
A senior bureaucrat says the government began changing the rules on awarding federal advertising contracts a year before the 1995 Quebec soverignty referendum - despite the Liberals' self-righteous insistence that the sponsorship program was brought in because of the said referendum:
The scope of the sponsorship scandal widened yesterday with allegations that controversial federal advertising practices, long painted as a response to the near-separation of Quebec in 1995, actually began many months earlier. Allan Cutler, a public servant turned whistle-blower, told a Commons committee departmental checks and balances on contract procedures were effectively erased in 1994 by a senior Public Works official, who claimed he had ministerial backing.
Cutler pointed the finger at Chuck Guite, then the department's director of advertising and public opinion, saying Guite effectively removed him from his job overseeing the price and terms of the lucrative ad contracts.
Cutler, who was then placed directly under Guite, said he was asked to backdate contracts, give payment for work apparently not performed, approve improper advance payments, and authorize deals that did not comply with rules.
"I was no longer expected to negotiate prices with advertising firms or to insist on the established government contracting practices," Cutler told the public accounts committee investigating the scandal.
[...]
"I have had to unlearn 20 years of good contracting," he said in one entry to his diary from December 1995. "Falsification of information, payments to firms to conceal improper contracting . . . it never ends."