I recalled this morning, reading about the sponsorship inquiry from a certain distance...because I am down here...that twice in my young and fawn-like life I have actually heard about the same sort of thing happening from the horses mouths except it was money arriving from provincial governments - "the program without a name". But without the taint of the kickback, I suppose. Or perhaps there is a difference between a kickback and a long-term relationship. Dues served and all that. Intergenerational patronage kind of thing.
Why do I have this suspicion that these guys either just did it so badly or they just got caught?
Comments
Rusty - April 13, 2005 1:35 PM
The kind of thing where someone gives donations to the party in exchange for government contracts happens all the time in Canadian federal and provincial politics. The difference, I think, in the case of the sponsorship scandal, is that the government contracts had no substance and the actual payment on the contracts for the nothing that was done became the donation to the party. Its bad enough when you hire your biggest donors to pave the roads but when you hire cronies to do nothing and then tell them to pay part of it back to the Liberal party, its worse.