IRA BASEN:
“Follow the money”: Watergate, the sponsorship scandal and the press
CBC News Viewpoint | April 18, 2005 | More from Ira Basen
Ira Basen joined CBC Radio in 1984 and was senior producer at Sunday Morning and Quirks and Quarks. Among his other accomplishments include his involvement in the creation of three network programs The Inside Track (1985), This Morning (1997) and Workology (2001). He has also written for Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus. He has taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson. He is a co-author of the Canadian edition of The Book of Lists, which will be published by Knopf in November 2005. His book on public relations and the media will be published by Penguin Books in 2006.
"But if these allegations are true … then the Liberal Party of Canada in Quebec may have been complicit in an extensive and ongoing fraud. And that is worse than the famous 1972 break-in at the campaign headquarters of the U.S. Democratic Party."
John Ibbitson - The Globe and Mail - April 8, 2005
"The dam protecting federal Liberals from the disclosure of their party's ugly past had been breached – and Canada's Watergate spilled out."
Don Martin - The National Post - April 8, 2005
"The Smoking Gun"
Globe and Mail headline - April 8, 2005
"Now, Mr. Justice John Gomery's exposure of a scandal finally worthy of the title of Canada's Watergate is accelerating political time to light-speed."
James Travers - The Toronto Star - April 7, 2005
Could these esteemed journalists be right? Do we "finally" have a scandal worthy of the title "Canada's Watergate"? Does this mean that Canadian reporters and columnists will now stop using the word "gate" every time some new example of malfeasance is uncovered? (Remember Tunagate, Strippergate, Shawinigate etc.?) And could the sponsorship scandal really be even "worse" than Watergate?
It is probably inevitable that any whiff of political corruption would conjure up images of Watergate. It was, after all, the granddaddy of all modern-day scandals. But the current efforts to compare the sponsorship mess to Watergate are not convincing.
Watergate was much more than the "third-rate burglary" that the Nixon administration tried to paint it as. The break-in at the Democratic headquarters was simply the last in a long series of illegal and covert actions that included the use of various government agencies to cover up crimes and shut down investigations.
The people involved in our current sponsorship scandal also appear to have been engaged in illegal activities, including, possibly, fraud, bribery and extortion. But that by itself does not raise this scandal to the standard of Watergate.
What sets Watergate apart from the sponsorship scandal, and most other political scandals, is the motivation of the drama's central characters. Why did these men do what they did? The answer, in the case of our current scandal, appears to be good old-fashioned greed.
The sponsorship program was a government-gifted golden goose ready to be fleeced. The admen knew that taxpayers were being ripped off and chose not to care, while the Liberal party bagmen and friends of the prime minister, who controlled access to the goose, were not prepared to see others profit without taking a healthy cut for themselves.
Their desire to line their own pockets even appears to have outstripped their interest in raising money for "the cause."
By contrast, nobody really made money off Watergate and the other crimes of the Nixon administration. There was, of course, a lot of dirty money floating around Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972, but neither the president nor any of his dirty tricksters were motivated primarily by greed.
Most of the money stashed away in various bank accounts was not meant for anyone's personal gain, or even to secure the re-election of the president. Most of it was to go toward funding further espionage and other illegal activities. Even the anti-Castro Cuban "plumbers" who broke into the Democratic offices in the Watergate Hotel thought they were striking a blow for a free Cuba.
And it is this absence of greed as a motivating force that makes the Watergate scandal so unique, and so dangerous. Because if it wasn't about the money, than the motivation of the perpetrators had to lie somewhere else. And according to American political historian Richard Reeves, Watergate was nothing less than a "clandestine domestic operation in which a determined president secretly plotted what amounted to a coup d'etat against American constitutional government."
As odious as the revelations coming out of the Gomery Inquiry are, none of them suggest anything of this magnitude was taking place. And as "explosive" as the testimony of Jean Brault is, it is not the "smoking gun" trumpeted by the Globe and Mail headline.
The smoking gun of Watergate fame was the taped conversation of President Nixon actively planning the cover-up in the days following the break-in. If Brault's uncorroborated accusations are the smoking gun of this scandal, what description will the Globe editors use if evidence ever emerges directly linking Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin to these illegal activities?
But there is another aspect of the Watergate scandal where comparisons with the sponsorship scandal are perhaps more useful, and that concerns the role of the press. Watergate has long been seen as the high water mark of investigative journalism, a shining example of the importance of a free press in a free society. The reality is somewhat different.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post became pop heroes for their critical work in bringing Watergate to light, but apart from them, the record of the Washington press corps was less than stellar. At the time of the break-in, there were about 2,000 full-time reporters working in Washington. In the first six months after the break-in, only 14 of them were assigned to cover the story full time, and only six were doing "investigative" work.
Similarly, the sponsorship scandal does not represent a golden moment in the history of Canadian journalism. The Globe and Mail, specifically reporter Daniel Leblanc, did important work uncovering the links between the sponsorship money and the Quebec ad firms, but the assertion, recently made by Globe editor Edward Greenspon, that Leblanc was responsible for the fact that "this tawdry affair ever came to light," seems a bit over-blown.
The fact is that the whole sponsorship mess was unfolding for more than five years in our nation's capital, home to more reporters per square metre than anyplace else in Canada, and it basically escaped the attention of just about all of them.
Of course, the focus of most of those journalists is on Parliament Hill, a place that is far less interesting and important than most of them think, but where a "story" is always available by scrumming a politician, and where you can usually find a communications flack eager to leak the details of some brilliant new government initiative under the cover of an "anonymous source."
Watergate was also fuelled by information from a source who demanded anonymity, but a great deal has changed since 1973, in both Washington and Ottawa. The strategic "leaks" of today bear little resemblance to the methods or the motives of Deep Throat.
The critical piece of advice that Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward in that underground garage was to "follow the money." It is still the most important service a political journalist can perform. But you generally won't find the money on the Hill.
As we have learned from the Gomery testimony, the money is down in the murky world where lobbyists, bagmen, political aides, bureaucrats and "friends of" congregate, far away from the bright lights of the Commons lobby.
Woodward and Bernstein have always argued that the reason they were able to crack the Watergate cover-up is that they were simply local reporters, not part of the political pack. "We were grunts," Bernstein wrote in 1992, "we had no covey of highly placed sources."
And this is the real lesson that Watergate can still teach us. In 2005, the federal government will spend about $190 billion of our money. Canadians are far more interested in finding out where that money is going than they are in the daily spectacle of the Commons zoo, or the breathless reporting of political gossip, or government spin masquerading as journalism.
Ottawa is a lot bigger than the 308 members of Parliament who command so much of our attention. To avoid future scandals like the one that is currently unfolding, the money will have to be followed a lot more closely than it has been in the past.
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