Tipping point for the Liberals

Capt. Renault: I’m shocked — shocked! — to find that gambling is going on in here. . . .

Emil (to Renault): Your winnings, sir.

Capt. Renault: Oh, thank you, very much. . . Everybody out at once!

— a scene from Casablanca (1942).

Yes, we do trot that little scene out more often than we should, but it seems to fit the Adscam scandal like a glove. And here we are, a month after the auditor-general’s revelations of improper billing by government contractors, inflated commissions, and let’s-pretend accounting in Crown corporations and the Department of Public Works, with a government seriously damaged, but still, like Capt. Renault, acting like it had nothing to do with the affair.

The latest numbers have the Liberals at 38% of decided voters, the Conservatives at 26%, and the New Democrats at 17%. The once-moribund Bloc Qubecois, revived by the scandal, stand at 12% nationally but poll 49% in Quebec, where the party runs candidates. The provincial breakdown of support suggests the Liberals are in deep trouble in Quebec and hurting in Ontario, the two provinces that were their strongholds in the last election.

Their strategy has been to place Prime Minister Paul Martin at the front, banking that his personal popularity can take some hits while the party lies low and counts on the public’s short memory. In this, the Capt. Renault strategy is an essential. Only if Martin can credibly play the reformer, the upstanding administrator shocked, shocked, by the revelations of dishonesty, will this work.

It is true that Jean Chrtien never found it necessary, in ten years as prime minister, to accept blame or concede he was wrong. Through an exquisite talent for bullet-headedness, he made his own guilt an irrelevancy. On questions of morality, there was simply no reaching him.

Not so the current prime minister (as the commentators Andrew Coyne and David Warren have invaluably pointed out in the National Post and Ottawa Citizen). Martin is not quite lost to shame, or has at least received advice that he should play the part in front of the nation. The auditor-general having produced the paper trail, and the Chrtien-era trick of calling that trail a forgery having been exhausted, he was forced to acknowledge that a government of which he was a member had behaved abominably with public money.

Thus the crack in the Liberal armour: the government having once acknowledged that these corrupt acts were wrong, and less than the electorate deserves, its critics now have a moral standard that even the Prime Minister’s Office has publicly accepted. Governments, and government contractors, shouldn’t make up invoices for phony transactions. In Warren’s useful metaphor, we have gone from watching a cunning rat escape to watching a cornered rat cower.

Not that the prime minister hasn’t played Capt. Renault by claiming to anyone who will listen that he had no knowledge of the misbehaviour. We are unsympathetic. Liberals in government winked at this kind of thing for years, and at this very same thing for at least two previous auditor-general’s reports. They knew, and acquiesced in it.

We can’t know whether the new public rage and the decline of Liberal popularity now means the next election will be a contest instead of a cakewalk. But misfortune doesn’t drape well on the political physique, and after the setbacks of recent weeks, unhappy Liberals have brought some nasty party infighting into the open. Martin’s and Chrtien’s factions — often, interestingly enough, divided on ethnic or religious grounds — are swiping at each other in local nominations, and doing some very public damage to the party’s image as an unconquerable monolith.

If the Adscam revelations were the final straw for the public, and the Liberals have at last lost their station in Canadian public life, watch for the knives to come out. Much can change, and very quickly, when they do. We may shortly not have Paul Martin to kick around any more.