John Gomery

A worried judge, a counteroffer and an eager opposition

Newsmakers of the week

Must-reads: Don Martin on Gomery’s comeuppance; Susan Riley on the cabinet shuffle; Richard Gwyn on the Green Shift.

Or perhaps a tour of the Gomerytham sewer system in a glass-bottomed boat. Let’s just hope he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs so he can find his way back to the present day:

I spent several weeks in Montreal covering the Gomery commission hearings in 2005. Despite my earlier posts today, which detail shoddy work by the Gomery crew, it is true that anyone who sat through those hearings could only shake his head at how sleazy the sponsorship scandal was. Here are three of my pieces from that period.

Feb. 10, 2005. Commission counsel Neil Finkelstein is careful not to rattle the ice cubes in Paul Martin’s glass as he delivers the gentlest interrogation in the history of ever. Ooh. Ooh, Mr. Martin, could you maybe grace this court with rousing tales of your victory over the deficit? You bet he can:

Return with us now to the thrilling days of Feb. 8, 2005, when Jean Chrétien testified at the Gomery Commission on Ratifying Paul Martin’s Preferred Campaign Narrative. (All transcripts are available here.) Jacques Bernard Roy is commission lead counsel. (Not “council.” Thanks to Mark Bourrie for spelling assistance. Sigh.) His witness, Jean Chrétien, has been exhaustively pre-interviewed, his lawyers briefed on all areas of potential questioning. Or so he thought. But what’s this?

12:49:13 PM

I am very sorry, though unsurprised, that the massive online archive of testimony from John Gomery’s now utterly discredited vanity parade has now been removed from the innertubes, because I would have liked to point to specific incidents of towering boneheadedness on the part of Judge Gomery and his cast of twits for posterity’s sake. The day the lead commission council ambushed Jean Chrétien with Elections Canada donation information that turned out to be incorrect and misinterpreted, as a single call to Elections Canada would have told them, for one example. The entire transcript of Neil Finklestein’s Olympian day-long suck-up to Paul Martin, for another. Alex Himelfarb’s coerced second appearance, in which the Clerk of the Privy Council was called back for no other reason than to contradict the testimony of the former prime minister, which he stubbornly declined to do while politely making plain his contempt for the entire line of questioning (“I was disappointed when the auditor general said every rule in the book was broken. I was kind of hoping there was one rule that didn’t get broken”).

Mr. Chretien’s lawyers are due to be in the National Press Theatre at 1pm. The gloating should be palpable.