Gomery Report finally released

[ladywithspinninghead]

After 18 months of scandalous revelations, the Gomery Report has finally been released! Paul Martin is exonerated and Gomery has largely assigned the blame to Chrétien although Gomery doesn`t know if Chrétien was fully aware of the corruption within his inner circle.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051101.wgomeryfind1101/BNStory/Front



Will this bring down the Liberal gov't or has the Canadian public gotten over it? If the latter, will it be sufficient to usher in a majority government? Interesting times lie ahead....

Oh, and Jean Chrétien is to make a rare public appearance denouncing Gomery`s findings...

 

[anitram]

Did you see Chretien's press conference? That was something else. He's kind of like this insane old man and a comedy routine all in one.

I think nothing will really happen as a result of Gomery. PM was exonorated of any wrongdoing and even if he hadn't been, I don't think the public is interested in this sort of scandal. It seems to me that most people accept there is a level of corruption, and this is just par for the course.

The next election is going to be a waste of money - I think very little will change in terms of seats.

 

[ladywithspinninghead]

I agree that the Canadian public will be largely over it but I do think seats will change in the next election - I think the Liberals will win back the seats they lost in Ontario (if my memory serves me correctly, there were a few) and possibly a few in provinces apprehensive of the Tories such as Saskatchewan and British-Columbia.


As for Chrétien, I only saw parts of it on the news - you can`t blame the guy - in his mind, he built up a legacy for ten years and it was sullied and tainted in a relatively short amount of time.

 

[DaveC]

I thought Chretien did a pretty decent job in the press conference - he didn't shrug the whole thing off, accepted his part of the blame, and lightened the mood so that the whole thing didn't seem like some dismal gloom on the Liberal Party.

Paul Martin is exonerated, although personal opinion is that as Finance Minister, if that much money is disappearing, you should know about it. He's been exonerated from being part of the actual corruption, but not from displaying ineptitude in his former job (at least in part of it).

This whole situation has made me switch from a card-carrying member of the Liberal party to now being a tacit NDP supporter. Mind, my values have changed somewhat over the past year (I've shifted quite a bit more to the left), but regardless. I'm starting to see the Liberal party (and especially after I attended last year's Annual General Meeting) as one giant morass of bureaucracy.

I'll likely be voting for the local NDP candidate in the upcoming election (and we've got a provincial one coming soon too). But not solely as a result of the sponsorship scandal. I really can't see that many votes shifting from the Liberals as a result of all this.

I think the main result of all this has been to make the people who hate the Liberals hate them even more, and the hardcore party supporters now just stand behind the party even more. Those of us who aren't committed one way or the other are really not that badly affected by this. The Liberals will likely be re-elected to yet another majority, and the Conservatives will whinge again during the campaign and come up with ludicrous talking points yet again about how the Liberals support child porn for refusing to use the notwithstanding clause.

God damn, I hate the Conservative Party.