Andrew Coyne is reporting that the earlier reports that were denied by the Liberals were true after all. Well, that fits a pattern, doesn’t it?

And yes, it does appear that the Liberals have put off passing the budget implementation bill until then, notwithstanding earlier denials. Wonderful: a government that is too afraid to put any bills before the House, for fear they might come to a vote. They’ve more or less barricaded themselves in their offices.

Be sure to go from there to the main page – Coyne has lots of juicy stuff today, including the identity of Kinsella’s “mystery caller”.

David Frum, in the New York Times;

Luckily for the Liberals, the Conservative Party split into warring factions in 1993. Consequently, the Liberals were able to return to power that year even though they won only 37 percent of the vote.
Almost everything that Jean Chr�tien did as prime minister over the next decade can be understood as an effort to reverse his party’s long-term problems. He edged to the right on economic issues in the hope of appealing to middle-income voters alienated by Mr. Trudeau’s economic mismanagement. He veered leftward on social issues in the hope of finding a new constituency among wealthier Ontarians and Quebecers. After 9/11, he struck anti-American and anti-Israel attitudes that he hoped would resonate in isolationist Quebec and among certain immigrant communities.
And it was presumably for these same reasons that Mr. Chr�tien set in motion his kickback scheme. As Liberal strength in Quebec has decayed, the Liberals have found it more and more difficult to hold together an effective political organization in the province. How do you sustain a political party without principles or vision? Sometimes you do it with graft.
[…]
Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain’s Labor Party, Canada’s Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India’s Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.
As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It’s an exchange that is long past due.

(The column requires free registration.)
(* – I first spotted this at London Fog, but have since learned it was coined by Paul Jan�)
Bananadian update – “Fred” and Andrew Coyne have informed me that the first known appearance of “Bananada” was on March 18, 2004, at Andrew’s blog.

Captains Quarters has several posts on the testimony coming out of both Gomery and the Commons accounts committee. I’d suggest you just head over and start at the top, though I’ll provide a few key exerpts as appetizer;

The Sponsorship Program bought advertising at ten hunting and fishing shows from Gaetan Mondou for $100,000, who discovered yesterday that the man who bought them, Luc Lemay, told the government that they had cost over $1.8 million. The difference disappeared into the pockets of Jacques Corriveau, longtime pal of Jean Chr�tien and a man who doesn’t even fish.
[…]
…the two inquiries now have started to air testimony that demonstrates Martin may well have participated in the same schemes as his former boss as well as parallel corruption supporting his chief of staff’s boyfriend.
It’s these developments that pushed the Liberals into the desperate move of blocking Harper from controlling Parliamentary business on Opposition Days as scheduled yesterday in order to gain time to recover …

And this, which should the opposition members should start trying to hammer home; that Martin’s delays have engineered the perpetrators a free “Get Out Of Jail Free” card by pushing the investigation past the absurdly brief 18 month statute of limitations.

Weston believes that much more promise may come from an independent financial audit from the same forensic accounting team that plumbed the depths of the Enron scandal. Insiders have told Weston that after going through the financial records of everyone involved in Adscam, including the front businesses and the subcontractors, the bagmen and the recipients of their cash, and of course the Liberal Party, they have a good idea who wound up with the lion’s share of the money.
They promise that the audit contains “pure political dynamite” — and that report will come to the Gomery Inquiry in the next few weeks. Canadians might even see some of the money returned, if it still exists in liquid form, but more likely will be tax-fraud charges that might survive the statute of limitations that prevent Adscammers from facing the consequences of their graft.

Well, they’ve been treating our money as though it was paper in their own political board game. I suppose we should have known there’d be a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card in the rules – after all, they wrote them.

I was very hard up at one time – when I was living in Friar-street – and I used to frequent a house kept by a betting-man, near the St George’s Surrey Riding-school. A man I knew used to supply this betting-man with rats. I waw at this public-house one night when this rat-man comes up to me, and says he, “Hallo! my pippin; here, I want you: I want you to make a match. Will you kill thirty rats against my dog?” So I said, “Let me see the dog first;” and I looked at his mouth, and he was an old dog; so I says, “No, I won’t go in for thirty; but I don’t mind trying at twenty.” He wanted to make it twenty-four, but I wouldn’t. They put the twenty in the rat-pit and the dog went in first and killed his, and he took a quarter of an hour and two minutes. Then a fresh lot were put in the pit, and I began; my hands were tied behind me. They always make an allowance for a man, so the pit was made closer, for you see a man can’t turn round like a dog; I had half the space of the dog. The rats lay in a cluster, and then I picked them off where I wanted ’em and bit ’em between the shoulders. It was when they came to one or two that I had the work, for they cut about. The last one made me remember him, for he gave me a bite, of which I’ve got the scar now. It festered, and I was obliged to have it cut out. I took Dutch drops for it, and poulticed it by day, and I was bad for three weeks. They made a subscription in the room of fifteen shillings for killing these rats. I won the match, and beat the dog by four minutes. This wager was five shillings, which I had. I was at the time so hard up, I’d do anything for some money; though as far as that’s concerned, I’d go into a pit now, if anybody would make it worth my while. *

A spectator’s version.
Update – CTV has video links and a Mike Duffy interview.

As I was just saying the other day, people send me the coolest stuff.

Yup
PDF
UPDATE A reader has a translation up