(Non)Judgment Day

So the man Paul Martin appointed to get to the bottom of the sponsorship scandal has (surprise, surprise) exonerated Paul Martin.
The full interim report can be found at www.gomery.ca. I'm not going to tell you it's worth reading: I suspect that the only people who will read every word of the thousand-plus pages will be lawyers involved in the next phase. (For a next phase there will be--pretty much everybody who has been excoriated in this report is musing, publicly, about lawsuits and counter-inquiries; the name Gomery shall resound from sea to sea for some while yet, I'd wager.)
The interim report may not be worth reading (who, really, has that kind of time?) But it's certainly worth skimming, and I would recommend anyone with the slightest interest on what went wrong, and how, take a gander at Justice Gomery's take on the matter.
Gomery notes that his conclusions do not have the force they would in a court of law. So many people had so many attacks of convenient amnesia on the stand that I'm surprised Gomery was able to come to any conclusions at all. He was also specifically instructed not to assess blame in the criminal or civil sense. It's surprising, therefore, to see so much blame so Liberally (sorry) scattered hither and yon.
A lot of the blame, according to Gomery, falls on ex-PM and Paul Martin nemesis Jean Chretien. Again, how convenient: not only does Paul get off pretty much unscathed, his archenemy gets a huge heaping helping of blame.
I'm not saying Gomery's wrong to assess Chretien some responsibility for the program he created and supposedly oversaw. My hatred for "Johnny Crouton", as a friend of mine calls him, runs so deep I find it very hard to be objective...the paragraph above is the best I can do, and that only because I don't like Paul Martin very much, either.
How could our Prime Minister, who was Minister of Finance during the years of the sponsorship program, have been entirely ignorant of the shenanigans? According to Gomery,

Mr. Chrétien, Mr. Pelletier and Mr. Gagliano, apparently motivated by a belief
that their political adversaries in Quebec would exploit information about
the Sponsorship Program to the disadvantage of the federalist cause, chose
to keep it a secret, even from Mr. Chrétien’s colleagues in the Cabinet, at least to the extent that that was possible, and for as long as possible.

I suppose I can swallow this if the alternative is choking to death. However, a second reading caused me to burp it right back up. Here's the thing: if you're so desperately afraid your foes will find out what you're doing and use it against you...why are you doing it?

That question goes unanswered by Gomery, at least as far as I can see. Johnny Crouton wraps himself in the flag and says he was saving da Canada. Except the referendum was in 1995: the sponsorship scandal came later, after the separatists had lost. Who mounts a battle after the war has been won? A blithering idiot, to be sure.
Why, I wonder, were Chretien and company sworn to such secrecy? Was it in case the malfeasance practically built in to the sponsorship program was discovered? Or was it that the mere existence of the sponsorship program was a colossal insult to the intelligence of Quebeckers?

More to come...