In my opinion, Jean Chretien was never as great a leader as many now perceive him. In my opinion, Paul Martin was a far better leader than many considered him then or now.
In my opinion, Paul Martin was handed a poison pill by the Chretien administration in the form of the sponsorship scandal. That skulduggery happened on Chretien’s watch while Paul Martin sat purged in backbench exile.
A lot of folks claim that Martin must’ve known about it. He didn’t. How do I know? Because if he had known about it he’d have been all over Chretien with it like a Newfie on a Harp seal, beating the living bejeebus out of him over it.
Curiously enough, Paul Martin seems to think the same as I do. In his new book Hell and High Water, Martin takes aim squarely at Chretien. From the Toronto Star:
In a chapter devoted to the sponsorship scandal, he takes angry aim at Chrétien, his political nemesis, for leaving him saddled with a damning auditor’s report into questionable government funding in Quebec.
“I was mad at Jean Chrétien for having left me this time bomb,” Martin writes. “It drove me crazy that I had to deal with this leftover mess when there were so many more important issues I had come into government to confront.”
Martin repeats his assertion that he was in the dark about the sponsorship program [an often overlooked conclusion of the Gomery Commission as well]. But he conceded that the revelations of kickbacks to party backers in Quebec fuelled a political firestorm.
“We did not win the communications battle over sponsorship in the end. I don’t know whether it was winnable,” he said.
He said the resulting controversy revived the separatist parties in Quebec, boosted the sagging fortunes of the NDP and “lubricated the unity of the right.”
Martin also critiques Harper for his “pinched vision” of Canada.
Maybe it’s a function of Canadian politics. Trudeau begat Mulroney. Mulroney begat Chretien. Chretien begat Harper.
Anyway, that’s my opinion.
The Mound of Sound 