The fall of the Liberal Government due to the Sponsorship Scandal
The sponsorship program, known as Adscam was a swindle attributed to the fall of the Liberal party in Canada in the 2006 election. Allegations point the Liberal Party of the Canadian Federal Government in Quebec province as the major perpetrators of the fraud.
The fraud resulted from the arrangement of the government to defy the efforts of the party of Quebec, which worked to promote its independence. Therefore as a counter, the government of Canada aided in creation of awareness of its effort it had down in the industries and other initiatives in the Quebec (Dylan 2010, 12).
The sponsor who people assumed genuine was only blindfolding the public. It was a scandal, which led to a loss of trust by the Canadians, making the party of Liberal lose followers. The ‘sponsorship scandal’, as witnessed in the Canada federal government, resulted from malpractices associated with the liberal party of Canada. The party swindled many funds from the move through fraudulent means in the excuse of sponsoring its adverts in the media, which was among its roles in Quebec, as it claimed.
For instance, various ads were paid for advertising firms, which in turn did little or no work in ensuring their production (Archer 2002, 12). Furthermore, some funds were relayed back to the Liberal Party instead of being directed to the activities it was intended to do. This fraud through sponsorship had operated for various years until 2004 when its prominence came out after the raising of the red flag by Fraser Sheila, an auditor general for the federal government.
Therefore, it turned the event as the prominence of the Liberal party diminished leading to loss of their power. Therefore, this paper validates the hypothesis that the aforementioned scandal was the root cause of the fall of the 13-year Liberal government. However, there exist some political implications as far as this claim is concerned. For instance, the witnessed party rift contributed significantly towards the end of the government.
Political Implication
The issue of party separation, as witnessed virtually all governments, marks the end of such government. Majority of governments and even political parties engage in corrupt deals in their endeavour to escape traps.
Sad enough, they engage in such acts without having a second thought on how their behaviour could affect their current standing even having catastrophic implication on their future political hopes and career. This is one of the cases or rather an illustration of how political miscalculations can damage a political party and even leading to its collapse.
Corruption, as perpetrated by the federal government and more specifically by the Liberal party, brought a huge blow or loss to the party when its re-election mission was tainted (Gomery 2005, 12). The fact that the public had lost their trust in the Liberal party, which was associated with the scandal, saw them vote it out in the 2006 election. This was the price, which the party had to pay because of their involvement in the scandal.
The government of the day led by the Prime Minister Martin Paul also suffered the negative effects of the fraud. Being the sitting government of the time, and unable to identify corruption scandal of that calibre, the public had negative perception leading to loss of trust. Because of showing commitment, the prime minster set up a commission of inquiry known as the ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities’ to dig deeper into these allegations.
Regardless of the then efforts and initiatives to regain its past image, the pubic had already lost its faith in it, which therefore meant that it also had to face the consequences, which were evident during the 2006 elections. This pressure on the prime minister was so high that it forced him to resign as a party leader, hence further making the party to lose its popularity among the voters.
There was too a witnessing of the politics alignment, with the two factions within the Liberal party blaming each other. The factors were the Martin Camps and the Chretien Camps. The former tried its best to seclude itself from the blame by pointing out that the reports from the auditor general and the Comery commission were committed by the small group of alien members of the Liberal party, particularly from the former government, which was led by the prime minster Chretien Jean (Cbc News Online 2006).
This debate intensified with the Prime Minister Martin distancing himself from the allegations and blaming the former regime of the corrupt deals in the sponsorship programs. This counter argument and blame game meant that the party was in critical states of breaking and therefore there could be no way the party could regain its already indented image in the public domain or sphere.
The conservative, who ascended to power in 2006 elections, used the corrupt allegation as one of their campaign tools over their rivals to win over the Liberal (Roy 2009, 45). The conservative also claimed that the leadership of the Liberal party, which had lasted for over a decade had come with no reforms or no changes. Therefore, these allegations and the fact that there existed some claims that the party was corrupt agitated or rather facilitated their surrender from the then government.
Some of the opponents of the Liberal party like Sheila Corp (Mathew 2007, 12), were of the opinion that the Liberal party was propagating, the culture of corruption. The fact that the people of the Canada had wished for reforms, which were not forthcoming, it meant that they could change their government, a sign of its predicted fall. In addition, Martin’s deteriorating popularity implied a falling of the government.
The swindle, which is estimated to have led to loss of roughly $100-$250 million, indented Martin’s popularity especially in Quebec. This was witnessed when their leader Gilles Duceppe accused him of some unscrupulous planning or dealings, which were associated with expanding the St. Lawrence Seaway that could benefit his own steamship lines in Canada (Royston 2005, 532).
The accusation meant a lot to the people of the Quebec who felt that the president was only serving for his own interest where he mostly directed large sums of money only to benefit his own people. This episode therefore contributed a lot to the loss of trust of the Quebec people in the prime minister, which also accelerated his loss of power and fame during the 2006 election leading to his relinquishment of power.
The unrefined appointment of people in some prominent political positions and cabinet too explains the end of the government. The scandal furthermore arises from his appointments, which he made in his government (Nadeau 1993, 775). For instance, he had made recommendations of various key cabinet ministers to head various ministries, which people treated as sensitive and important.
Therefore, his recommendations brought back the idea of the sponsorship to the minds of people claiming that the recommendations only targeted to cover up the scandals. This was no more than a way of hiding them from the public and therefore he wanted to avoid any form of blame or accusation as being one of the propagators, as Bickerton and Alain (2009, 25) point out.
Relevance
The turn of events had some level of relevance in Canada. It depicted that in a political game there is need for politicians to be very sensitive and play the game with much attention and keenness. For the case of Canada, the conservative party because of a mistake that they committed (Nevitte 2002, 34) did not defeat the political party, which had enjoyed the leadership of Canada for over a decade.
This clearly shows that people had the power over the political of a country, a case that would easily lead to a political collapse. Regardless of the fact that the conservative had been the minority, this waive of corruption that implicated a major party was to their advantage as they used it as their advantage in ascending to the power.
Therefore, it is a lesson worth emulating by other countries with the behaviour of swindling public financial and practicing bad leadership to ace the consequences. Furthermore, this incidence also shows how the people’s voice is powerful than the politics of the day. The people determine their destiny and the leaders whom they want to be served.
For instance like in this scenario of Canada Stephen Harper a political leader of conservative party was able to ascend to the premiership of the Canada after the people saw in him the will and the power to lead and govern the nation well (Cher 2005, 9) . He won the confidence of the electorate a person who could assist is stemming up the culture of corrupt through reshaping the institutions of the Canada in order to embrace reforms that could lead them into victory and realisation of their dreams.
The corruption saga in the federal government of Canada illustrated clearly that various groups of people who were behind the deal did the saga. The deal was meant to satisfy various groups of people including Liberal party. Therefore, one of the principles of the scandal was to benefit various groups of people. Therefore, it was found out the various ad firms were some of the beneficiaries from the sponsorship programs.
The scandal also raised a question of accountability among the political elites and members of the parliament (Anderson 2006, 449). This led to the introduction of a clause in the parliament after the inception of Harper as a new prime minister in the government of Canada, whose goal was to stamp out the behaviour of members of the parliament of not being accountable and trustworthy when it came to ensuring or safeguarding the assets of the public.
Conclusion
The above expositions validate the stated hypothesis concerning the end of the 13-year liberal government. From this discussion, it has come out clearly that, one of the major reasons for the defeat of the populous liberal party in 2006 general elections was the sponsorship program.
The program was a scandal and associated with corrupt deal, which was advanced by the liberal party and some ad firms, as per allegations. These illustrations had devastating impacts to the party leading to its loss of popularity. Therefore, apart from other major causes attributed to the fall of liberal government, poor reforms too explain just but a minor cause of the scandal (Royston 2004, 227). Therefore, the 13 years of the liberal party were turned down merely because of this political mistake pinpointed by Sheila.
Although the swindle, said to have been going on within notice for a while, 2004 saw it in the limelight and cutting the ambitions of the Liberal party dream of leading Canada for another term. Therefore, the sponsorship scandal as highlighted, led to the defeat of the Liberal Party and hence the 13-year-old liberal government, a case that aided in Canadians to handover leadership roles to the minority party as witnessed in the 2006 elections.
Reference List
Anderson, Cameron F. “Economic Voting and Multilevel Governance: A Comparative Individual-Level Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 449.
Archer, Keith G. Citizen Politics: Research and Theory in Canadian Political Behaviour. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Nadeau, Richard J. “Explaining Election Outcomes in Canada: Economy and Politics.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 26 (1993): 775.
Bickerton, James H., and Alain, Gagnon G. Canadian Politics. 5th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Cbc News Online. “Federal Sponsorship Scandal.” Web.
Cher, Grueneer N. “Canada’s Liberal Party Sink or Swim (The sponsorship scandal).” Web.
Dylan, Moaore M. “Stephen Harper and the Decline of government Accountability.” Web.
Gomery, John HHHhhhh. Who is Responsible? Phase 1 Report.. Ottawa: Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities, 2005.
Mathew, Mingus A. The New Public Management and Democracy in Canada: A Recipe for Scandal? Newark: Delaware, USA, 2007.
Nevitte, Neil A. Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Roy, Jason J. “Voter Heterogeneity: Informational Differences and Voting.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 42 (2009): 117-137.
Royston, Patrick, S. “Multiple Imputation of Missing Values.” Stata Journal 4 (2004): 227.
Royston, Patrick (2005) “Multiple Imputation of Missing Values: Update of Ice.” Stata Journal 5 (2005): 527-36.