What a twist. The question has now become: Was there a sponsorship scandal? It’s like the curious matter of the dog that barked in the night. (It didn’t. That was the curious matter.) For this, we are indebted to Chuck Guité’s testimony last week. He was supposed to reveal the evil genius behind the plot; instead he introduced a whole new plot line.

He came like a character from Yes, Minister, a throwback to an era when Canadian civil servants had pride, even arrogance, and felt they ran government while conning elected officials into a false sense of importance. He ordered MPs questioning him to shut up or let him finish. He said they had asked so many questions that he would only bother answering the last.

It brought a whiff of an era in which public service was a major force and people of ideals and ambition, like Gordon Robertson or Lester Pearson, entered it. That tradition ended during the Mulroney years in the 1980s, when its inheritors, like Derek Burney, Allan Gotlieb or Stanley Hartt, agreed to help dismantle everything their predecessors had built and hand many public-sector prerogatives over to big business and the free market. Then they moved into the private sector themselves. (Others, like Bernie and Sylvia Ostry, kept the faith, or tried to.)

Chuck Guité is a small fish, well down the ladder. He lacks the mannerisms and rhetoric of noblesse oblige. But it was refreshing to see an unapologetic civil servant, who didn’t look as if he felt he’d be working for some grubby business if he were good enough.

He also recast the role of Saint Sheila the Auditor-General, whom the committee mindlessly lionized as it later did to Myriam Bédard. Fraser has now been forced to write the committee insisting she was so right, that “Documentation was poor and there was little evidence of analysis to support the expenditure . . .” [my emphasis]. This is far from the widespread view that there were no contracts and money was simply swiped. “We have never stated that $100-million was missing or stolen,” she added. Perhaps she was seduced by the glamour. Newsworld’s Evan Solomon told her she was a “folk hero . . . Are you touched?”

Back in February, she had charged that some of the ad firms that got sponsorship money seemed to do little or no work for their fees. Well, what did she expect? They’re ad agencies. They invent skimpy slogans, construct gaseous campaigns around them, overcharge and go to lunch. I once met the legend who created, “Does she or doesn’t she?” She was at the top of the heap for decades. I often wondered how long that line took her, and what she did ever after.

Why was it all scantily documented? Guité said they did not want the enemy in Quebec to know federal plans in the War for Canada. Baloney. Putting a maple leaf at centre ice in the Montreal Forum isn’t the plan for D-Day. He was trying to conceal the use of Quebeckers’ taxes to undermine their own desire to separate, and prevent that use from becoming an issue. As for “political” direction from the top, as Paul Martin passionately averred, there’s no proof or need for it. Just the usual back-scratching, of the sort he himself did with the Earnscliffe firm.

So why was the conspiracy theory so fervently embraced? (“The question that everyone’s been asking,” panted Evan Solomon to Sheila Fraser: “How high up does it go?”) A complex scandal rather than a mere botch? Now, there’s an interesting question. Conspiracy theories are always popular, like the 9/11 conspiracy that has George Bush and the CIA behind those events. Or the Jewish media conspiracy in which Jews controls news and information.

Conspiracy has an enduring explanatory appeal, over mere venality or inadequate institutions. It spreads a layer of consistency across reality. It eliminates the chancy, fortuitous element in life, which can be really scary, and replaces it with the comforting predictability of unseen, malevolent forces. Besides, the vaster and mightier those forces are, the less point there is to trying to do something about them. Might as well just grouse a bit, then turn on the hockey.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.