Item: In the summer of 2001, Allan Rock, then the Minister of Health and now the Minister of Industry; John McCallum, then a freshman MP soon-to-be junior finance minister responsible for tax matters and now the Minister of National Defence; and Dominic LeBlanc all went on vacation together with their families. LeBlanc is the son of Romeo LeBlanc, a former Liberal cabinet minister and former Governor General. LeBlanc fils is, himself, a onetime aide to Jean Chrétien and is now a federal MP and was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Defence.

Nice.

The powerful Irving family — whose corporate tentacles extend deep into federally regulated oil and gas, forestry, shipping, defence and communications industries — not only footed the bill but also provided the venue. The Irvings invited the politicians to enjoy their R&R at the family’s private Downs Gulch salmon fishing lodge on New Brunswick’s salmon-rich Restigouche River and made it as easy as possible for the busy politicians, flying them in and out of the luxurious resort in an Irving corporate jet.

Even nicer.

When news of the holiday jaunt leaked out recently, Howard Wilson, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s ethics lapdog, was quick to bless and beatify the arrangement after the fact.

Nicest.

Wilson, in fact, professed to find no direct conflict of interest in any of it, even though federal guidelines prohibit cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries from accepting gifts worth more than $200.

And Wilson doesn’t seem especially curious to know why the Irvings would be so generous to a bunch of politicians they hardly know. Because the Irvings are in the business of being nice to people they hardly know? Or because they wanted to win powerful friends and influence government decisions down the road?

You have two guesses. The first one doesn’t count.

Which raises the question: did the Irvings pay for these holiday jaunts out of their after-tax personal pockets? Or did they write off the cost as a business expense?

I’m curious. Wilson clearly isn’t.

Item: While Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper were publicly consummating their newfound and undoubtedly heartfelt love at a press conference in Ottawa last week, political insiders were offering the real scoop on just who had wielded the shotgun to their heads to make this political marriage of convenience happen.

That would be Belinda Stronach, the president and CEO of Magna International, the giant international auto parts maker.

Stronach, who claims she was acting “in my capacity as a citizen,” not only helped organize the process by which the agreement was negotiated but also made the first approach to Stephen Harper to kickstart the negotiations. She told him, in the delicate paraphrase of Canadian Press, that “corporate Canada wants to see a united right.”

Yes, ma’am-sir.

After Stephen smiled his cherubic smile of agreement, he and Peter were suddenly making nice on the playgroundâe¦

When the negotiations bogged down — as they eventually did — Stronach was able to call on the assistance of another corporate heavyweight, Peter Munk of Barrick Corp., who invited Peter MacKay to Toronto for lunch and a little arm-twisting.

Et voilà, a done deal.

Do you ever wonder why the real push to unite the trite . . . er, right came from corporate Canada? And why the politicians were so eager to do its bidding?

Exactly.

Item: The latest report on who contributed how much to Paul Martin’s Liberal leadership campaign was released last week. It showed that Martin has managed to rake in a whopping $10.2 million from a who’s who of his closest personal and corporate friends, most of whom just happen to have frequent dealings with the federal government.

Gerry Schwarz, the corporate takeover specialist, coughed up $255,000; blue-chip accounting firms KPMG and Price Waterhouse, along with Newfoundland Capital Corp.’s Harry Steele, donated $100,000 each; McCain Foods and Alliance Atlantis Communications both gave at the office to the tune of $50,000; and the corporate law firm of McCarthy Tetreault contributed the equivalent of $118,000, most of that in the form of a salary for Martin’s chief of staff.

What do these corporations get as thanks for their generous largesse to a campaign war chest for a war that is already won? Paul Martin bragged this week that the names of “every one of those donors have been made public. This is very open and very, very, very transparent.”

It is indeed transparent — transparently obvious that politics is about money, and that he who pays calls the tune to which the politicians dance. The rest of us can only watch and listen.

And they wonder why Canadians seem so cynical about politics.

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel and nine books of non-fiction, including the best-selling Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair...