Hush Money

M.K. Braaten is one of the more financially literate Blogging Tories and has been doing a yeoman's job covering Adscam and Techscam.

His comments on Warren Kinsella's Public Accounts Committee testimony of David Dingwall's knowledge of Paul Martin's illegal diversion of government contracts to Earnscliffe Strategy Group cut right to the central issue: David Dingwall's severance pay is hush money.

David Dingwall could bring down the government by implicating Paul Martin directly in the corruption that has been festering in this government for more than a decade.

Martin would no longer be able to claim that it was all the fault of Jean Chretien and his underlings.

Waiting for the Gomery report would become irrelevant if Dingwall were to tell all, because Martin's own corruption would become a live issue.

And wouldn't Dingwall love to, as one of the last Chretien holdovers leaving office in Ottawa?

The Chretien-Martin civil war in the Liberal Party is still being fought, because Paul Martin is still campaigning for the leadership of the party two years after winning it. Now it threatens to bring him down, and he's trying every desperate means to stave off his own collapse.

Paying off Dingwall undercuts his claims to be the great corruption fighter in Ottawa, but sweeping out Ottawa ends whenever it appears he might be swept out by his own broom.