Thursday, July 06, 2006

On entitlements

Hot on the heels of the Cons' convention funding and cheque-swapping scandal, now Con candidate Allan Cutler is apparently blowing the whistle on his new party, claiming that he was promised restoration payments by the Cons if they won the 2006 election.

Time will tell who's telling the truth now: of the two Con MPs alleged to have made promises, John Baird's office has denied Cutler's claim that he was involved, while Pierre Poilievre's office apparently hasn't commented yet.

But now that Cutler has taken his case to the public, there's no way around at least one prominent Con getting utterly discredited. Either the Cons' election poster boy for clean government is inventing promises to try to force a settlement now, or at least one prominent MP offered a financial reward to a potential or actual Con candidate. And it may get all the worse for the Cons if the party's chief spokesman on the Accountability Act gets tied into any impropriety contrary to his office's protestations.

It'll certainly be interesting to see how what seems to be an inevitable war of allegations plays out in the future. But the inescapable conclusion is that there's all the more reason to doubt that the Cons are particularly interested in cleaning up much of anything.

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