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Lies, Damned Lies and Inquiries

© David Russell

An old joke asks: how many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: we won't know until the commission releases its findings. For a country whose population evidently knows so little about its past, we spend a great deal of time and money looking at recent history to try to figure out what went wrong. In short, Canada is commission crazy.

This September, the long awaited - not long enough some might say - public inquiry into the so-called Sponsorship Scandal began in earnest. That earnestness will not come cheaply: before the inquiry ends the inquiry will eat up millions of taxpayer dollars as it seeks to find out how millions of taxpayer dollars were eaten.

Canadian governments are fond of publicly funded naval gazing to find new ways to apportion blames for past wrongs, to answer seemingly unanswerable questions or to appease those who feel or have felt slighted by some government body.

With inquiries, commissions and - the grand-daddy of them all - the Royal Commission, we can expect to find our dollars spent on hearings every day of every year somewhere in the country. Some examples spring to mind:

In 1997 protesters outside the A.P.E.C. conference at U.B.C. were pepper sprayed and dispersed, allegedly at the entirely illegal and inappropriate direction of the prime minister's office to the R.C.M.P. Nearly four years, hundreds of hours of testimony and millions of dollars in legal fees later, the commission struck to study the problem wrapped up with no clear verdict on who was in charge, who sprayed whom or whether Prime Minister Chretien looks good in a leather A.P.E.C. jacket. By then, however, many participants and most of the public had likely forgotten what the question was the commission sought to answer.

In Victoria, a resident awoke to the sound of mortar falling into his garage when a Canadian naval vessel, practicing maneuvers off the coast of Vancouver Island, fired a thankfully unarmed missile towards shore and the unsuspecting residents of Sooke. Three months later, commission officials confirmed what any reasonably intelligent person had already surmised: someone screwed up, pointing the gun in the wrong direction and sending a projectile hurtling towards a residential neighborhood.

So common and apparently meaningful have commissions and inquiries become, they are now often used as political weapons. Where politicians used to run on the strength of their party's platform, now they promise if they receive your vote, they'll launch studies of the previous government.

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