Warren Kinsella links to an important story in today's National Post (subscription required) that should be getting more attention. (Then again, there are so many stories that should be getting more attention right now that if they actually did, newspapers would have to double the size of their staffs to cover it all, which will never happen.) According to the report by Tom Blackwell:
Numerous contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were awarded to a polling company linked to Paul Martin in violation of federal tendering rules, according to a 1995 document obtained by National Post.The contracts handed to the Earnscliffe Strategy Group included seven for the Finance Department when Mr. Martin was the minister, says the report, which has been submitted to a Commons committee investigating the Earnscliffe situation.
Many of the tenders appeared to have been drafted so that only Earnscliffe could have won, concluded the document, marked "Top Secret".
Read further down for more juice:
The report even raised questions about the fact that Mr. Herle and Terrie O'Leary, his common-law wife and Mr. Martin's executive assistant, had recently bought some land from CBC-TV personality Peter Mansbridge. They planned to build a cottage on it and the "co-mingling of assets" represented a serious problem if it had not been approved by the ethics commissioner, said the review.
The Earnscliffe people are claiming this is bunk, and that they've been cleared in a report done by Ernst and Young. Neverthelss, this looks and smells awfully bad.
