The Steamship Paul Martin is taking on water. The political machine that seemed so unsinkable just last fall is now in a full-blown crisis, with sections of Canada’s ruling elite already jumping ship, opting for the captain-less and re-christened Conservative Party of Canada. The sponsorship scandal, however, should be understood as only the tip of the corporate-corruption iceberg in Canadian politics.

Paul Martin has been dubbed Canada’s CEO, and the label should stick like crazy glue. Simply put, the man has an evangelical belief that the Canadian state ought to be a state of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. The new prime minister’s response to a couple of earlier scandals-that-ought-to-have-been illustrates the point quite clearly.

In December, it was revealed that between 1995 and 2002, then finance minister Martin had taken five trips abroad on private jets owned by some of the country’s business elite.

The excursions were mostly for private vacations. For instance, in 2002, he and billionaire buddy Wallace McCain -- of super fries fame and fortune -- jetted down to the Caribbean for some golf and some rays. When confronted about the trips, a confident Martin flatly stated, “I fully intend to take holidays with my friends.” Indeed, conflict of interest guidelines provided a loophole, as government ministers are not allowed to accept gifts of over $200 value, unless they are from “close personal friends.” Well, the personal is indeed political, and it was these close friends that reaped the benefits of Martin’s budget-slashing years as finance minister. No scandal here, though, as the vacation revelations soon faded from the news.

Then there is the case of Martin’s own business, Canada Steamship Lines, of which he transferred control to his children before becoming PM in order to avoid any semblance of conflict, as parents are never known to favour their own children. Incredibly, while Martin was finance minister, urging the tightening of belts in order to slay the debt-monster, he had registered a number of CSL’s ships in foreign countries, flying “flags of convenience,” in order to avoid income tax in Canada.
As CBC’s Disclosure reported last spring: “Today, Paul Martin’s family business has expanded into a global empire. In Canada, CSL owns 18 ships which fly our flag. It employs 500 Canadians, and pays Canadian taxes. CSL also owns, in whole or in part, 18 foreign flagged ships, sailing around the world, from Montreal to Melbourne.”

So, exactly half of Canada (sic) Steamship Lines’ vessels were registered under flags of convenience, avoiding taxes, paying a fraction of Canadian wage rates, etc. (Dobbin, www.paulmartintime.ca, 2003). Then, in January, it was revealed that CSL did more business than originally disclosed with the Canadian government. Previously, it was reported that CSL had received $137,000 in contracts from the government. It turns out the figure was actually $161 million, including 46 big ones while Paul was finance minister! But, again, it seemed, no real scandal here.

It was only in late January, when the sponsorship scandal really broke, that the Teflon PM was no more. Amidst the well-deserved fury over the sponsorship corruption of the Liberals, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the real scandal: the fact that this prime minister puts the corporate profits of he and his “close personal friends” before everything and everybody else. It’s not that there are a few bad apples in Ottawa rewarding their big business cronies; it’s that the whole crop is rotten. That’s how the system works. Paul Martin will, certainly, pose as a “social Liberal” -- one who understands the plight of ordinary people, in order to obfuscate this reality. Frankly, though, I don’t think that Martin will be able to pull it off -- at least certainly not with the faux inarticulate aplomb of his rival and predecessor, Jean Chrétien.

A "candid" revelation about the prime minister a couple of months back should illustrate this.  It was reported in the Globe and Mail that, according to Martin's wife Sheila, the PM's favourite food is Kraft Dinner. Yes, the multimillionaire loves that classic economy meal of macaroni and cheese which, it just so happens, Canadians consume at a higher rate, per capita, than any other people on the planet. Is this convergence of tastes proof that Canada's CEO is, after all, a real Everyman? Well, no, because the PM's wife made another all-too-candid admission: Paul doesn't actually know how to make the stuff. She, it seems, is the one who takes on the highly complex task of boiling the water, adding macaroni, draining, and mixing with cheese sauce, milk and margarine.

This episode recalls an old Michael Moore skit on his short-lived TV show The Awful Truth, in which that American Everyman queried both working-class and the wealthy on how to make macaroni ‘n’ cheese. Blue-collar folks, of course, rattled off the recipe, while the uptown Manhattan crowd blundered hilariously, or just stared in confusion at that classic blue box. The point being, when you’re really rich -- and Paul Martin is really rich like no Canadian PM before him -- cooking for oneself can prove to be an alien concept.

Perhaps our new prime minister’s taste for good old mac ‘n’ cheese helps to explain the behaviour of this (“former”) shipping baron as finance minister. After all, the massive cuts of the past decade must have pushed thousands of families across Canada onto a more KD-reliant diet. Faddish Atkins notwithstanding, when you need to feed the family dinner for $0.99, “good” carbs are cheap carbs.

Paul Martin, the multimillionaire, just doesn’t get it. He isn’t like you and me. Nor are his “close personal friends,” those corporate chieftains for whose benefit he’s running the country, like you and me. Whether it’s cooking Kraft Dinner, paying their taxes, or taking a family vacation, the constraints (or lack thereof) imposed on their reality are different. Yet, these are the guys that are running the country. And this is the really awful, really scandalous truth.

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