Gomery Report - Part I

[August1991]

I share Doug Fisher's opinion about Gomery:

This leads me to Gomery himself. He is that disappearing rarity in Quebec, an English-Canadian of high attainment. Before accepting this inquiry assignment, Gomery spent 23 years on the Quebec Superior Court bench, to which a previous Liberal government appointed him in 1982.

My supposition is that as an anglo Quebecer, Gomery almost certainly shared the conventional political wisdom which emerged in the 1970s and still holds sway -- that in the face of a separatist political movement there, the best, indeed the only available remedy, was the Liberal Party of Canada. No federalist Quebecer with an ounce of concern about separatism would have bet on the Conservatives to carry the day in a referendum (except perhaps Brian Mulroney's Tories).

Judges in Canada are hallowed as independent and apolitical beings, but they are in reality no different from you and me. It is hard for me to imagine even Gomery's considerable judicial experience detaching him from the anglo Quebecer's belief that the federal Liberals were and are the answer to Quebec's future in Canada.

Adscam badly hurt the Liberals' electoral chances in Quebec. To blame an ex-PM is one thing. To blame Paul Martin too would have been, according to this theory, fatal to the one party capable of keeping Quebec in Canada.