There is a scandal brewing on Parliament Hill, the likes of which has not been seen since the spring of 2000 and the HRDC billion-dollar boondoggle. Of course we speak of the present furor surrounding the awarding of two Public Works and Government Services (PWGSC) contracts to Groupaction Marketing, a Quebec-based firm specializing in brokering government sponsorship deals for, on average, a 12% commission fee.

Now yours truly could easily pound out a thousand words on the keyboard detailing the evils, waste and futility of government sponsorship - to the tune of some $40 million per year - but we'll save this tirade for another column because it will take some time to assemble a list of all the useful things $40 million could buy … like MRIs, drug-sniffing dogs at our airports, kilometers of needed highways, enhanced customs and immigrations controls, eight hours of debt interest payments, etc., but I digress.

At issue here is the growing appearance of what the opposition parties are calling a "kickback" scheme, where contracts were awarded for little or no work to actually be performed, and in return, the federal Liberals received hefty political contributions from firms that received these "contracts" in the first place. And like the HRDC scandal, this paper chase is sure to turn taxpayers' stomachs.

To recap, Groupaction Marketing was awarded two contracts to report on government opportunities for sponsorship of sports and cultural events. The first contract to be completed by February 1999, worth $550,000, was for analysis of visibility opportunities though sponsorships. The second contract, worth $575,000 and to be completed by October 1999, was for an impact assessment of government sponsorship activity in the fishing and hunting sectors.

The problem, as reported by the Globe and Mail almost a fortnight ago, is that no one, neither PWGSC nor Groupaction, after searching high, low, near and far could find the first report. But as parliamentary and public attention became more acute, then miraculously, hocus pocus and abracadabra, a copy of the first report, or at least major contents of it, were allegedly found on a hard drive on one of Groupaction's computers. And with record speed, the contents were dispatched to Ottawa where PWGSC Minister and local Glengarry-Prescott-Russell MP, Don Boudria, tabled them in the House of Commons for all and sundry to see.

End of story, right? Ah, no! Enterprising journalists quickly devoured the first report and found striking similarities between it and the subsequent October 1999 report, right down to identical typos and capitalization peculiarities. This prompted a relentless fury during question period on Monday punctuated with PC-DRC Leader Joe Clark lambasting Minister Boudria with this zinger: "If this is not a fraud, what does he (read: Boudria) call it?"

Now the answer to this question is not that straightforward. The 2002 version of Don Boudria, Cabinet Minister, chief government apologist during this brouhaha and consummate Liberal partisan is quoted by Sun media as saying, "it's very difficult to say three or four years after the fact whether a report was worth the money or not."

Now rewind back to the mid-to-late 1980s and the Mulroney days, when Don Boudria, famed Liberal ratpacker and tenacious opposition MP, pilloried scandal plagued Tory ministers and MPs with names like Stevens, Gravel, Blais-Grenier and Bissonette. Hmmm, what would that Don Boudria he have said about this mess? Suffice it to say that his attacks would have been even more incisive and blistering than those to which is responding now.

Sadly, while the opposition smells blood, they lack the killer instinct on this file. Admittedly, we now know that taxpayers were jipped of $550,000: Either the first report was never produced (as some contend), or it was produced and the second report is merely a copy of the first or vice-versa for that matter (a conclusion that many are drawing).

What they should now be pressing for is a forensic examination and diagnostic of the hard drive on which the first report was allegedly found. Good computer technicians can diagnose when the document (or both for that matter) was actually saved, which word processing (or spreadsheet or database) software package was used and what version of operating system was employed. This technical data would then close the loop, one way or the other.

And if the opposition won't demand this information, then Minister Boudria - if he is the man of integrity that interim opposition leader John Reynolds asserts that he is - should pursue this course of action himself.. The sworn affidavit from the Groupaction principals attesting to the document's validity - given all that has transpired - just doesn't cut it.

Earlier it was noted that this scandal bears a striking resemblance to the HRDC fiasco. Both ministers, Boudria now, and Jane Stewart two years ago, inherited a scandal not of their own making.

It was former HRDC and now Trade minister Pierre Pettigrew that presided over the HRDC internal audit, and Alfonso Gagliano (ye of Denmark Ambassadorship fame, fill in your own Hamlet-inspired rotting jokes here), was top dog at PWGSC when this Groupaction mess transpired.

And both former ministers were Quebec ministers who escaped in the political getaway car, leaving their successor Ontario colleagues to face the political heat.
But wait, there's more.

Both scandals also involve untouchable bureaucrats. Mel Cappe, now Clerk of the Privy Council and the country's top civil servant, was the deputy minister in charge at HRDC under Mr. Pettigrew. And the civil servant who signed off on the Groupaction contracts, a monsieur J. Charles Guité, has since retired.

Finally, both scandals have overtaken question period debate with the opposition parties circling like vultures over a fresh carcass of, at the very least, abuse of taxpayer funds. The question now is if the combined forces of the opposition are sufficient to dig deeper for other PWGSC contracting scandals and continue their assault on this integrity-challenged government?

After the HRDC boondoggle, we learned that a gaping flesh wound wouldn't trample the government. But perhaps the death of a thousand cuts facilitated by a barrage of Access to Information requests into PWGSC might do the trick.