Raiders of the Public Purse

"I think the appropriate thing would be if Mr. Duceppe to consider, and perhaps the Bloc Quebecois to consider, repaying some of these funds, maybe all of these funds, because even though they're following the letter of the law, they're not following the spirit.
"Numbers of people were employed in both functions.  It wasn't conceived originally when this bylaw was produced that this would be possible."
MP Gordon O'Connor, Board of Internal Economy, House of Commons

But it was evidently possible, and it did occur, that Gilles Duceppe, as elected MP and head of the Quebec-centric Bloc Quebecois and president of the Bloc, saw fit to allow his party to use its parliamentary research budget for the purpose of paying salaries to political operatives.  The Bloc's director general, Gilbert Gardner, in Montreal, was paid with public money for a period of seven years.

Mr. Gardner's annual salary was over $100,000, busy doing the work of a political party whose influence and focus was Quebec-focused to achieve the goal of separating the province from confederation.  And for this sterling work Canadian taxpayers were billed to pay his salary. 

The party, having lost its official status in Parliament, reduced to four seats in an upset during the last election, no longer has a fully funded budget to fiddle with. The Bloc Quebecois, as a private political organization is responsible for its own fund-raising to provide financial resources to manage its affairs. 

That it took the unethical liberty of raiding parliamentary funds for that purpose is outrageous, if not under the parliamentary rules of the time illegal.  While Mr. Duceppe was leader of his party in the House of Commons he had employed personnel both in his parliamentary office and at party headquarters in Quebec.

And he and his party played fast-and-loose with his House of Commons budget to the tune of "many thousands of dollars" to pay their political staffers.  After a ten-month investigation by the Board of Internal Economy, Mr. Duceppe and the Bloc were given a slap on the wrist and politely asked to return the funding they had erroneously appropriated. 

The Bloc insists it has done nothing wrong, and technically no House rules were broken.

But then, who ever expected that an organization whose agenda is so obviously canted toward grabbing whatever it can get away with from the federal public coffers while contemptuously spurning federalism, to recognize the moral ambiguity of its mission?