Adler Asks Some Questions

Whether the charges are true or not are one thing but let's not forget one thing.....if the "bribe" was actually offered it would not have cost the taxpayers one penny unlike Adscam.

Charles Adler: Questions that need to be asked about Cadmanscam

Posted: March 02, 2008, 2:04 PM by Yoni Goldstein

Charles Adler

1) Which Chuck Cadman story is true?

2) Is it the one he told Mike Duffy of CTV that is absent any scenario in which Tories put serious money on the table for his vote to defeat the Liberal government of Paul Martin?

3) Or is it the story he told his family which had two Tory suits willing to pay him $1-million for one very important vote.

4) Why would a man tell one story on the public and private record to a journalist and another to his wife and daughter?

3) Could this be a deathbed confection manufactured by the wounded pride of a man who in a moment of high vulnerability was being asked for something very valuable — his vote — and offered nothing more than a pig in the poke?

4) Is it possible that Chuck Cadman in his conversations with the Tories (We don't know how many there were. We can only speculate that the Tories couldn't have gone back to the well over and over again and then had two of their chief lieutenants pay him a formal visit unless they thought Cadman was giving them a window of opportunity.) simply couldn't get the Tories to meet his reasonable price?

5) Is it political correctness or just sloppy sentiments that persuade us that Cadman, a man of great integrity, had no price?

6) How could we blame a man for wanting to harvest as much security for his family as possible, knowing that he was dying and genuinely worried about the people he was leaving behind, and was being asked by the Tories to take a huge risk.

7) If Cadman was angry at the Tories, could it be because their final offer, quite understandably, insulted him?

8) If the final offer was precisely what the Tories and what Chuck Cadman publicly said it was — an uncontested nomination and campaign expenses — wouldn't any of us be insulted?

9) Since we know Cadman was in a great deal of physical difficulty in the spring of 2005, and did indeed die within two months of the the Tory offer, (the vote was on May 19th of 2005. Cadman died on July 9th) would he not have told the Tories that he was in no condition to fight an election?

10) And if he did manage to spend his dying days going against doctors orders and a desire to be with his family, to engage in election combat, and win, might he have then been a dead man before being sworn in. Might his family in such a scenario have been stranded with zero insurance money?

11) How could Chuck Cadman have taken such a risk and how angry could he have been at having some Tory agents pushing him on this and how unsurprising can it be that Stephen Harper on the so-called smoking tape, told the author of the book, that he didn't think that pushing such an offer was going to succeed?

12) If Chuck Cadman left any window open for the proposition of defeating the government, doesn't intellectual honesty demand that we ask the question of what was the price of the vote that the Tories wouldn't meet?

13) Could it have been a million dollars?

14)) Is it possible that when the Tories told Cadman they couldn't do a serious money transaction because doing so would have exposed them to charges of criminality, the entire episode left him feeling cheap, dirty and violated.

15) If you were feeling this way, in your dying days, might you in your private moments with your family tell them that your anguish was planted by a group of ambitious political agents of evil trying to corrupt you.

16) Can anyone blame Chuck Cadman's family members for believing Cadman's deathbed version of events?

17) Can anyone blame the Liberals for believing them?

18) Can the rest of us get so lost in our sentiments that we allow ourselves to call something a criminal act based on "witnesses" who were not at the scene of the crime, and who cannot possibly be objective in their testimony?

19) Since Chuck Cadman is dead and cannot be cross-examined, and since his family could never have been expected to cross-examine him, what precisely is it we are expecting the Mounties to find?

20) Since most media types and their Liberal political allies enterprising the idea of political scandal know full well that nobody is likely to be convicted of anything on unexamined factoids and rumors and hearsay, what is the endgame?

21) Will victory be defined as a headline that reads, "RCMP Investigates Tories."

22) Since that is kind of headline that became the lynch pin for the defeat of the Paul Martin government, is anyone surprised that his Liberal successor believes it can work for here?

For what it's worth Paul Martin wrote the forward to the book that tells this unexamined tale. But I have no further questions.

adleronline@gmail.com