Sparks fly ahead of Canada election over crime jab

Sparks fly ahead of Canada election over crime jab

Sparks fly ahead of Canada election over crime jab
Sat Nov 26, 2005 3:32 AM ET

By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, threatening legal action, demanded on Friday that the Conservative opposition apologize for comments linking his minority Liberals to organized crime.

Martin's government is expected to be brought down in Parliament on Monday evening over a scandal involving kickbacks from government contracts, and election fever is gripping political parties.

Martin protested, however, that Conservative leader Stephen Harper had gone too far in using the words "organized crime" to describe the Liberals.

"He should apologize and make a strong withdrawal of that statement," Martin told reporters in Kelowna, British Columbia, where he is attending a conference on aboriginal policies.

"Lawyers acting on behalf of the party have informed Mr. Harper in writing of our intention to defend the party vigorously against any false smears such as those he uttered yesterday," said Scott Reid, a spokesman for Martin.

The Conservatives said they had nothing to say sorry for, and it was the Liberals who should apologize for wrongdoing in a government sponsorship program designed to prevent French-speaking Quebec from leaving Canada.

"The Liberals need to apologize to Canadians for the sponsorship corruption, and the Liberal Party needs to come clean about the tens of millions of sponsorship dollars still missing," Harper said in a statement.

"A Conservative government will ask the appropriate authorities to take action against the Liberal Party to recover the missing money."

The uproar marked an early start to what is expected to be a bruising election battle. Campaign buses and planes start rolling on Tuesday for an election in mid- to late-January.

The Liberals hold a small lead over the Conservatives in opinion polls and had hoped to put the sponsorship scandal behind them. The scandal was largely responsible for them losing their majority in Parliament in the June 2004 election.

The Liberals appeared to be seeking to replicate a bounce they got in the 2004 election when they demanded that Harper apologize for a Conservative press release accusing Martin of supporting child porn. Harper refused and the story stayed alive for three days.

"He has been down this road before with his disgraceful comments about child pornography," Reid said.

Harper made his "organized crime" remark in the House of Commons on Thursday as he introduced a motion of no confidence in the government, which is scheduled to pass on Monday and bring the Liberals down.

He said evidence to a commission that investigated the sponsorship scandal had shown that the Liberals have no moral authority to govern.

"The testimony before the commission began to confirm a sponsorship program that was a front for massive kickbacks involving organized crime, used by the Liberal Party to fill its own election coffers," Harper said on Thursday.

John Reynolds, the Conservatives' national campaign co-chair, told Parliament: "There's still 40 million (Canadian) dollars missing that we don't know where it went. There's nothing to apologize for on this side of the House."

Reynolds later engaged in semantic sparring with reporters over whether the kickbacks had involved organized crime.

"This was crime and it was organized," he said. "Now it's in the hands of the police."

(Additional reporting by Allan Dowd in Kelowna)