Sponsorship scandal proves Bloc Quebecois needed, says Jacques Parizeau

"The sponsorship scandal will give the Bloc an extraordinary chance in the next election," he said, noting the sovereigntist party asked more than 400 questions about the scandal in the House of Commons.
"Just a few months ago, people were asking what the Bloc's purpose was. Well, we understand the Bloc's role -- to defend us."
Support for the Bloc in Quebec surged past that of the federal Liberals after the extent of the scandal became known last month.
Auditor General Sheila Fraser found the Quebec firms got $100 million in commissions and fees under the $250-million program, often for doing little or no work.
Two years after federalism's near-loss in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Chretien government hatched the program as a means to place Canadian flags at sports and cultural events in the province.
Parizeau said he wasn't surprised federal Liberals tried to "buy" Quebecers through the sponsorship program, but the ex-premier expressed astonishment at the extent of the alleged corruption.
"I knew that they would try to buy Quebecers," said Parizeau, who served as Quebec premier in the mid-1990s.
"They try to buy us in all sorts of ways -- the millennium scholarships, university chairs, (ex-heritage minister) Sheila Copps giving out Canadian flags.
"What I didn't expect was that this would lead to a corruption operation like this. That's where the sponsorship corruption in Ottawa hits like a gunshot."
The program is now the subject of criminal investigations and two inquiries.
Via Rail president Marc LeFrancois and Michel Vennat, president of the Business Development Bank, were suspended last week and ordered to explain the roles of their respective companies in the program.
Parizeau said such a scandal was unlikely to happen on the provincial level in Quebec, where strict party financing rules have been in place since the 1970s.
"Quebec politics is clean as a whole, contrary to what many people think," said Parizeau.
"The laws of Rene Levesque on political party financing. And things continued under Robert Bourassa. From that moment, we developed a political framework that was quite clean. There are no longer any big scandals in Quebec."