There are certain phrases that properly arouse immediate suspicion. “The dog did it,” for example. “Trump apologizes.” Or, “Jean Chrétien declines to talk about himself.” The latter is in play because the former Liberal prime minister has declined to appear before a parliamentary committee to discuss certain rather unsavoury directives he might have given his immigration minister in 1995 with an eye to winning the Quebec independence referendum.

Teflon Jean loves to talk about himself and his genius the way most of us love breathing, which is to say it’s essentially an involuntary function. He doesn’t even need to think about it. And in the past that has certainly included matters pertaining to very nearly losing that referendum campaign, and subsequent efforts — known collectively as the Liberal Sponsorship Scandal — ostensibly designed to prevent it from happening again.

But Chrétien doesn’t seem to want to engage with a remarkably casual recent admission by Sergio Marchi , who was immigration minister in the lead-up to the referendum. In an interview with the Journal de Montréal, Marchi admitted that Chrétien had pressured him into mass-naturalizing as many new citizens in Quebec as quickly as possible, on the reasonable assumption the majority of them would vote No .

“I remember Jean telling me, ‘Listen, I know we have a backlog of citizenship applications, but do your best to move them along because the referendum is coming up and people want to vote’,” Marchi told the Journal.

“Working nights and weekends” in the month of October 1995, the paper reported, Ottawa bureaucrats naturalized 25 per cent of the people they did the entire year — roughly 11,500 new Canadians. And as soon as the referendum was over, wouldn’t you know it, the overtime hours mysteriously dried up.

“Did it make a difference? Yes. Was it in Canada’s favour? Yes,” Marchi said. “To what extent? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone can really know.”

Marchi has also refused Parliament’s invitation to appear before committee, despite his candour to the Journal’s reporter, despite having a new book to flog , and despite facing no peril: committee meetings are privileged; he’s almost 70; his pension could sink a ship; he’s not from Quebec; and, without wishing to seem unkind, nobody really knows who he is.

In 1996, while still in government, Marchi argued that federal Liberal communications director Aurèle Gervais should wear illegal campaign-spending charges against him, with respect to the referendum, “like a badge of honour.” Thirty years later, he has nothing to say publicly about all this — presumably in its defence?

For the record, the No side’s margin of victory was 54,388 votes (out of 4.8 million cast). So this mass-minting of new citizens certainly didn’t turn things on its own. Combined with roughly $539,000 in illegal No-campaign spending uncovered by retired judge Bernard Grenier in a 2007 report, however, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that federalist skullduggery could have changed the outcome. (We’ll leave broadly similar allegations of separatist skullduggery aside for now.)

The difference it made isn’t really the point, though. The punishment for electoral fraud doesn’t hinge on whether it was successful, except in countries where the winners of elections (if any) control the police and prosecutors. Until relatively recently, many Canadians rightly viewed our immigration system as something to be proud of.

Accelerating citizenship ceremonies isn’t the end of the world; comprehensively screwing up Canadian immigration fell to Justin Trudeau and his hapless immigration ministers, two of whom amazingly enough continue to haunt Mark Carney’s cabinet room. And Canadian immigration policy has always been set with the ballot box at least in the back of mind.

“All’s fair in love and war,” I imagine Chrétien saying, were he buttonholed on this.

But what were he and Marchi so afraid of? It’s a question that too rarely gets asked, and into which they might provide valuable insight.

The referendum question was ludicrous. It’s difficult to believe a 50 per cent-plus-one Yes vote on that question would have roused the international community to recognize an independent Quebec. France had suggested it might, but if push had ever come to shove I really have to wonder if then French president Jacques Chirac would have emboldened his own country’s separatist movements to placate a bunch of people who live in the French imagination paddling canoes and wearing beaver pelts.

It’s certainly forgivable if Chrétien and Marchi were panicked about the referendum. A lot of people were panicked. I was one of them. Canadians might be inclined to forgive their transgressions, so long as they admitted they in fact transgressions.

So what are they so afraid of now? Or would they just rather not bother testifying, a Commons committee often being a poor venue for self-aggrandizement?

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com