On the politics of achievement, transparency.

People don't like it when they find out that someone they know, or thought they knew, is not whom they thought they were. They feel betrayed or stupid.

Additionally, people don't like it when other people steal their money.

As I sit down with a trans-fatty acid disguised as an Oreo and a cup of tea to contemplate the recent ups and downs of our prime minister, I find myself surprised about how predictable he really has been.

Here's what I wrote a year ago in January 2003.

Paul Martin without question has things wrapped up as we speak, but his halo is going to be so damaged by the time the leadership contest is over a majority government for the Liberals will be very iffy. His problem is that he has peaked too soon, and his many weaknesses have been forgotten and unchallenged. The media will get to him soon and feel it is their obligation to cut him down to size. It will not be pretty. Worse still, Stephen Harper will start to look reasonable and take more seats in Ontario than anyone thinks possible. The Liberals will take more seats in Quebec.

I think the thing about Paul is that he wants to be good. He wants to make his daddy proud, but there is a darker side. There is a massive gap between his overblown rhetoric of the politics of achievement and the democratic deficit and what he actually does.

He doesn't walk the talk.

Transparency? The Canadian government reported a year ago that the amount of business it has done with Paul's shipping company was a few hundred thousand dollars. When the opposition dug a little deeper the government came clean and told us it was more like 160 million!! That is not a typo--one hundred and sixty million dollars.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Demonstrating his commitment to a new kind of politics, the PM quite successfully buried the story by announcing, among many other things, an inquiry into the Maher Arar incident to deflect attention away from this inconvenient truth. It turned out the new kind of politics looked a lot like old politics of obfuscation.

Paul Martin has been collecting taxes from us for more than 10 years. What is Paul doing when we write our annual tax return check? Nothing. He's avoiding his. He's hiding his company in a tax haven. It stretches the notion of hypocrisy to the breaking point to discover the chief tax collector in the land is not paying taxes.

When this whole advertising fraud case was unmasked Paul started out downplaying it. Then he started pointing fingers, and then he decided to be horrified by it and called an inquiry. His current communications advisor headed part of the spin team to minimize the public fallout from this matter some years ago under Prime Minister Chretien.

The prime minister is hanging by a thread of his own stitching. He has been clear about what should happen to politicians who know about this and looked the other way. They should resign or be removed he believes.

This boy loves the high-wire act. It is going to take extraordinary creativity to cover his tracks. Nothing of course is impossible in Ottawa, but this is going to be tough.

Listen, there are few saints in politics, but a minimal requirement, it seems to me, is that if you want to be prime minister you should pay your taxes or sell your business to someone other than your sons; if you want to talk transparency then tell us how much business you did with the government, don't hide it; and if you want to be horrified about corruption that took place right under your nose, let us hear that sentiment before you are backed into a corner.

The tragedy is this. I take one look at the scintillating debate between Stephen, Tony and Belinda, all of whom would like us to be dying in Iraq with that ill fated policy of America, and who knows what else, as the party they want to lead has no policy, and I want to call Paul and say all is forgiven. Just lie to me so I don't have to take responsibility for my actions. But lie well. Make me believe.

Then I think what would I do if my daughter came home from a mock student Parliament and told me she had just been elected student prime minister for a year and that she had done it by hiding the amount of money she had received from the government, downplaying the fact she had moved her company to a tax haven because all shipping companies do it, and that she had overcome her obvious complicity or incompetence in the worst fraud in federal history by blaming others and pretending to be outraged.

I would know I had failed.

Michael Atkins is president of Northern Ontario Business. He can be reached by e-mail to [e-mail].