Power Corporation and Iraq's oil-for-food scandal.

As Iraqis headed for the polls for the first time in fifty years [on January 30, 2005], a new theory--positing the 'truth' behind Canada's absence in Iraq--was spreading like an oil stain on concrete. The theory has its roots in the Oil-for-Food scandal, now being billed as the biggest corruption scandal in history. And it goes like this.

According to reports from news outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to CanadaFreePress.com, former prime, minister Jean Chretien's incoherent policy on Iraq may have been based on personal connections to what American columnist Charles R. Smith has called "a horde of rich global fat cats" who wanted to make millions on the UN program. "One of them is a rich Canadian whose bank made millions and whose Paris-based holding companies include the originally French-Belgian oil company TotalFina Elf, which cut lucrative deals with Saddam's Iraq," Smith asserts.

His name? Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation.

Since the scandal broke last year, various American congressional committees have uncovered a number of incriminating facts that point directly to the incompetence at best, complicity at worst, of senior UN officials. It's already well known that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son Kojo was receiving hefty payments from a Swiss firm that profited from the program in return for his "expert" advice. U.S. Congressional investigations also show that Saddam Hussein may have siphoned off as much as $15 billion, almost a quarter of the $64.2 billion alleged to have been transferred in the scam.

"While the anti-U.S. critics wailed at the impact of the embargo on the Iraqi people, their attention miraculously centered on the nation that liberated the victims of Saddam's original aggressions--and not on the Thugin-Chief or his numerous continental 'partners'," Smith charges. Among them was the European-based BNP Paribas bank which the UN chose to administer the program and which reportedly received nearly $1 billion for its efforts and which until recently had been assumed to be a French bank.

In fact, BNP Paribas is controlled by Power Corporation, Smith says. BNP Paribas also has another distinguishing feature: a direct corporate and familial relationship with the people running the Canadian government for the past twenty years.

BNP Paribas bank is part of Pargesa Holding, a holding company jointly owned and controlled by the Frere and Desmarais families. Paul Desmarais Sr. is chairman of the group; Albert Frere is vice-chairman; Albert's son Gerald is one of three general managers; Paul Desmarais Jr. is also an officer. And Power Corp. CEO Andre Desmarais is son-in-law to Chretien who opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq. Pargesa, and thus Power Corporation and the Canadian Desmarais family, holds a controlling stake in TotalFina Elf, the petroleum multinational corporation formed from the merger of Total and Petrofina.

The chain doesn't stop there. Chretien's successor Paul Martin is a former Power Corporation employee who made his fortune when he bought Canada Steamship Lines from Power Corp., with loans from Power Corp. A senior foreign affairs/international-trade-adviser to Martin is Maurice Strong, former CEO of Power Corp. and a longtime UN and Kofi Annan adviser.

TotalFina Elf? That's the oil company that cut a deal with Saddam to develop the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq, said to contain 25 percent of the country's oil reserves.

Paul Volcker? He was appointed by Annan to head the 'independent' UN investigation into OFF and held a seat on Power Corp's international board. So what does this smell like to you?

Regardless of how all this plays out, the sickly sweet stench now emanating from some of the highest perches in the land, and abetted by complicit liberal media, is as common as dirt, though not until recently had it been associated with Canada. It's called 'corruption'. And this is how it works.

When avowedly 'Catholic' politicians and powerbrokers depart from orthodox Catholic teaching, corruption sets in. Automatically, spontaneously, inevitably. Corruption is death taking hold, like fruit fallen on the ground. However slowly or quickly, it rots individuals and institutions alike, eroding civilisation with it.

Regardless of how politicians try to deceive themselves and their constituents, every Catholic knows there is no such thing as separate personal and public truth. There is only Truth which is Jesus Christ and His teachings which are eternal, immutable, and life-giving. To depart from Truth--be it for fear or comfort or convenience or power or fame or money--means to cut oneself off from Life and to embark on a fatal and futile road, the return from which becomes more difficult with the passing of time and with the lavish rewards the Enemy bestows on those who would lead others to ruin.

Do I overstate the situation when I say that Canada is being sickened unto death? The founding Christianity that made Canada so blessed, so bountiful and so protected is now being stripped away and replaced with secular 'rights' to a host of wrongs--from abortion and gay marriage to euthanasia--now attacking the nation's immune system. All in the lying name of liberte, egalite, and fraternite, blighting Canada the same way it's long been blighting the Continent.

Here in Europe, intellectuals sneer at America and gloat over the body count in Iraq, despite all the U.S. has done to free Europe in the past from totalitarian dictatorships, both Nazi and communist. Though such sophisticated cynicism is contradicted by recent events in Iraq where--as in France 60 years ago--American soldiers sacrificed their lives to liberate a people from tyranny, anti-Americanism is written deep in the European psyche. And now in the Canadian psyche, which today prefers Utopian dreams over self-sacrifice.

Though Europe has suffered repeatedly and hideously for its sins, Canada has so far suffered little. But will this continue as, like Europe, Canada marches relentlessly towards total secularism? God alone knows. But neither is God mocked as His children, by throwing off His shield, set deadly traps for themselves. Traps?

The same week as millions of Iraqis flocked to the polls, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was being celebrated. This on a continent now rejecting Christianity as racist, akin to fascism, while in the name of tolerance simultaneously allowing itself to be swamped by anti-democratic, intolerant Islam in which anti-Semitism appears to be an integral part of the creed.

Paula Adamick is a journalist who writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly, Canada Post.