STEP INTO THE HOUSE

Prime Minister Paul Martin took to the airwaves again yesterday to tell
Canadians how sorry he is that money was wasted in the sponsorship scandal,
and that he regrets he wasn't paying closer attention when he was finance
minister to what happened to $250 million in federal money spent on the
program.

Too bad he couldn't find a few minutes between interviews to pop into the
House of Commons, where members of Parliament have been waiting for most of
the past week to ask the prime minister questions about his role in the
fiasco.

There was no time to sit down for a chat with newspapers, though, since
that wouldn't give him the chance to deliver verbatim his real message to
Canadians: "Please, please don't turf me out of office. I have waited my
whole adult life to get here and I deserve longer than a year on the job."

Frankly we're not sure why Martin needs to talk directly with voters to
explain the sponsorship mess. The message is pretty simple: the Liberals
set it up, the Liberals ran it and -- if you believe the growing mountain
of evidence being put forward at the Gomery inquiry -- the Liberals
benefitted from it.

Martin has some serious explaining to do alright, but he should be facing
the music in the House, where opposition members of Parliament have plenty
of questions about what the PM knew and when, and just how friendly he was
with some of the ad execs who have been testifying in front of Justice John
Gomery.

We elected him, after all, to run the government and should be able to see
him held accountable. We didn't send him to the Commons to be a TV star.
His refusal to show up demonstrates contempt not only for members of other
parties but for the very institution itself.

If Martin has lost interest in governing let him dissolve Parliament and
call an election. He has been behaving for weeks as if he's already on the
hustings. Otherwise we expect to see him get on with the business of the
House of Commons, and that means showing up for work in a regular basis.

And another thing ...

The city of Ottawa has decided to go ahead with its crack pipe program, at
least for now, and that makes us nervous.

Fighting the spread of diseases like hepatitis C is a good idea. We're just
worried that the pipe program might be seen as condoning the use of a
dangerous narcotic that can trigger violent behaviour.

Far better, we would say, to treat the addiction than to make it easier to
indulge.